A New video in the ongoing Kaufman-Pigliucci series is out, this one on the question of whether teleology, the idea that things have a “purpose” in the strong Aristotelian sense of the word, still makes sense in light of modern science and philosophy.
We begin our discussion by examining various meanings of “purpose” in science and in morality, and then by exploring Aristotle’s take on the subject. I argue that “what is it for?”, i.e., looking for functions, makes perfect sense in evolutionary biology, but not in other sciences, such as chemistry or geology. That’s because of the special role of natural selection in evolution. Accordingly, we explore the relationship between form and function and how the two reciprocally shape each other in living organisms.
We then move to ethics, exploring the idea of moral laws. From there, we discuss the different paths to human flourishing and how they relate to the concept of meaning and purpose. Finally, I explain once again what Sam Harris gets wrong about the relationship between science and ethics. But you can skip that bit if you are (understandably) tired of that particular dead horse… (or you can read my original critique here).
Here is the full video:
Footnotes to Plato 
Hi Coel,
Umm no. Disagreeing with a position is not the same as regarding it as heresy.
The problem is, as I have pointed out a few times, is that the only useful information science can provide is that we have these emotions because once, a long time ago, they increased the probability that certain patterns among the nucleotides predominated over others in a long vanished landscape.
That pretty much deals science out as we don’t really care about molecular seating arrangements.. The specific details of how any particular feeling increased this probability may be interesting but it is of no relevance in deciding what to do.
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As you might guess Massimo, my question was to inquire about a kind of “other-minds” instance of an artificial mind that could be logically encoded yet functionally intelligent and plausibly purposeful. If such could be mapped onto our bio-carbon brains, then I wonder if the concept of purpose could be entirely scrubbed from the universe. I won’t waste your time here: the key concept seems to revolve around how “if-then” conditionals are crucial to machine-based intelligence as we currently employ it in adaptive learning circumstances and how those same conditionals might play the same role in projecting purposes in human endeavor. I’m trying here to avoid the hard question of consciousness as Chalmers would put it and simply wonder if at some basic level of human consciousness imagination in the first-person experiential sense just expresses an underlying “if-then” process we can replicate in artificial intelligence. If that makes any sense, then the dilemma is either we impute the concept of purpose to like-minded (as it were) machines or we retract it from human intelligence. My own thinking right now is that we should do away with the concept of purpose as some ultimate explanatory principle, including in our own case (except as a practical shortcut of explanation). I hope that was clear.
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Alan,
Yes, I guessed where you were going, but I would be inclined to reach the opposite conclusions: IF we could one day create true artificial consciousness, THEN those beings would be additional teleological entities, just like us. That, in my ind, lends no support at all to Chalmers’ so-called hard problem, though.
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Massimo:
.>And there I agree with Singer: it makes no difference, just like both the Platonism and the nominalistic do math in the same way despite their metaphysical differences
…and like QM where the interpretation (metaphysics) makes no difference to the answers which in this case gets it right regardless.
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Gaia for planets or galaxies is just plain silly.
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As a naturalist, determinist, and causalist in the end, I cannot support the notion that purpose exists in an ultimate sense, and not even for biological dynamics. From this perspective everything just is what it is based upon nature, and so cannot possibly deviate, let alone have some kind of elemental purpose. But then once looked at from our tiny human perspectives — sure, we can say that the purpose of a snail’s shell is to protect the snail. Similarly we can punish people for being “evil”. Such statements suit our needs, though can’t be true in an ultimate sense (given perfectly causality). I don’t complain when other naturalists disagree with me here, but simply try to maintain an objective view.
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Eric,
So what was your purpose in writing this comment?
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Hi Robin,
Suggesting that meta-ethics is better considered from a scientific perspective than a philosophical one would be considered heretical by some.
Hi Massimo,
That additional argument being Occam’s razor. (Which is both a philosophical and a scientific tool.) Yes, science does not produce a non-existence proof regarding moral realism, but it does explain everything about meta-ethics that there is to explain and it does so in a moral subjectivist way.
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Hi Eric
Why do you think teeth are the shape and consistency they are, if not because of tgr purpose they have of tearing snd masticating food?
They would have started as an accident, a hard sharp calcification because of the way the cells react with a certain kind of material, but evolution has shaped them in a particular way because of the purpose they have in the animal.
No one here is suggesting an everarching purpose, that the Universe has a particular desire for food to be torn and masticated in a particular way.
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Coel,
Occam’s razor is not a magic wand by which to wish away all philosophical problems, and you should stop using it that way.
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Its not heretical. It’s just obviously wtong.
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Hi Massimo,
He isn’t using it as a magic wand. He is using it appropriately, as far as I can see.
Science (biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology) can study and I think explain why we have moral intuitions — a feeling that some things are right and some things are wrong. There is absolutely no need to assume that what is right and wrong are objective facts built into the universe — nothing we see requires such an assumption to explain it. To make that assumption is therefore to violate the razor by making one assumption too many. What part of this chain of reasoning do you disagree with, and if you do disagree with it then what led you to reject moral realism?
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DM,
I’m surprised to see you defend Coel’s use of Occam against moral realism. Wouldn’t that cut down mathematical Platonism as well?
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Hi Massimo,
It might, if you construe mathematical platonism as postulating a mystical realm of mathematical possibilities where mathematical objects are floating around, mostly disconnected from our reality but which mathematicians can somehow mysteriously perceive. On such a view of platonism, there are the mathematical objects we talk about and think about and do mathematics with and publish papers on, and then there are the mysterious objects themselves. The mysterious objects themselves would correspond to objective morality, and are unnecessary by Occam’s razor.
But this is not how I think of platonism. For me, platonism is more of a convention about how we ought to define and think about the concept of existence in order to have a coherent world view.
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DM,
A moral realist could defend his position in exactly the same way.
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Hi Massimo,
I don’t think so, not the usual moral realism anyway. Moral realism typically says that that of all the possible moral values or judgements one could make, usually there is just one way of doing it correctly (or at least there are objective facts of the matter on which ways are correct and incorrect). Moral realism therefore draws distinctions between moral laws which do exist (e.g. “thou shalt not kill”) with ones which do not (“e.g. “though shalt kill as many as you can get away with”), and so for a moral realist, the existence of moral laws is an independently meaningful property of those laws, a weighty concept about which there is a fact of the matter. The moral realist therefore needs to take the step of assuming that this distinction is meaningful.
This is entirely unlike my platonism. My platonism says there is no one correct way of doing mathematics. All axiomatic systems, all possible mathematical objects exist. I do not draw a distinction between (coherent) mathematical objects which exist and those which do not. For me, mathematical objects all exist or all fail to exist together. All that matters to me is what we mean by existence. There is no fact of the matter one way or another.
But if you want to say that a moral realist could do the same, and just say that all possible moral systems exist, and so nobody is objectively right on moral questions, then OK, but that’s a funny sort of moral realism. Seems more like moral relativism to me.
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DM,
Then you sound less and less like a Platonist.
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Hi Massimo,
Are you saying platonists are supposed to think only some mathematical objects exist and not others?
If this is what you are saying, then what term would you prefer I use for someone who believes all possible mathematical objects exist?
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I know this isn’t primarily a thread on metaethics, but I’ve been meaning for some time to respond to Coel on this subject, and I thought I might as well do it now, while I’m in the mood.
Hi Coel,
While I have some of agreement with you on metaethics, I think you’re misusing terms and getting some thing wrongs.
The main view we share is that “there are no moral facts”, or as I would put it: moral statements (such as “X is morally wrong” and “you have a moral obligation to do Y”) cannot be true. I cannot find an accepted and unambiguous term for this view (neither “moral skepticism” nor “moral nihilism” seems quite to fit), so I’ll coin my own term “moral anti-factualism”.
Moral anti-factualism is just a subset of moral anti-realism, while emotivism is just a subset of moral anti-factualism. It may well be true that most scientists are moral anti-realists, but it seems very unlikely that (as you claim) most scientists are emotivists. Indeed, I hope they are not, since I consider emotivism to be misguided (the wrong sort of moral anti-factualism).
At the risk of oversimplifying, emotivists believe that the utterance of a moral statement is JUST an expression of emotion, and not an assertion of a supposed fact. But I say that people who utter moral statements in earnest (e.g. “Abortion is morally wrong!”) are very often (but perhaps not always) asserting what they take to be a fact. That seems pretty damn obvious in many cases, especially when different people are asserting what appear to be contrary moral views and are arguing in support of those apparently contrary views.
It might be appropriate to say that they are BOTH expressing an emotion AND asserting a supposed fact. I suspect you might go along with that. But then you would not be an emotivist, as I understand the term. (Of course these issues are complicated by the fact within any labelled category of philosophers, including emotivists, there is usually a considerable variety of views.)
I used to call myself a “moral error theorist”, but now I’m not comfortable with any of the standard labels, and prefer to simply state my view briefly as follows: moral statements cannot be true, but (contrary to at least some non-cognitivist views) they are typically asserted as facts.
Note. I consider assertion to be a stance adopted by a speaker, and not something that is inherent in particular words or sentences. A flat-Earther might assert that “the Earth is flat”, while I can speak the same sentence without asserting it. Moreover, the boundary between when one is asserting and when one is not may be a very fuzzy one.
There is also a problem with your use of the term “moral subjectivism”. In common parlance it may refer to the vague idea that “morality is subjective”, and might be considered a rough synonym for “moral anti-realism”. Indeed, before I read anything about the subject I sometimes called myself a moral subjectivist. But to philosophers it seems to have a much narrower meaning, is non-overlapping with emotivism, and as far as I can tell relatively few philosophers consider themselves moral subjectivists. I suggest that you avoid the term.
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Alan: I agree with Sellars that there is no eliminating purpose from the Manifest Image. If that’s the case, then in any discussion of the affairs of persons, not matter what they are made of, purpose will be a central explanatory concept.
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DM: Why don’t you write up your “idea” for refuting moral realism via Occam’s Razor and send it to a peer reviewed ethics journal?
Do you seriously think that if it was as easy as simply waving your hand at Occam’s Razor, philosophers who spend their entire careers working in Ethics would have just missed it?
As for the discussion of mathematical Platonism, when I saw it, I considered killing myself. The problem is, you can only do it once.
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Thanks for asking Massimo, since while there can be no purpose in an ultimate causal sense, there can be purpose in respect to a mere human. I perceive writing that comment for entertainment. I perceive entertainment to make me happy, and so to add value to my existence. In fact I could go on to say that I’d love for the field of philosophy to begin studying a new form of ethics that concerns value rather than the “arbitrary” values associated with morality.
Well it sounds like you’ve got it then Robin — we give teeth their purpose through human interpretation, nothing more.
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I didn’t want to tire the audience, so I stopped inquiring about the disanalogies between the biological and other natural sciences. But there are still things that nag me about the suggested disanalogy that I’m hoping Massimo can clarify further.
The idea was supposed to be something like this: it makes sense to say that teeth are for chewing, because of natural selection. But it doesn’t make sense to say that rivers are for creating riverbeds, because there is nothing like natural selection, within the frame of which such an explanation does any work.
The idea, then, seems to be that natural selection is a kind of system, while, as Massimo explained, the the geology of the planet is not.
What I’m still not sure I understand is in what sense natural selection is really any kind of system. It seems to me that the term ‘natural selection’ simply describes the entirely accidental fact that certain traits are advantageous in certain environments and others are not and thus lead either to propagation of the trait or loss of it, in populations over time. Why do these facts make natural selection a “system” any more than the entirely accidental fact that certain combinations of natural elements like water and soil and rock cause certain things to happen and others not to happen?
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DM,
I don’t think Platonists would go for the idea that incoherent objects exist, for instance. I don’t know what to call your position, but it’s not Platonism as it is understood in the philosophy of mathematics.
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Eric,
Even if you wrote the comment just for the purpose of entertainment, you still had a purpose in mind…
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Hi Massimo,
Nor do I. I think you misread me.
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Dan,
Good question. I think the difference is that the workings of natural selection are directional, cumulative, and tend to maximize particular quantities (survival and reproduction). Every other natural phenomenon may have one or two of these properties, but not the latter.
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It’s an interesting division of the natural sciences. Those sciences that bother with teleological explanations and those that don’t. Has anyone thought of what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for this to be the case? I mean, nature can’t possibly care whether a particular biochemical system has a purpose or not. Is natural selection the whole answer? Can other forms of selection or other types of reproduction be used? Can we go to pre-genetic or proto-genetic level and still comfortably talk of purpose?
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Sorry, DM, you did reference coherence, but not in the way I understood. But then if you are a mathematical Platonist I see no way for you to differentiate that metaphysics from that of a moral realist. The moral realist is focusing on the subset of moral claims that are true (or so he thinks), just like you focus on the subset of methematical objects that are coherent. Just because your set is larger than his that doesn’t make for a substantive difference.
However, as Dan as forcefully reminded us, this thread is not about metaethics, so perhaps we should table that particular discussion now.
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Bunsen,
I’m suspicious of anything that is cast in formal terms of necessary and sufficient. In my experience, per Wittgenstein, most complex concepts simply don’t admit of that sort of definition.
But in answer to your question, no I don’t know of anything other than natural selection that can generate teleonomy. And we still have no idea how human beings made the jump from teleonomy to teleology — i.e., how Consciousness came about. (But no, I don’t believe this is a “hard” problem, it’s just a problem.)
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