Can Psychologists Tell Us Anything About Morality?

John M. Doris, Edouard Machery and Stephen Stich
Philosopher's Magazine
Originally published May 10, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Some psychologists accept morally dubious employment. Some psychologists cheat. Some psychology experiments don't replicate. Some. But the inference from some to all is at best invalid, and at worst, invective. There's good psychology and bad psychology, just like there's good and bad everything else, and tarring the entire discipline with the broadest of brushes won’t help us sort that out. It is no more illuminating to disregard the work of psychologists en masse on the grounds that a tiny minority of the American Psychological Association, a very large and diverse professional association, were involved with the Bush administration’s program of torture than it would to disregard the writings of all Nietzsche scholars because some Nazis were Nietzsche enthusiasts! To be sure, there are serious questions about which intellectual disciplines, and which intellectuals, are accorded cultural capital, and why. But we are unlikely to find serious answers by means of innuendo and polemic.

Could there be more substantive reasons to exclude scientific psychology from the study of ethics? The most serious – if ultimately unsuccessful – objection proceeds in the language of “normativity”. For philosophers, normative statements are prescriptive, or “oughty”: in contrast to descriptive statements, which aspire only to say how the world is, normative statements say what ought be done about it. And, some have argued, never the twain shall meet.

While philosophers haven’t enjoyed enviable success in adducing lawlike generalisations, one such achievement is Hume’s Law (we told you the issues are old ones), which prohibits deriving normative statements from descriptive statements. As the slogan goes, “is doesn’t imply ought.”

Many philosophers, ourselves included, suppose that Hume is on to something. There probably exists some sort of “inferential barrier” between the is and the ought, such that there are no strict logical entailments from the descriptive to the normative.

The article is here.

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking

By Steven Shapin
The Boston Review
Originally published January 20, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

So natural science without the capacity of moral uplift, and grown-up scientists, so to speak, without moral authority, are—in historical terms—recent creations. Both the disenchantment of the world and the supposed invalidity of inferring ought from is derive from the historical development of a conception of nature stripped of the moral powers it once possessed. That development reached its culmination in the science and metaphysics of Darwin and the scientific naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Their modern conception of nature could not make those who studied it more moral than anyone else because no sermons in stones were to be discerned. Nature, said the great nineteenth-century biologist T. H. Huxley, “is no school of virtue.”

The insistence that science cannot make you good, or make the scientist into a moral authority, flowed from a natural philosophical position: there are no spiritual forces operating in nature and there is no divine meaning to be discerned in nature. That is to say, Weber was making a sociological statement about what belongs to certain social roles, but he was doing so by way of historical changes in science and metaphysics.

The entire article is here.

Science cannot determine human values

Earp, B. D. (in press). Science cannot determine human values.
Think: A  Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, in press.

Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, famously argues that “science can determine human values.” Against this view, I argue that while secular moral philosophy can certainly help us to determine our values, science—at least as that word is commonly understood—must play a subservient role. To the extent that science can “determine” what we ought to do, it is only by providing us with empirical information, which can then be slotted into a chain of deductive (moral) reasoning. The premises of such reasoning, however, can in no way be derived from the scientific method: they come, instead, from philosophy—and common sense.

The entire article is here.

The Evolutionary Ethics of E. O. Wilson

By Whitley Kaufman
The New Atlantis
Winter/Spring 2013

In his new book The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), naturalist E. O. Wilson argues that our best chance at understanding and advancing morality will come when we “explain the origin of religion and morality as special events in the evolutionary history of humanity driven by natural selection.” This is a bold claim, yet a familiar one for Wilson, who has been advocating something like this approach to human morality ever since his landmark 1975 work Sociobiology.

In that book, Wilson provocatively argued that “scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers” and that ethics should instead be “biologicized”: questions once debated seemingly without end by philosophers will be settled by biologists using the same methods by which they have explained digestion, reproduction, and all of the other evolved drives and functions of the body.

The unification of science and morality, on Wilson’s count, would be a much-needed revolution for ethics. But it has also long been one of the desiderata of the Enlightenment project — which has been so successful in fulfilling its promise of advancing our scientific knowledge and our material wellbeing, yet seems to have made so little progress in settling debates over ethics. The consilience of the human and natural sciences that Wilson’s sociobiological project promises would carry on the scientific method’s “unrelenting application of reason” to the field of ethics, and finally begin to establish a stable, wise, and enduring ethical code for the future.

The entire story is here.