Dan Fabulich wrote:
> > To be more precise, such a science might predict your beliefs at any stage
> > of a cognitive process; I see no reason to focus on some mythical "end."
> > And let's not get distracted by the straw-person of perfect prediction.
> > It could be plenty useful if predictions were just much better than random.
>
>Don't forget what's supposed to make your argument work. In your orginal
>case, you hypothesized a scientific crystal ball which would predict ALL
>of my ethical beliefs. ...
I was just responding to your challenge at that time. You had said that even
with an empirical magic wand, one couldn't say anything about right and wrong.
I agree that such a wand makes the strongest case; I disagree that without it
there is no case.
>The fact that I'm going to believe X *normally* doesn't provide any argument
>at all for believing X now, but the fact that I'll believe X at the end of
>inquiry *does* provide me with reason to believe X. ... your scientific
>process ... argument ... it's a dismal failure if it fails at all, because
>*nothing* like the argument from the best answer applies his cloudier crystal
>ball. ... [the same claim is made several more times in other words]
I think this is just wrong. The difference between your beliefs now and at
the "end" of inquiry is made up of a bunch of little differences between
nearby points in time. Anything that informs you about your beliefs at any
future time implicitly informs you about your beliefs at the "end". I could
prove this in a Bayesian framework if you would find that informative.
>In fact, you can't give me *any* such argument without getting your hands
>dirty and doing some non-empirical moral philosophy, and *that's* what I'm
>trying to show: you can't do the whole thing empirically, you have to do
>at least some of the job non-empirically. ... No experiment can reach
>these criteria, and any experiment that fails to reach these criteria won't
>tell me anything about ethics by itself.
Let's consider a physics analogy. You tell me that you have placed an atom
at a very particular location in your brain, and you challenge me to use
science to tell you the exact mass of that atom. I reply that sure, physics
is useful here. I can right off tell you the mass is almost surely limited
to being one of the known isotopes of known atoms. Furthermore I might do a
(non-destructive) brain scan and determine the kinds of atoms that are
contained in your brain, which are presumably not all possible atom isotopes.
You then reply that is not good enough. You want the mass of the particular
atom you have in mind, and no you aren't going to tell me which one that is.
You then conclude that, ha ha, physics isn't enough to tell the "whole thing"
about the mass of atoms, "you have to do at least some of the job
non-empirically," and so the mass of atoms "isn't PURELY empirical".
A true claim, I suppose, but very weak, and it wouldn't justify your saying
that physics should stop going around saying that science can tell us the
mass of atoms.
The analogy should be obvious: Your exact moral beliefs at any point in
time will be determined by your brain state, some of which will be
unobservable by the rest of us. That doesn't mean that we can't learn
most everything there is to know about morals by learning how brains
evolve their moral beliefs.
> > ... You complained that evolutionary psychology folks
> > were pretending to study ethics, while instead ethics is just a different
> > world; no factual statements are relevant to judging ethical statements.
>
>Point of interest: that's a gross oversimplification. I'm simply making
>the standard can't-derive-ought-from-is argument. ... I do hold that
>empirical matters *alone* won't tell me anything about ethics.
I'm disputing that standard claim, and am saying that empirical matters
alone tell us a lot about ethics, and as the science progresses may well
tell us almost everything there is to know about ethics.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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