Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
According to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, it is ideas, not capital or institutions, that enriched the world. This article is about her new book, and it does present an interesting point of view, which however needs to be filtered by the fact that it appeared in Reason magazine, a notoriously libertarian-leaning magazine. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Or is there?
Long and thoughtful article by Philip Ball at Nautilus on the disciplinary boundaries (or lack thereof) between biology and physics. He argues for no boundaries, and takes as his adversary the late Ernst Mayr, an evolutionary biologist who drew them very sharply. I’m somewhere in the middle. Too bad we couldn’t connect at HowTheLightGetsIn festival recently.
Patrick West, over at Spiked, argues that mythical scifi writer Ray Bradbury was an optimist about technology in real life, and yet wrote very dark stories about the techno-future of humanity. “We may see his tales as cautionary, not clairvoyant. Bradbury was optimistic by instinct but not by conviction.”
Does science have anything to say about moral intuitions? This article by Michael Mitchell in Aeon strongly argues for the no position. I think he goes a bit too far, but his reasoning is interesting. For my own take on the same subject, see here.
Footnotes to Plato 
I’ll at least partially take Maslow’s hierarchy over Reason.
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Agree with Aeon; subconscious priming should make us at least mildly skeptical of ALL intuitions.
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I for one firmly believe that Bradbury existed!
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BTW the Spiked piece should have enlisted Dandelion Wine in evidence for Bradbury’s optimism. I read it when I was a kid but still recall many images from the almost magical summer it creates for its child protagonist.
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I like Bradbury, but always thought he was the least of the Golden Age science fiction writers, well behind Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.
His greatest work is undoubtedly The Martian Chronicles. It alone ranks among the Childhoods Ends, Foundations, and Stranger in a Strange Lands.
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And of course, Philip K. Dick is the greatest of them all.
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According to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, it is ideas, not capital or institutions, that enriched the world
Ideas like the EU? Of course, it is an institution too…for the moment…
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His greatest work is undoubtedly The Martian Chronicles
Fahrenheit 451? Of course he missed cable TV or the internet, but now we are all getting antennas back. There’s plenty of propaganda on the boob tube.
And, of course, books can not be eliminated with fire anymore!
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Fahrenheit 451 was very much a latecomer on the dystopia scene, and it had already been done better by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell.
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Hi Dan,
Librarians (like my wife Margaret) love Fahrenheit.
I’m contemplating a story based on Wells ‘Star Begotten’ were among other things the genetics behind the Martian take over of our minds is outlined in terms of genetic engineering… I don’t mind being ‘derivative’.
I finished my time-travel Oedipus which is the first time I’ve ever managed to finish a story. Still needs a lot of proofing (as you can imagine from my high typo rate and sometimes garbled syntax). I’m thinking of sending it Asimov’s Sci Fi though the odds of getting are miniscule.
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My wife teaches High School English. She tried F 451 a few times, but switched to 1984.
I’ve tried several times to publish Science Fiction short stories with zero luck.
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Hi Massimo, I thought the article by Mitchell was pretty good, and was wondering where/how he went too far for you? I didn’t see it as being that different in message from what you had said.
Intriguingly, that article brings up the very problems I had tried to raise with Garthdaisy about his science based moral theory.
I wonder what Singer’s reaction would have been if the results had turned out differently? I can sort of guess…
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dbholms: I agree with you entirely. That a big-shot Harvard scientist like Greene would make such an elementary error is rather humiliating. One starts to wonder what these fancy pedigrees are really worth. That Singer should try to ride it is .., well, not surprising.
Our moral intuitions constitute the ultimate measure against which the adequacy of *any* moral account is determined. That they are conflicted and even sometimes contradictory does not alter that fact. Indeed, it is because our moral intuitions are conflicted and contradictory that we have conflicted and contradictory moral accounts.
For those who are interested, I did a short essay on this, and then a significantly longer conversation, with Dan Tippens.
https://theelectricagora.com/2015/09/21/intuition-and-morals/
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/32684
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Dan,
Just curious. Have you read Dandelion Wine?
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Re the Aeon article by Michael Mitchell:
Hmm, this article just seems to strawman Greene rather than showing him wrong. First, the article makes the usual presumption of moral realism (often a cause of going wrong):
E.g. he just assumes that one can apply truth values to moral claims, e.g.: “To assess whether a moral theory is true, philosophers formulate cases that call for particular moral choices and ask which choice seems, intuitively, like the right one.”
After reviewing Greene’s work he then attributes to Greene the suggestion:
“As a result, we should apparently be suspicious of deontological intuitions and deferential to our consequentialist intuitions. This research thereby also provides evidence for a particular moral theory: consequentialism.”
But the one paper of Greene’s linked to doesn’t say that. Indeed, Greene is explicitly *not* applying truth values, and is not attempting to be prescriptive or to defend consequentialism. He explicitly says otherwise:
Greene: “Our conclusion, therefore, is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We do not claim to have shown any actions or
judgments to be morally right or wrong.”
Now, *Singer* might have interpreted Greene’s results along the above lines, and indeed Greene might have done so elsewhere (in which case Mitchell should have pointed to it), but Greene is not saying that in the piece linked to.
Mitchel continues:
“Greene’s argument just assumes that the factors that make a case personal – the factors that engage relatively emotional brain processes and typically lead to deontological intuitions – are morally irrelevant.”
No, actually, Greene does not assume that. Indeed he is saying roughly the opposite — he is giving a *descriptive* account saying that the factors pointed to **are** morally relevant in the sense of affecting the moral intuitions that people have.
Thus, the entire refutation by Selim Berker pointed to by Mitchell seems to be refuting something that Greene has not said (again. if he’s said it elsewhere the piece should have pointed to it; or it should have made clear that it was *Singer’s* interpretation, not Greene’s, that was being refuted).
Note also that Berker’s article is titled: “The **Normative** insignificance of neuroscience” (added emphasis). That’s correct, neuroscience cannot give you a normative prescription (nor can anything else).
But neuroscience can *describe* human moral intuitions, which it seems to me what Greene was doing, so it is wrong to say that neuroscience “has nothing to say” about moral intuitions — it has lots to say about them.
Mitchell seems to be misjudging Greene because he (Mitchell, and possibly Singer) is presuming moral realism, and trying to mash Greene onto that.
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The McCloskey article, saying that “ideas” rather than capital leads to wealth begins:
“Contrary to economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies.”
That’s rather weird, considering that in Wealth of Nations Adam Smith attributed prosperity not to the accumulation of capital but primarily to the division of labour, the idea that we all specialise at tasks and thus get much better and more efficient at them. Which is pretty much along the lines that McCloskey argues for — the theses are not “contrary”.
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The article in Reason, on Bourgeois Equality, further exemplifies the tendency of libertarians to think The End of History has arrived, with their clear and insightful omniscience.
For one thing, biology had evolved levels of technical complexity by a hundred million years ago, that we still don’t really understand and now think that, like cargo cults building stick figure airplanes and thinking they will deliver the goods, our crude mechanical and computational approximations will shortly spring to life.
As for the clerisy and those infernal institutions, guess what? They gave us civilization. No small feat. Yes, we often just see the management and police functions, not the innovations and insights on which they are built, but that is more a consequence of the perceptual limits of the observer, not the failures of the constructs.
Yes, those of us who do work with our hands and minds in the practical world are quite capable of devising interesting, useful and more efficient methods of doing things than those who only preach about such efforts, but even this can be taken beyond its useful limits and find itself spiraling out of control. Such as the premise of debt based currencies as true capital value and not just a contractual medium, that is currently in the process of exploding in rather spectacular fashion.
One can only wonder what patches the True Believers will devise to fix this mess.
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David: Yes, I have read Dandelion Wine. As far as Bradbury’s boyhood novels go, I prefer Something Wicked This Way Comes. Dandelion Wine was about three times as long as it needed to be.
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In sci fi and mystery I prefer short stories. It seems like the extra length in novels has to be padded out … and leads to a lack of displace and loose plotting. Gimme Dashiell Hammett any day.
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displace –> discipline
Ugh!
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Folks:
Just remember that Moral Realism needn’t be true in order to justifiably believe that moral judgments have truth values. All that is required is Moral Objectivism. (Not the Randian kind.) In the case of a moral theory grounded in Contractarianism, for example, moral judgments will be objective, though they will not be “real,” in the sense of being mind independent.
Moral Realism/Anti-Realism has absolutely nothing to do with Mitchell’s piece, which is spot-on with regard to Greene and this increasing (and unfortunate) effort to “scientize” ethics. One and the same thing can count as a moral reason, on both Realist and Anti-Realist accounts. And whether or not a particular reason is morally “irrelevant” is not something that science can tell us.
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Daniel–couldn’t one argue that contractarianism is a form of majority subjectivism–like how Coke and Pepsi conduct taste-tests in order to claim that “9 out of 10 preferred the taste of x to y” where and x and y can range over both Coke and Pepsi given what samples are used? But if one counters that contractarians use (e.g.) reason or fairness or some such to found an objective basis of it, then I fail to see why that isn’t an invocation of some sort of realistic value, as opposed to some majority agreement on “what tastes best”.
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A few people have pointed this out before, but the fact that our neurology is the substrate upon which moral intuitions are instantiated does not imply that neuroscience can describe moral intuitions, any more than neuroscience can be said to describe Eratosthanes Sieve.
For a start, a moral intuition depends upon more than a single mind and upon more than just minds.
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I’ve read the Mitchell piece twice now, and see little wrong with it other than, perhaps, its brevity. Certainly an impressive piece from someone just starting his career in philosophy.
He captures the two big problems with Greene’s work. First ethics is not reducible to simple choices the way that neuroscientists believe – this in itself is a scandal of he neurosciences studies on ethics. “Push the man off the bridge, yes or no?!” – Oh, come on, that’s not the kind of ethics choice most of us face in daily life.
The other problem is that neuroscientists, like clinical psychologists, are notoriously guilty of confirmation bias in such studies. Greene wants Consequentialism to prove the more ‘rational’ choice and, by gum, doesn’t his study prove it?
Finally, Mitchell’s balanced approached, while not making it an overt point, yet should remind us that most of our ethical choices – and with increasing frequency most of our more sophisticated discussions on ethics – reveal that thoughtful people tend to be engage differing ethical principles regarding differing ethical choices. So it’s possible to act as a Consequentialist in the morning and a Deontologist at night, should the circumstances seem to warrant it.
Of course ideologues will not have it so, everything is black and white to them. So paying attention to them at best wastes our time, and at worst leads us down to narrow-minded ignorance. The question is whether scientists can avoid slipping into this mode of thought just because, you know, “science” (wave hands here). We expect better of those trained to keep an open mind.
And just BTW, tho not completely OT, I should remark that the Electric Agora just posted an essay by one of my favorite writers (although I find myself quarreling with his point of view frequently), which concerns the layered ethics of robotics as presented in Japanese popular media – https://theelectricagora.com/2016/06/23/astro-boy-and-the-mark-of-the-human/. I think he may be on to something, but his occasional hubris grates against my intuitive sense of humility.
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Alan: The only subjectivism that gets you moral statements with no truth-values is the Emotivist variety, a la Ayer, in which moral statements become performatives.
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On the biology as physics essay;
“One of the key issues here is causation: In what directions does information flow? It’s now becoming possible to quantify these questions of causation—and that reveals the deficiencies of a universal bottom-up picture.”
“biological systems often operate close to what physicists call a critical phase transition or critical point: a state poised on the brink of switching between two modes of organization, one of them orderly and the other disorderly.”
What if one of the problems is the physics? We assume critical phases as the interaction between ordered and disordered states, but what if criticality is the default state and order/disorder are the sides, or fluctuations inherent to this?
Rather than reality being “bottom up,” it is that bottom up and top down reflect each other. Both bottom up as interacting pieces and top down as parts of the whole.
As well as the point I keep making about time; in that as energy flows from past to future events, these events go future to past. All within, not external, to the physical state of the present.
Or that in thermodynamic systems, causality would be high pressure systems pushing, while low pressure systems effectively direct/guide/pull. (Nature abhors a vacuum.)
Consider that “order” is one of those things which seem obvious, by definition, until we try to really pin it down and the logic becomes circular. Just as disordered states have some information, or we couldn’t detect them.
I know this idea isn’t being as clear, structured and “scientific” as some would prefer, but I’m directing it to those who might see similar concepts and get feedback. It is our nature to make judgements, but that is a subset of understanding the relationships in the first place.
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It is interesting to first read the article arguing biology can be defined in bottom up physical terms, then read the article arguing science can explain ethics, without considering it as a bottom up process, in which good and bad are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. Such that in the complex reality in which they operate, there will be innumerable conflicts and contradictions and every situation will have its own unique factors(input) and fuzzy outcomes(output). The lack of perspective is truly stunning.
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The title of Mitchell’s article reminds me of the recently discussed “Darwin Was Wrong” brand of article titles. After reading the article I think a more appropriate title would have been “Science Has Almost Nothing To Say About The Trolley Dilemma. But Then Again, What Does?”
Like Coel, I’m still looking for where Greene stated that this invalidates deontological intuitions and confirms that consequentialism is the right way. I sure don’t believe that and I can’t see where Greene claims to believe that either.
As for whether science has something to say about moral intuitions, again, like Coel, I think it clearly does descriptively, and I am suspicious of any flat-out denial that it does. But it’s just description. The formation of normative ethics, if one chooses to engage in such things, can only be done by philosophy. Philosophers can choose how much they choose to be influenced by science in their philosophy, but science can not formulate ethics.
I asked this before and sadly got no takers. Can anyone give an example of an ought that is not derived from what is?
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EJ Winner
“this in itself is a scandal of he neurosciences studies on ethics. “Push the man off the bridge, yes or no?!” – Oh, come on, that’s not the kind of ethics choice most of us face in daily life.”
“Push the fat man off the bridge” is not a neuroscience study on ethics it is a thought experiment based on the trolley dilemma which was created by the philosopher of ethics, Philippa Foot. “Push the fat man” was the part added to it by another philosopher of ethics, Judith Jarvis Thomson:
So is this now a scandal of the philosophy of ethics? Or no longer a scandal at all?
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Dan–I disagree. (And that assumes some ground of disagreement–even if emotive!) If one assumes something like emotivism then contractarianism devolves into exactly what I was describing–majority expressionism versus a minority.
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