> 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. 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. Even if there is no end of inquiry, simply mapping out all of
my beliefs for the rest of my life would be enough for empirical science
to (by definition) tell me everything I'm capable of knowing about ethics.
Call this the argument from the best answer: the crystal ball is
guaranteed to give the best answer I'll ever come up with, and for this
reason (and only for this reason) I ought to believe the ball.
If your scientific process falls short of that, then the argument that I
can't do better than the crystal ball fails. What's more, it's a dismal
failure if it fails at all, because *nothing* like the argument from the
best answer applies to this cloudier crystal ball. What reason have I to
believe what the cloudier crystal ball tells me? What argument can you
give that the fact that I will (might?) believe X in the future shows that
I ought to believe X now?
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.
The only crystal ball which wields its own ethical argument is the one
which predicts all of my beliefs perfectly; anything less, and you'll need
to provide me with a moral argument to back up the claims of the ball.
And, as I've argued, these are impossibly high standards for a scientific
process to reach. No experiment can reach these criteria, and any
experiment that fails to reach these criteria won't tell me anything about
ethics by itself.
But once you've gotten your hands dirty, it's no longer an empirical
science: it has an empirical element to it (and this, I think, nobody
doubts is the case about ethics) but it isn't PURELY empirical.
> And let's keep our eye on the key claim at issue: can one study ethics
> via scientific methods? 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. Beginning with a moral
premise, factual statements can and do come into play in determining which
actions are moral and which aren't. However, I do hold that empirical
matters *alone* won't tell me anything about ethics.
> I am saying that ethics is part of science, just as other cognitive and
> social sciences are. You *can* learn about what is right by empirical
> study.
Via a hypothetical experiment which can't actually be performed? Not very
good science, if you ask me.
> The standard of a science of ethics isn't the ability of it to predict
> some mythical "end" of ethical inquiry, any more than the standard of
> solar physics is to predict the final end of the sun, billions of years
> after humans may have vastly changed the galaxy.
No, but physics has instrumental use when its answers are close, but not
quite right. Of what use is the cloudy crystal ball? What reason do I
have to believe that the ethical beliefs the cloudy ball reports I'll have
are actually right?
> You can't say that science is irrelevant if it can't predict
> perfectly. And it is far from obvious that ethical opinion is some
> maximally opaque computation which can only be predicted by running it.
> Certainly many other things that brains do can be predicted, even though
> in principle brains could make it very hard to predict them, if they
> tried hard at it.
Again, science has USE as an approximation. What argument can you provide
that the cloudy crystal ball would be right *at all*?
> You're trying to make this a choice of extremes: either science must
> predict everything exactly, and do it soon damn it, or the subject (ethics)
> is just not a scientific subject; it is fundamentally different.
> This same attitude would say "scientists shouldn't pretend to be
> understanding love; there's no way science could exactly predict who I
> would love at the end of the universe, since I could work hard to
> make that unpredictable. Thus love and science are just two different
> things."
An approximate science of love can tell me useful facts about lovers
BEFORE the end of the universe. What useful facts about ethics can a
cloudy crystal ball provide me?
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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