This is a reposted comment of mine from Secular Philosophy. I touched on something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now – the relationship between truth, morality and ethics – but as of yet the muse hasn’t struck me properly. Still, thought you might find this interesting.
The original has a few spelling mistakes, and I’ve decided to leave them in. Spelling in context. 
I like the overall tone – however, I’m a bit skeptical of the NOMA overtones in this article.
The situation is different in the field of ethics. Science has no moral mission; it cannot tell what is good or bad.
I question that statement. I’m convinced that there IS a moral truth about the world, and we CAN discover it through evidence-based reasoning. Morality and ethics are more like trigonometry than legislation.
Consider this: Practicing genuine compassion will lead to an increase in personal happiness. That increase will be proportional to the intensity of the practice. Hence, our personal quest for happiness provides a solid rationale for self-transcendence. It’s not a question of opinion. It’s an empirically testable statement about how morality and ethics function, and as such evidence-based reasoning DOES have something to say on the subject.
There are many areas of human life that are not concerned with truth. For example, am I a tea drinker or a coffee drinker? There’s no truth about the matter that needs to inform this choice. It exists outside the category of truth. Alternatively, if I am spending time with my friends, the topics of conversation will not usually be concerned with truth. Mostly, we sit around and talk rubbish. It’s good bonding. If we just sat around, produced utterances, and tried to work out if they were true all day… That would be boring and intolerable. Such conversations exists outside the category of truth.
So I do accept that there are a great many important areas of human life that are not concerned with truth. However, morality and ethics are not one of them. Morality and ethics are important, they are human, but they are also firmly within the domain of the truth-seeker.
If a man should kill his daughter in cold blood because he perceives that she has committed some slight against his honor, there IS a moral and ethical truth to be discerned that is not relative to culture or perspective. That daughter had a long life ahead of her. Life itself is the very basis of compassion and happiness. Considering that life is also fragile, and we have a strong basis for regarding life as something precious. Far more precious than any perceived slight of honor could ever be. As such, the act of sacrificing a precious human life for the restoration of mere honor is in direct violation of basic moral and ethical principles.
To claim that such an act could ever be considered morally or ethically valid would be analoguous to claiming that the sum of the three angles of a triangle will ever be anything other than 180 degrees, or that that 2 + 3 could ever be anything other than 5. Such a claim would be demonstrably wrong.
So we can safely say that such a man is behaving immorally and unethically even without engaging in a discussion about whether his perception of a slight against his honor was even justified in the first place – though I think that there is a good case to be made that even this is a false view of the reality of the situation.
Truth matters.
I’m going to disagree.
Compassion leads to happiness – scientific claim. Seeking happiness leads to self-transcendence – what does self-transcende mean here? This is probably not a scientific claim.
The assumption that morality and ethics are fundamentally concerned with happiness – philosophical claim, not a matter of science.
That said, I won’t disagree with the matter of ethics and morality being concerned with truth. That I am not sure about.
Comment by Tommi — September 10, 2008 @ 4:29 am
I’m also going to have to disagree.
You’re presupposing an ultimate goal for humanity: personal happiness and “self-transcendence”. You can’t scientifically claim that this is the best and only path we must take. It would even be hard to make a philosophical argument that this is the best path. One might argue that self-sacrifice for a greater good in future generations is the best path for humanity. These self-sacrificing people might even call you evil and selfish for promoting your idea of personal happiness. One might argue that humanity itself is evil and is a cancer of the natural earth.
The idea of good and evil are human made inventions that have no real context to the rest of the universe. The universe doesn’t care what we do, it’s all just entropy in the end. Good and evil are cultural and each culture has its own idea of what is good. Each individual has its own idea of what is good.
Now, I do agree that once you have chosen your goal, you can do things that are scientifically demonstrable to be right and wrong, but only the context of that goal.
Comment by zhatt — September 10, 2008 @ 6:01 am
Sorry it took so long to respond. I’ve been busy.
@Tommi
This is actually a good point – I haven’t defined my terms. Drilling down into everything would take a while. I’ll try to be brief.
Definition of term: Selflessness
To be without self. Here, we have shrunk the self down in importance until it is nothing. We have removed the barrier between ’self’ and ‘other’ by killing off the self.
Definition of term: Self-transcendence
We can use empathy to share in the suffering and joys of other people. This has the same effect of removing the barrier between ’self’ and ‘other’ as does selflessness, but through a radically different means. We’re expanding the self by increasing our empathetic connectedness with other people.
Definition of term: Empathy
The ability to hypothetically put yourself in the position of another person and to feel what they would be feeling in that situation as if it was happening to you.
Definition of term: Compassion
The application of empathy to the suffering of others.
Definition of term: Affection
The application of empathy to the happiness of others.
To go back to your original point:
Sorry to bicker semantics, but I didn’t quite say that. I said that our personal quest for happiness provides a solid rationale for why self-transcendence is a good thing – provided, of course, that we should accept my claim that actively practicing compassion will lead to proportional increase in personal happiness. At the very least, we seem to agree that this proposition is a question that a) could be true, and b) is open to evidence-based investigation.
I um’ed and ah’ed over that one for a while – that brief paragraph is mainly why it took so long for me to respond. Bastard.
There’s room for a lot more discussion on this point, but it looks like I’ll be touching on this in my reply to Zhatt so I’ll leave it for there.
@Zhatt:
Actually, I have to take a slice of humble-pie here and take the point that you and Tommi have both made – that in stating that the aim of ethics is to promote happiness, I have made a philosophical claim and not a scientific one.
On reflection, my philosophical presuppositions go even deeper.
Definition time again: I’m using the term ‘ethics’ to mean a set of precepts.
I’m using the term ‘morality’ to mean living in accordance to a given code of ethics.
P1) The first philosophical part of my error is that I have presupposed that there is some good at which any human endeavor can or should aim. I’ve thought about it, and I can’t think of any hard evidence that would conclusively favor this position over that of nihilism or relativism. I still think there are some very good reasons for this position, but I have to admit that they are largely a matter of philosophy and argument – they are not scientific reasons.
P2) The second philosophical part is that I’ve presupposed that ethics are supposed to aim at anything in particular. This one is almost an issue of semantics, but I’m not about to let myself get caught out again quite so soon.
P3) The final and important philosophical part – the one that you’ve both pulled me up on – is that I’ve decided, without evidence, that out of all the ends that ethics possibly could aim at, it should aim at happiness. This is one of the very few areas in which I actually agree with Aristotle on pretty much anything. Once again, there are some good reasons for this position… But I have to admit that they are not scientific ones.
These three things were sitting in the back of my mind and shaping my argument, almost without my realizing it.
Hmm… That’s odd.
I took up a position that was flawed in ways I hadn’t realized, and I’ve had the two of you come in and effectively demolished it. Yet strangely, I’m all the happier for it. Reminds me of one of Bertrand Russell’s lines:
Comment by Ubiquitous Che — September 15, 2008 @ 10:44 pm
Che;
It takes courage to admit being wrong. That I respect.
Comment by Tommi — September 17, 2008 @ 3:09 am
Glad we could help, but I don’t think the argument is destroyed. You can draw a lot of conclusions with this reasoning as long as you accept that you are presupposing the idea that personal happiness = good. It would also be interesting to compare and find correlations between the same reasoning but replacing “personal happiness” with something else. Personal wealth = good, maybe.
Interestingly, I find it quite easy to find moral quality in your father-kills-daughter scenario if I’m able to to remove the personal happiness concept. The fact that capital punishment still exists shows that the idea of personal happiness as an ultimate goal isn’t accepted by everyone. Justice seems to be the ultimate goal for many.
Comment by Zhatt — September 19, 2008 @ 11:33 am
[...] trying to make a complete, airtight, philosophical argument out of this. Also, please refer to the comments on his post for a discussion he and some others had of this argument. I’m using his argument [...]
Pingback by Value and Morals without God « consider Him — September 22, 2008 @ 10:21 am
@Tommi:
Thanking you muchly for the sentiment. Still, it’s no false modesty on my part to say that I really don’t mind if I get proven wrong about something. The cost of calling yourself a free-thinker is that you have to be prepared, at any moment, to admit yourself to be wrong and change your mind – provided, of course, the evidence and reasons for doing so are sound.
That said, you and Zhatt both agreed with the underlying point I was trying to make – that we can scientifically investigate (up to a point) how well a given code of ethics does or does not achieve a given purpose.
The disagreement only came in when the two of you – quite rightly – pounced on my implicit assumption that the only good worth considering was happiness [edit: I mistakenly said ethics in my original in place of happiness]. How fortunate! Everyone should have such insightful and decisive commenters on their blogs!
@Zhatt:
My response to Tommi pretty much covers everything. I do think there’s room for more discussion on the topic of justice.
I would disagree with you when you say that you could consider the man’s actions in my story to be just if the ethical argument was to be set aside. I’d disagree with you on that one. In this case, the man’s actions were a form of vengeance, and in my understanding the entire point of justice is that it frees us from the recessive cycle of mutual vengeance… But methinks that’s a topic for another time.
@Richard:
I’ve really got to get around to replying to you one of these days. In the past, I used to post when I was at work… Since then, I’ve been disciplining myself a bit more, so I have significantly less time – when I do get some time together, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my negligence.
Comment by Ubiquitous Che — September 29, 2008 @ 8:36 pm