Question Why can’t science tell us what morality ‘is’? In the trivial sense, science can certainly catalog the diversity, commonalities, and contradictions of cultural moral standards and moral behaviors. But science is very good at teasing out underlying principles. What forbids determining such principles (if any exist) using the normal methods of science? For instance, we might propose an observation like “Almost all moral behaviors are strategies for increasing, on average, the synergistic benefits of cooperation and are unselfish at least in the short term” as an hypothesis about what moral behaviors ‘are’. Then we could evaluate its provisional ‘truth’ as a matter of science by how well this hypothesis meets criteria for 1) explanatory power for the diversity, commonalities, and contradictions of moral standards, 2) explanatory power for puzzles about moral behavior, 3) predictive power for moral intuitions, 4) universality, 5) no contradictions with known facts, and so forth. Of course, provisional ‘truth’ as a matter of science provides no source of justificatory force (‘oughts’ or ‘bindingness’) for an individual to accept the burdens of a definition of morality when the individual expects that to be against their best interest. But look at the special case of this hypothesis. It defines moral behaviors as, on average, producing benefits (for the individual as well as the group). What if for this sort of hypothesis, it would be normally a rational choice (that is expected to best meet needs and desires) if individuals ACCEPTED the burdens of acting morally even when based on their confused perceptions and poor prediction capability, they expected, in the moment, that doing so would be against their best interest? That is, they might rationally choose the moral wisdom of the ages as a basis for acting rather than their confused perceptions of the moment. I’d love for moral philosophy to tell us conclusively what moral behavior ‘ought’ to be. But in the meantime, couldn’t it be useful to see what science tells us the underlying principles of moral behavior ‘are’?

Accepted:
April 29, 2010

Comments

I think science can probably tell us lots of things about how people reason morally, that is, how they think about what they ought to do. And it might well be interesting to look at cross-cultural differences, and perhaps even more interesting to look for cross-cultural similarities, that is, "moral universals", in the sense of moral principles, or forms of reasoning, that are in some sense universal. Psychologists and philosophers have been doing just this in recent years.

But it seems important to recognize the contrast you cite at the end of your question: No such investigation could possibly tell us what moral behavior ought to be, that is, tell us what one actually ought to do. Suppose there turn out to be certain "moral universals". It would be a coherent position that these are just wrong, that is, that, by reasoning in accord with them, one will not typically arrive at the thing one ought to do. One cannot just assume otherwise. That is not to say that it would not be interesting, even on this view, to know about these "moral universals". It would mean we would have to work especially hard to combat them!

That said, I'm bothered by the phrase "moral behavior", which is very different from "moral reasoning", which is what I've just been discussing. Consider this claim, which you cited as a provisional observation: "Almost all moral behaviors are strategies for increasing, on average, the synergistic benefits of cooperation and areunselfish at least in the short term." How is the scientist supposed to know which the moral behaviors are? I take it that a "moral behavior" here is supposed to be one that is morally appropriate: right, or good, or whatever. Whether a particular act is moral in that sense isn't the sort of thing one can in any plausible sense observe, nor even design an instrument to measure. Presumably, then, the scientist will have to judge which behaviors are "moral" using his or her own sense of morality. But maybe she's just wrong. Note that this problem is the one that is supposed to be avoided by founding scientific investigation on observations that are, at least to some significant extent, "theory neutral": scientists are at least supposed, at least ideally, to be able to agree on the data, even if they disagree about how the data are to be interpreted. The problem is that there seem to be no data for a scientific theory of "moral behavior".

So, science can (and, as I said, currently does) investigate what different societies believe about moral standards, and investigate how different people think about what one ought to do. But I doubt science can, even in principle, investigate what you are calling "moral behavior", that is, investigate moral standards themselves.