Sunday, September 9, 2012

Science vs philosophy

A somewhat interesting, though also depressing, dialogue between Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss here.   Krauss says the following things:
If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.
Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong".
The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it.
If the first two quotes don't seem problematic to you, the third ought to make clear what's going wrong here. Baggini battles gamely, but I'm not sure he really gets through to his opponent.  

8 comments:

  1. It is always funny to see how thinkers take an initially plausible thought, and continue it blindly until it leads them to absurdity. There is a kind of misguided, or perhaps just simplistic, idea of intellectual courage in doing that.

    But I probably should not say that it leads them to absurdity, but merely to the verge of absurdity. Because it seldom happens that such thinkers mention the really "unthinkable," like eating dead human bodies, or marrying inanimate objects, or having sex with babies, or killing newborn rape babies.

    Not that the really courageous thinker would say that those things exemplify yet more kinds of moral superstitions. I'm not sure what to call someone who said that; but 'courageous' is not the word.

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  2. I agree. 'Courageous' is not the word. But I don't think, or at least I'm not sure, that Krauss is trying to be courageous in the way that Peter Singer tries (or at least is prepared) to be. I'm not sure he realizes how radical he's being. Although he must be dimly aware of it.

    Here's Baggini responding to what Krauss says about homosexuality:

    Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural. There have been claims, for example, that rape is both natural and has evolutionary advantages. But the people who made those claims were also at great pains to stress this did not make them right – efforts that critics sadly ignored. Similar claims have been made for infidelity. What science tells us about the naturalness of certain sexual behaviours informs ethical reflection, but does not determine its conclusions. We need to be clear on this.

    And it's in response to this that Krauss makes the remark I quoted about infidelity. He says this:

    Once again, there are only subtle disagreements. We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony. However, I think that science can either modify or determine our moral convictions. The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it. Moreover, that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

    I want to change the subject.


    In other words, as I see it, he's either deliberately avoiding the subject of rape, or implying that any thinking person must modify any absolute condemnation of it, or insisting that "only subtle disagreements" lie between his position and Baggini's (but what could these be?), or else he's badly muddled. His position on rape seems to depend on whether it is a "fact of biology," whatever that means, and on what we can do to promote social harmony, whatever that is. Rape might well be a fact of biology in Krauss's sense, although the problem of what (if anything) this means is real. But surely rape is not bad because of its effects on social harmony. The effects on the victim must count for more than that.

    A really courageous thinker would not want to change the subject. I'm not sure that any thinker would want to change it. Thinking means not changing the subject to avoid difficulties.

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  3. I agree.

    And I also admit that after I laugh in such cases, there remains a sour taste in my mouth. And it is connected to what you say about Baggini not getting through to his opponent.

    It is as if there is no agreement on what the subject should be. And perhaps this is an essential part of the disagreement. Perhaps getting through to one's opponent in such cases requires not merely changing their views, but their whole conception of the matter. It is as if Krauss insists on having this conversation in a logical space that Baggini can only feel confined in: in which he would not even be able to say what he wants.

    If this is right, though, then for Krauss to be intellectually courageous would be to follow out his line of thinking to a place that would force him to change the subject (or what would seem to him as changing the subject). For if he followed out his own argument, he might be able to see that the argument requires a different logical space.

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  4. I don't know. Can you say more? I agree completely until your last paragraph and then I'm not sure what you are saying. Would he be forced to change the subject? On pain of what? That is, I think he has (at least) two options. He could insist that all non-scientific talk, e.g. talk about right and wrong, is irrelevant and should be ignored. And then the belief that rape is wrong might turn out to be an old-fashioned or ignorant superstition according to his view. Or he might see that he doesn't want to say this kind of thing and change his mind somehow. But I'm not sure that the argument he is actually making requires a different logical space.

    In a sense his argument is that we don't need that space. I hope he would abandon the argument if presented with enough examples of what would thereby be lost, but Baggini probably thought he had all the example he needed with the case of rape. And that didn't work. (That last sentence should perhaps be in all caps with several exclamation marks at the end, with long pauses between the words, but sometimes the meaning of what is being said is all the punctuation needed.)

    Thanks, by the way.

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  5. The 'change of subject' I had in mind would not necessarily so much involve talk of something else (although this might happen too). It might involve only talk about the same thing in a different way, or at least the realization that there are important questions to ask that cannot be solved in the laboratory.

    It seems to me that for Krauss to see those questions would very much feel as if the whole discussion has changed on him; namely, that the subject has changed. (I am saying this partly based on personal experience. I have a "Kraussian" mother-in-law.)

    One thing that Krauss says is that science provides THE basis for moral decisions. But this is at best a joke. The scientist can no more say what is good and what is bad than she can say what is tasty or whether the tie fits the shirt, or who I should marry, or whether or not I should take a vacation, or become a monk, or how to solve my tensed relations with my mother.

    The scientists can investigate what people has already judged to be beautiful or ugly. But she has no scientific basis for making those judgments. (Of course, she has a human basis for making such judgments, but science is supposed to go beyond this.)

    Krauss talks about questions that can and questions that cannot be answered. But for him answerable questions are answerable empirically. That is he defines (rather than gives us any reason to think) answerable questions as questions that are answerable with science.

    It seems to me that he is working with a very narrow conception of what it is to answer questions. and this is just another symptom of the narrowness of his (philosophical) view.

    In Kant's terms, for Krauss, judgment is a kind of theoretical judgment (and he has a very narrow conception of theoretical judgment). He fails to see the difference between the theoretical judgement and other kind of judgments, and he seems to have no conception of the importance of other ways of thinking for our life but the scientific. - He fails to see how impossible to make sense of things it would be if we tried to think only scientifically.

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  6. Thnaks for the clarification. I agree. It's odd that he doesn't completely fail to see these things, and yet he ignores them all the same. At some level he must be aware that he has dodged the question about rape. But he seems to want to shrug such matters off as "only subtle." I suppose that's a strategy for debate--ignore counter-arguments. It's far from admirable though.

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  7. His position on rape seems to depend on whether it is a "fact of biology," whatever that means, and on what we can do to promote social harmony, whatever that is. Rape might well be a fact of biology in Krauss's sense, although the problem of what (if anything) this means is real. But surely rape is not bad because of its effects on social harmony.

    In Freud's philosophy of culture, of course, repression of our natural inclinations (to the point of becoming neurotic) is the price we tragically have to pay for civility. Reading Krauss, it strikes me that Freud's view is already well on its way to becoming culturally incomprehensible. It is as if the price of civility is still acknowledged to be repression, as with Freud, but any given amount of repression is always already being judged as too high a price.

    I'm one of the great Freud-overrated-considerers of our age, but this is the one bit of him that even I'd be loath to let go of. But we perhaps will live to see it become a kind of quaint period piece.

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  8. Nietzsche says something similar, doesn't he? That we have re-directed the cruelty of the master morality against ourselves, meaning that we no longer roam about like lions terrorizing others (which is good) but also that we tend to beat ourselves up excessively (which is bad). Krauss almost seems to want to return to the master morality. Whether we should bring about such a return would depend, it seems, on whether it would allow for social harmony (did the Romans, for instance, have this?). But he also thinks we don't have free will, so questions of what we should do might not interest him.

    Good luck making sense of this:

    We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony. [...] many moral convictions [...] are learned [...] Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

    He seems to be saying that we do what we do. Everything we do is either hard-wired or else learned as a way to promote social harmony. Either way we have no free will, so there's no point judging what anybody does as good or bad. That's a retreat into naivete. The part about our having an intellect that enables us to override natural tendencies sounds like Freud, but this is the part that doesn't really seem to fit the rest of the story.

    So, yes, Freud's idea seems to be almost incomprehensible from Krauss's position. Which means that civilization (as Freud understands it, anyway) is almost incomprehensible from his position.

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