The End of Christianity (48 page)

THE MORAL WORRY
(OR “CAVEMAN SAY SCIENCE SCARY!”)

Since we will only ever do what we most want to do, because that is by definition
what it means
to choose to do one thing rather than another (a point I'll illustrate below), our focus should not be in trying to deny this fundamental egoism. Rather, we should focus on ensuring all moral agents are operating rationally and with sufficient information. Because when we do, scientific facts come to bear that establish quite strongly that self-interest does not entail selfishness, self-centeredness, hedonism, or indifference. To the contrary, rational self-interest entails quite the opposite, that the cultivation of the personally enduring virtues of compassion, integrity, and reasonableness (at the very minimum) is necessary for your own happiness and well-being. I won't demonstrate that here. I have elsewhere, and others are adding to the case.
²⁶

Here the point must only be made that
it doesn't matter
what the results of such scientific inquiry will be. It still remains an unarguable fact that there is only one system of imperatives we are sufficiently motivated to obey, and science can discover what that system is by ascertaining what we most want (which means not what we happen to want at any given moment, but what we really
would
want if we were rational and sufficiently informed—and the “informed” part of that equation entails empirical knowledge), and then ascertaining what behaviors most efficiently achieve that result.
²⁷
Science can do that in exactly the same way it discovers and verifies imperative propositions in medicine, engineering, or car maintenance. Though there are many methodological difficulties in successfully implementing such a research program, most of those difficulties have already been faced and overcome by psychologists, sociologists, and cognitive scientists (on whose results most philosophers are often shockingly uninformed), and the remainder will be just as surmountable. Even if not, the true moral facts would then only become undiscoverable; they would not thereby cease to be true. But scientists have already discovered enough about human desires and the outcomes of different behaviors to know that at least
approximations
of the true moral facts are empirically accessible even with current methods.
²⁸
And we aren't limited to current methods—science is nothing if not methodologically innovative.

Because the end result of such an inquiry will necessarily be the only system of imperatives that we will ever be sufficiently motivated to obey when rational and informed, it will be wholly invalid to argue against it that you don't like its results. You cannot decide a priori what is morally true, and then judge the results of an inquiry to be invalid simply because those results don't agree with your preconceived notion of what is moral. If they have unarguable, empirical facts supporting their every claim, it's simply irrational to persist in maintaining they are wrong. To the contrary, they will have thereby proved
you
are wrong. Thus fears of what the “true moral facts” may turn out to be are as irrational as fears of what the “true facts” may turn out to be on the origin of life or the universe or any other subject whose true results may contradict your cherished beliefs. And it's always irrational to reject empirically established facts and replace them with what you prefer to believe.

For example, claiming that by following this research program science might empirically prove that “slavery is moral” is not a valid objection either to the inquiry or its results. I doubt that will ever happen, just as I doubt we'll find a cheese shop on Pluto even though we've never been there to confirm this. Suppose it did happen, and science proved slavery is, after all, moral—how would that be any different from discovering that giving full political rights to women is moral, after a thousand years of being certain it was not? We cannot claim to omnisciently know all moral truths and thereby test a method of discovering the truth by whether it gets our predetermined results or not. That would be like rejecting physics because it might prove the earth is round, and we all know it must surely be flat—because otherwise there would be upside down people on the other side of it and that's just silly. Well, maybe upside down people is silly. But if it's true, it's true. We must conform our beliefs to what we discover, not reject all discoveries that fail to conform to our beliefs.

Even still, I cannot imagine any evidence we are likely to find that will prove slavery moral—just as I cannot imagine any evidence we are likely to find that will prove a cheese shop is currently doing business on Pluto. I can imagine what evidence we
could
find verifying that fact, but none we are
likely
to, which is why we aren't planning a mission to Pluto to see if there's a cheese shop there. Empirically proving slavery is moral is just as unlikely as finding a cheese shop on Pluto, and for all the same reasons. Even current scientific evidence renders it likely that any further inquiry will confirm that the kind of ignorance and cruelty of character that must be cultivated for a slave master to persist in his business is such as to elevate the risk factors for a galaxy of negative effects on the slave master's own differential contentment (and that not only from his own feelings and behavior but from all the consequences to himself of the social system he must then support to make slavery possible), whereas cultivating instead an informed and satisfying character of such compassion, reasonableness, and integrity as would make remaining a slave master personally repugnant will (in conjunction with reasonable compensatory behaviors) reduce those negative factors while substantially increasing opportunities for a galaxy of
positive
effects on the (now ex-) slave master's differential contentment.

Adding to any such comparison will be an informed realization of the relative uselessness of most of what keeping slaves is supposed to gain you or the unrivaled personal satisfaction that can derive from sacrificing or even dying for what you know is right.
²⁹
Game theory compounds the problem: a fully rational and informed slave master must agree it's factually true that his slaves ought to kill him. It's unlikely a rational person will want to live in a world in which he admits it's right and proper that he ought to be killed. That is, not a world in which people believe he ought to be killed, but in which the slave master himself fully agrees he ought to be killed. I suspect the resulting paranoia and cognitive dissonance alone would make his life unlivable.
³⁰

Even if you wish to insist none of this is true, you are
still
making an empirical claim to fact and thus cannot claim to know you are right without any scientific evidence in your support. Thus even denying such propositions entails an obligation to scientific inquiry. The objection that we can't test such propositions directly because it's unethical to experimentally enslave people is of no relevance to this point. Science tests propositions indirectly all the time. We don't have to drop an apple over every point on the earth's surface to know it will fall the same on all (or near enough as would ever concern us)—and psychological conclusions in testable conditions are often just as capable of extrapolation to untestable ones.
³¹
And even when this is genuinely impossible, it becomes merely an issue of the limitations on how much we might be able to know, not of what's nevertheless true.
³²
More to the point, whether such access to the necessary evidence is genuinely impossible is
still
an empirical question answerable by science.

In the final analysis, moral knowledge is not analytical but empirical. Even debates over how to define a person, for example, simply reduce to the question of why we should care about “persons” in whatever sense defined, which can only be answered empirically: we need to know all the consequences of “not caring about that” (and all the consequences of caring about it) before we can honestly say which consequences are better for us in the long run. The same will follow for any other debate over definitions in moral disputes. And if the objection instead is that “science hasn't conducted that inquiry yet,” our answer is that until we can engage the full apparatus of scientific methods and resources to answering it, we can rely on prescientific empirical observation and reasoning, accepting that its conclusions must necessarily be less reliable. Still, these conclusions would be far more reliable than philosophizing from the armchair, substituting assertions for actual observations or fallacious conclusions for valid. Either way, whether some such knowledge is accessible or not, or fully verified or not, it's still irrational to argue “there are some things we don't or can't know, therefore we should engage no inquiry to learn anything at all.” And certainly there is no reason to believe we can know
nothing
pertaining to whether slavery is a good idea. To the contrary, we know a great deal already as to why it is not.

A more realistic worry would be something like this: we might discover that a temporary enslavement of felony convicts is better for the convicts (if true, we could verify that, in actual fact, it makes them better, happier people in the long run) and for society (we could verify that, in actual fact, it improves productivity and reduces crime). Unknown to many is the fact that the US Constitution, still to this day, explicitly legalizes slavery for convicted criminals (Amendment 13, Section 1). But if we empirically discover nothing bad and everything good results from such slavery, what objection to it would we then have? If we have all the facts on our side, opponents of penal slavery would be like Creationists in a biology debate: kicking against the goad of demonstrated facts. I suspect we would only ever discover (if at all) that only very limited and well-regulated penal slavery is moral—but that conclusion won't be as shocking. And at any rate, we can't know what that conclusion will be if we refuse even to examine the facts that determine it.

We should stop worrying about the possibility that science will prove some of our cherished beliefs wrong. We should worry instead that we might be wrong. If we want our moral beliefs to be correct, we have to accept what is verified to be correct. Hence, to object that our present moral beliefs might be refuted is not a rational reason to oppose the inquiry. To the contrary, it's exactly the reason we should conduct that inquiry.

THAT THERE ARE MORAL FACTS TO DISCOVER

I have proved that imperative facts are empirically discoverable by science (and are simply facts of nature like anything else, requiring no religious hypothesis), and I have proved that the only possible moral facts that can have any relevant claim to being true must be of the same kind as all other imperative facts and thus must also be empirically discoverable by science. I have also cited several philosophers agreeing with me on both points, so I am not alone. The question only remains:
Are
there such moral facts?

I have defined true moral facts as imperative propositions that we ought
in actual fact
obey over all other imperatives, and so far as anyone has been able to prove, this means a moral imperative is a hypothetical imperative that supersedes all other imperatives. In other words, “true moral facts” are the things we ought to do
above all else
, such that if we confront two conflicting imperatives, we ought to fulfill the moral imperative instead of any other.
³³
Other philosophers might explicitly or implicitly define “moral facts” or “morals” or “morality” in any other way, but insofar as they do, they are no longer talking about what we
as a matter of actual fact
ought most to do. They might
think
they are, but by definition they cannot be, as whatever they are then discussing by definition won't be what we
as a matter of actual fact
ought most to do—unless, of course, it is, in which case they are defining morality exactly as I am here (whatever they may think they are doing instead). Thus it is either the one or the other. And since we only care about what we
as a matter of actual fact
ought most to do (and not other things that carry no sufficient motivating reason for us to do them instead), that is the only definition of morality that has any relevance to our actual conduct.

This can be verified in practice. If any group or individual
S
identifies
x
as moral, but it's then demonstrated that
S
ought to do
y
instead of
x
, then we will observe the following:
S
will either conclude that indeed
x
was not actually moral after all, but that
y
is moral instead, thereby arguing that
y
is what
S
ought most to do; or
S
will deny that
S
ought to do
y
instead of
x
by arguing that they ought to do
x
instead of
y
, thereby arguing that
x
is what
S
ought most to do. Either response simply confirms their implicit acceptance of my definition of moral facts. And even if
S
rejects that definition, they cannot avoid the facts by renaming them. If
x
really is what they ought most to do, calling
y
“moral” still does not give
S
any sufficiently motivating reason to do
y
instead of
x
(other than, of course, a reason that is either irrational or uninformed, and thus erroneous).

Every human being by definition always wants something more than anything else. Even if what they most want is several things equally, those things collectively constitute what they want more than anything else. And when rational and sufficiently informed, what they want most will in fact be what they ought to want most:

1. If you take up wanting
B
most, then
x
will happen; otherwise, ~
x
will happen.

2. When rational and sufficiently informed, you will want
x
more than ~
x