The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values Page 2
The relevant neuroscience is in its infancy, but we know that our emotions, social interactions, and moral intuitions mutually influence one another. We grow attuned to our fellow human beings through these systems, creating culture in the process. Culture becomes a mechanism for further social, emotional, and moral development. There is simply no doubt that the human brain is the nexus of these influences. Cultural norms influence our thinking and behavior by altering the structure and function of our brains. Do you feel that sons are more desirable than daughters? Is obedience to parental authority more important than honest inquiry? Would you cease to love your child if you learned that he or she was gay? The ways parents view such questions, and the subsequent effects in the lives of their children, must translate into facts about their brains.
My goal is to convince you that human knowledge and human values can no longer be kept apart. The world of measurement and the world of meaning must eventually be reconciled. And science and religion— being antithetical ways of thinking about the same reality—will never come to terms. As with all matters of fact, differences of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they do not oblige us to respect a diversity of views indefinitely.
Facts and Values
The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave (morality). 13 Following Hume, the philosopher G. E. Moore declared that any attempt to locate moral truths in the natural world was to commit a "naturalistic fallacy." 14 Moore argued that goodness could not be equated with any property of human experience (e.g., pleasure, happiness, evolutionary fitness) because it would always be appropriate to ask whether the property on offer was itself good. If, for instance, we were to say that goodness is synonymous with whatever gives people pleasure, it would still be possible to worry whether a specific instance of pleasure is actually good. This is known as Moore's "open question argument." And while I think this verbal trap is easily avoided when we focus on human well-being, most scientists and public intellectuals appear to have fallen into it. Other influential philosophers, including Karl Popper, 15 have echoed Hume and Moore on this point, and the effect has been to create a firewall between facts and values throughout our intellectual discourse. 16
While psychologists and neuroscientists now routinely study human happiness, positive emotions, and moral reasoning, they rarely draw conclusions about how human beings ought to think or behave in light of their findings. In fact, it seems to be generally considered intellectually disreputable, even vaguely authoritarian, for a scientist to suggest that his or her work offers some guidance about how people should live. The philosopher and psychologist Jerry Fodor crystallizes the view:
Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn't tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn't be a science of the human condition. 17
While it is rarely stated this clearly, this faith in the intrinsic limits of reason is now the received opinion in intellectual circles.
Despite the reticence of most scientists on the subject of good and evil, the scientific study of morality and human happiness is well underway. This research is bound to bring science into conflict with religious orthodoxy and popular opinion—just as our growing understanding of evolution has—because the divide between facts and values is illusory in at least three senses: (1) whatever can be known about maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures—which is, I will argue, the only thing we can reasonably value—must at some point translate into facts about brains and their interaction with the world at large; (2) the very idea of "objective" knowledge (i.e., knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.); (3) beliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain: it appears that we have a common system for judging truth and falsity in both domains. I will discuss each of these points in greater detail below. Both in terms of what there is to know about the world and the brain mechanisms that allow us to know it, we will see that a clear boundary between facts and values simply does not exist.
Many readers might wonder how can we base our values on something as difficult to define as "well-being"? It seems to me, however, that the concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable. 18 In fact, the meanings of both terms seem likely to remain perpetually open to revision as we make progress in science. Today, a person can consider himself physically healthy if he is free of detectable disease, able to exercise, and destined to live into his eighties without suffering obvious decrepitude. But this standard may change. If the biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey is correct in viewing aging as an engineering problem that admits of a full solution, 19 being able to walk a mile on your hundredth birthday will not always constitute "health." There may come a time when not being able to run a marathon at age five hundred will be considered a profound disability. Such a radical transformation of our view of human health would not suggest that current notions of health and sickness are arbitrary, merely subjective, or culturally constructed. Indeed, the difference between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential a distinction as we ever make in science. The differences between the heights of human fulfillment and the depths of human misery are no less clear, even if new frontiers await us in both directions.
If we define "good" as that which supports well-being, as I will argue we must, the regress initiated by Moore's "open question argument" really does stop. While I agree with Moore that it is reasonable to wonder whether maximizing pleasure in any given instance is "good," it makes no sense at all to ask whether maximizing well-being is "good." It seems clear that what we are really asking when we wonder whether a certain state of pleasure is "good," is whether it is conducive to, or obstructive of, some deeper form of well-being. This question is perfectly coherent; it surely has an answer (whether or not we are in a position to answer it); and yet, it keeps notions of goodness anchored to the experience of sentient beings. 20
Defining goodness in this way does not resolve all questions of value; it merely directs our attention to what values actually are—the set of attitudes, choices, and behaviors that potentially affect our well-being, as well as that of other conscious minds. While this leaves the question of what constitutes well-being genuinely open, there is every reason to think that this question has a finite range of answers. Given that change in the well-being of conscious creatures is bound to be a product of natural laws, we must expect that this space of possibilities—the moral landscape—will increasingly be illuminated by science.
It is important to emphasize that a scientific account of human values—i.e., one that places them squarely within the web of influences that link states of the world and states of the human brain—is not the same as an evolutionary account. Most of what constitutes human well-being at this moment escapes any narrow Darwinian calculus. While the possibilities of human experience must be realized in the brains that evolution has built for us, our brains were not designed with a view to our ultimate fulfillment. Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons, or of doing much else that is now crucial to our happiness in this century.
As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed, 21 if conforming to the dictates of evolution were the foundation of subjective well-being, most men would discover no higher calling in life than to make daily contributions to their local sperm bank. After all, from the perspective of a mans genes, there could be nothing more fulfilling than spawning thousands of children without incurring any associated costs or responsibilities. But our minds do no
t merely conform to the logic of natural selection. In fact, anyone who wears eyeglasses or uses sunscreen has confessed his disinclination to live the life that his genes have made for him. While we have inherited a multitude of yearnings that probably helped our ancestors survive and reproduce in small bands of hunter-gatherers, much of our inner life is frankly incompatible with our finding happiness in today's world. The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one's long-term well-being. I hope it is clear that the view of "good" and "bad" I am advocating, while fully constrained by our current biology (as well as by its future possibilities), cannot be directly reduced to instinctual drives and evolutionary imperatives. As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution.
The Importance of Belief
The human brain is an engine of belief. Our minds continually consume, produce, and attempt to integrate ideas about ourselves and the world that purport to be true: Iran is developing nuclear weapons; the seasonal flu can be spread through casual contact; I actually look better with gray hair. What must we do to believe such statements? What, in other words, must a brain do to accept such propositions as true? This question marks the intersection of many fields: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, economics, political science, and even jurisprudence. 22
Belief also bridges the gap between facts and values. We form beliefs about facts: and belief in this sense constitutes most of what we know about the world—through science, history, journalism, etc. But we also form beliefs about values: judgments about morality, meaning, personal goals, and life's larger purpose. While they might differ in certain respects, beliefs in these two domains share very important features. Both types of belief make tacit claims about right and wrong: claims not merely about how we think and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe either proposition is also to believe that you have accepted it for legitimate reasons. It is, therefore, to believe that you are in compliance with certain norms—that you are sane, rational, not lying to yourself, not confused, not overly biased, etc. When we believe that something is factually true or morally good, we also believe that another person, similarly placed, should share our belief. This seems unlikely to change. In chapter 3, we will see that both the logical and neurological properties of belief further suggest that the divide between facts and values is illusory.
The Bad Life and the Good Life
For my argument about the moral landscape to hold, I think one need only grant two points: (1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences relate, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world. To make these premises less abstract, consider two generic lives that lie somewhere near the extremes on this continuum:
The Bad Life
You are a young widow who has lived her entire life in the midst of civil war. Today, your seven-year-old daughter was raped and dismembered before your eyes. Worse still, the perpetrator was your fourteen-year-old son, who was goaded to this evil at the point of a machete by a press gang of drug-addled soldiers. You are now running barefoot through the jungle with killers in pursuit. While this is the worst day of your life, it is not entirely out of character with the other days of your life: since the moment you were born, your world has been a theater of cruelty and violence. You have never learned to read, taken a hot shower, or traveled beyond the green hell of the jungle. Even the luckiest people you have known have experienced little more than an occasional respite from chronic hunger, fear, apathy, and confusion. Unfortunately, you've been very unlucky, even by these bleak standards. Your life has been one long emergency, and now it is nearly over.
The Good Life
You are married to the most loving, intelligent, and charismatic person you have ever met. Both of you have careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding. For decades, your wealth and social connections have allowed you to devote yourself to activities that bring you immense personal satisfaction. One of your greatest sources of happiness has been to find creative ways to help people who have not had your good fortune in life. In fact, you have just won a billion-dollar grant to benefit children in the developing world. If asked, you would say that you could not imagine how your time on earth could be better spent. Due to a combination of good genes and optimal circumstances, you and your closest friends and family will live very long, healthy lives, untouched by crime, sudden bereavements, and other misfortunes.
The examples I have picked, while generic, are nonetheless real—in that they represent lives that some human beings are likely to be leading at this moment. While there are surely ways in which this spectrum of suffering and happiness might be extended, I think these cases indicate the general range of experience that is accessible, in principle, to most of us. I also think it is indisputable that most of what we do with our lives is predicated on there being nothing more important, at least for ourselves and for those closest to us, than the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life.
Let me simply concede that if you don't see a distinction between these two lives that is worth valuing (premise 1 above), there may be nothing I can say that will attract you to my view of the moral landscape. Likewise, if you admit that these lives are different, and that one is surely better than the other, but you believe these differences have no lawful relationship to human behavior, societal conditions, or states of the brain (premise 2), then you will also fail to see the point of my argument. While I don't see how either premise 1 or 2 can be reasonably doubted, my experience discussing these issues suggests that I should address such skepticism, however far-fetched it may seem.
There are actually people who claim to be unimpressed by the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life. I have even met people who will go so far as to deny that any difference exists. While they will acknowledge that we habitually speak and act as if there were a continuum of experience that can be described by words like "misery," "terror," "agony," "madness," etc., on one end and "well-being," "happiness," "peace," "bliss," etc., on the other, when the conversation turns to philosophical and scientific matters, such people will say learned things like, "but, of course, that is just how we play our particular language game. It doesn't mean there is a difference in reality." One hopes that these people take life's difficulties in stride. They also use words like "love" and "happiness," from time to time, but we should wonder what these terms could signify that does not entail a preference for the Good Life over the Bad Life. Anyone who claims to see no difference between these two states of being (and their concomitant worlds), should be just as likely to consign himself and those he "loves" to one or the other at random and call the result "happiness."
Ask yourself, if the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life doesn't matter to a person, what could possibly matter to him? Is it conceivable that something might matter more than this difference, expressed on the widest possible scale? What would we think of a person who said, "Well, I could have delivered all seven billion of us into the Good Life, but I had other priorities." Would it be possible to have other priorities? Wouldn't any real priority be best served amid the freedom and opportunity afforded by the Good Life? Even if you happen to be a masochist who fancies an occasional taunting with a machete, wouldn't this desire be best satisfied in the context of the Good Life?
Imagine someone who spends all his energy trying to move as many people as possible toward the Bad Life, while another person is equally committed to undoing this damage and moving people in the opposite direction: Is it conceivable tha
t you or anyone you know could overlook the differences between these two projects? Is there any possibility of confusing them or their underlying motivations? And won't there necessarily be objective conditions for these differences? If, for instance, one's goal were to place a whole population securely in the Good Life, wouldn't there be more and less effective ways of doing this? How would forcing boys to rape and murder their female relatives fit into the picture?
I do not mean to belabor the point, but the point is crucial—and there is a pervasive assumption among educated people that either such differences don't exist, or that they are too variable, complex, or culturally idiosyncratic to admit of general value judgments. However, the moment one grants there is a difference between the Bad Life and the
Good Life that lawfully relates to states of the human brain, to human behavior, and to states of the world, one has admitted that there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality. To make sure this point is nailed down, permit me to consider a few more objections:
What if, seen in some larger context, the Bad Life is actually better than the Good Life—e.g., what if all those child soldiers will be happier in some afterlife, because they have been purified of sin or have learned to call God by the right name, while the people in the Good Life will get tortured in some physical hell for eternity?
If the universe is really organized this way, much of what I believe will stand corrected on the Day of Judgment. However, my basic claim about the connection between facts and values would remain unchallenged. The rewards and punishments of an afterlife would simply alter the temporal characteristics of the moral landscape. If the Bad Life is actually better over the long run than the Good Life—because it wins you endless happiness, while the Good Life represents a mere dollop of pleasure presaging an eternity of suffering—then the Bad Life would surely be better than the Good Life. If this were the way the universe worked, we would be morally obligated to engineer an appropriately pious Bad Life for as many people as possible. Under such a scheme, there would still be right and wrong answers to questions of morality, and these would still be assessed according to the experience of conscious beings. The only thing left to be decided is how reasonable it is to worry that the universe might be structured in so bizarre a way. It is not reasonable at all, I think—but that is a different discussion.