Carrier's objection 2 is this:
(Objection 2) I disagree that science “has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.” Science factually demonstrates the truth of “ought” statements all the time (in medicine, surgery, engineering, car repair, what have you). Thus it is not a fallacy to derive an ought from an is. It’s a fallacy to think you can’t derive an ought from an is–or to think you can get an ought any other way. Obviously if we can derive an ought from an is in every other sphere of human life, we can do it in morality. And several scientists are doing exactly that. More and more we are accumulating evidence that living by the Golden Rule is essential to our happiness. Once we realize that “is” we derive the consequent “ought”: if we want to be the happiest we can be in the circumstances we are actually in, we ought to live by the Golden Rule. It could have been otherwise, had we evolved differently. But if we want to discover the best way to live, we have to attend to the way things actually are. If we can apply science to progress in the best way to cure disease, we can apply science to progress in the best way to live. And we ought. Because there is nothing we all want more than to know the best way to live.
Let's to examine Carrier's objection in parts:
1-He claims that Science factually demonstrates the truth of “ought” statements all the time (in medicine, surgery, engineering, car repair, what have you).
This is simply false and show Carrier's fundamental misunderstanding both of science and ethics.
First, "ought" statements are prescriptive or normative, not descriptive. They don't factually describe any state of affairs, but pose a prescription or command of what must be. For example, if I say "You ought to love your parents", that statement doesn't refers to an actual empirically verifiable state of affairs, but a command about how you should be to feel about your parents. The pretentions of validity of that normative statement holds even if you, factually, don't love your parents. (This is why ought statements are not empirically falsifiable).
For this reason, Richard Dawkins has argued: "Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical. That is a matter for individuals and for society" (A Devil’s Chaplain, p.34).
And in this interview, Dawkins expands the idea: "Now, if you then ask me where I get my 'ought' statements from, that's a more difficult question. If I say something is wrong, like killing people, I don't find that nearly such a defensible statement as 'I am a distant cousin of an orangutan"
The reasons why Dawkins claims that is 1)He's a metaphysical naturalist; 2)Unlike Carrier, Dawkins is logically consistent about the ethical implications of naturalism and atheism; and 3)Unlike Carrier, Dawkins has a good command and understanding of natural science, and therefore he realizes that ought statements are not descriptive and thereby are not empirically verifiable (therefore, empirical science has not methods to deal with them)
Even though Carrier is not a philosopher, the above ideas about ought statement not being empirical are so ridiculously obvious that I'm sure that Carrier, who's a historian, understands it.
So we have to be more charitable in the interpretation of Carrier, and try to make sense of his point and interpret his objection in its strongest and charitable formulation.
2-Carrier's examples give us a clue about what he's in mind. He mentions, as examples, medicine, surgery, engineering and car repair. Note that all the examples mentioned by Carrier refers to practical disciplines or technologies, not to descriptive or basic sciences (medicine has a descriptive side, when it researches the causes and description of diseases and their symptoms; and a technological or practical side, when prescribe certain treatments to attain the goal of healing).
Technologies and practical discplines have in common the use of certain MEANS to reach or attain certain ENDS. The ends themselves are chosen by individuals, but the relation means-ends is objective. These practical disciplines are essentially INSTRUMENTAL, because they use certain instruments to reach certain practical ends.
Their instrumental purpose is not to describe or explain the world, but to produce certain effects or ends chosen by human beings.
For example, suppose that you want to read your e-mail. This is the END. But what's the mean to attain that end? Well, you need an internet connection and a password.
Based on these facts, we can formulate an "ought statement": if want to read your e-mail (end), you ought to have internet and type your password (means).
So, apparently, you can derive "ought" statements from "facts". This is what Carrier has in mind when he mentions the above examples:
-Medicine (e.g. if you want to cure your disease, you ought to use the treatment X)
-Surgery (e.g. If you want to extirpate the tumour and avoid its extension, you ought to cut right here in this way)
-Engineering (e.g. If you want to run your machine, you ought to put the parts in this way and not in that way, etc.)
-Car repair (e.g. if you want to repair your car, you ought to fix this part, etc.)
And this is where Carrier's argument breaks.
The VALUE of ends themselves is what is at stake.
Science tell us that if you jump from the top of a building, you'll die. What science cannot tell us is whether suicide is good or bad, because it's a ethical and moral question, not an empirical one.
Knowing that A is the best mean to reach B doesn't tell us anything about the value of B.
3- Based on the above considerations, we're in position to understand the faulty reasoning of Carrier.
Carrier's basic fallacy is to suppose that the "ought statements" (in the normative, not purely instrumental sense) derive from facts. He conflates a purely conditional imperative or technical-pragmatic rules (e.g. if you want to get X, you ought to do Y) with categorical commands typical of ethical thinking (e.g. torturing children for fun is absolutely, inconditionally, necessarily and always WRONG and BAD)
He says: Thus it is not a fallacy to derive an ought from an is. It’s a fallacy to think you can’t derive an ought from an is–or to think you can get an ought any other way
Since Hume, any philosopher or student of philosophy would know that, from a strictly logical point of view, it's impossible to deduce prescriptive statement from descriptive ones. In his book A Treatise on Human Nature, Hume famously argued: "In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it" (Emphasis in blue added)
Philosopher Kennett Merrill, in his Dictionary of Hume's philosophy, explains Hume's idea: This “inconceivable deduction” is often described as the impossibility of inferring a normative (e.g., a moral or ethical) conclusion from wholly factual premises. It is not necessary that the words is and ought or their negatives literally occur in the argument.
Thus, the following argument illustrates the sort of inference that Hume is taken to proscribe: “Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of persons who had committed no serious crime or no crime at all, and certainly no capital crime. Further, Stalin knew that these people were innocent. Therefore, Stalin was an evil man.” First, a point about terminology. When Hume speaks of a deduction, he means any sort of ratiocinative inference, whether it be deductive (in the contemporary sense of logically necessary) or inductive (= probabilistic).
It is a mistake to interpret Hume as restricting what he calls deduction to arguments whose conclusions follow (or are claimed to follow) necessarily from their premises by strict entailment. He clearly means to include arguments based on causal reasoning, all of which fall short of demonstration. He first argues at some length that moral distinctions do not consist in relations that are “the objects of science” (or, alternatively, “can be the objects of knowledge and certainty”); namely, resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in quantity or number (THN, 70 and 468; 1.3.1.2 and 3.1.1.26). He goes on to “the second part of [his] argument” (THN, 468; 3.1.1.26; italics are in Hume’s text), which is to show that morality does not consist in any matter of fact that can be discovered by the understanding (causal reason, in this case). Taken together, the two parts of Hume’s argument purport to prove that morality is not an object of reason, either demonstrative reason or (probabilistic) causal reason.
Since reason “exerts itself” in only the two ways just mentioned—i.e., from demonstration or probability; from the abstract relations of our IS/OUGHT • 155 ideas or the relations of objects revealed in experience—it follows that moral distinctions are not based on rational inference at all". (Dictionary of Hume's Philosophy, pp.155-156)
This impossibility of logically (deductively or inductively) inferring ought statements from factual statements have been known in philosophical circles, and for good reasons, as Hume's Guillotine. (Carrier's argument is straightforwardly an easy prey of Hume's Guillotine.)
As we have seen, Carrier conflates the purely instrumental and causal idea of means-to-ends connection, with the ethical problem of VALUE (which is an intrinsically normative concept) and normative statements (which don't describe any actual state of affairs in the external world and hence are not empirically testable).
4-After being cut by Hume's Guillotine, the head-less Carrier says "And several scientists are doing exactly that. More and more we are accumulating evidence that living by the Golden Rule is essential to our happiness."
But that argument assumes that happiness is the actual valuable end of human beings.
However, happiness is a subjective feeling, and what causes happiness to you not necessarily causes happiness to me.
A same fact could be a cause of happiness to a person and unhappiness to another.
For example, if the AWARE study on NDEs produces a positive result, spiritual persons will be very happy because science has validated their beliefs, and they'll share this great news with family members and friends. Their hopes of an afterlife will be ratified.
However, the same fact will cause a very strong and painful cognitive dissonance in atheistic materialists, metaphysical naturalists, pseudo-skeptics and all the members of infidels.org and the secular web (Carrier included). They'll see their worldview destroyed (again) by the evidence, and the predictable negative emotions (including intense unhappiness) will cause that they begin a PR campaign on the internet to discredit the research, to cast doubts on the researchers, to undermine the results, etc. (here you can include all the well-known methods used by pseudo-skeptics to suppress evidence against their worldview and to keep alive the self-delusion that they're rational and free-thinkers.)
The point is that assuming happiness is the only (or most important) criterion of value is highly debatable and questionable.
5-Carrier's simplistic thinking is evidenced by this comment: "Once we realize that “is” we derive the consequent “ought”: if we want to be the happiest we can be in the circumstances we are actually in, we ought to live by the Golden Rule"
And what if we disagree with that "is"? What if, contrary to Carrier's simplistic ideas, we agree with Rosemberg? What's the "ought" derived of the acceptation of Rosemberg's argumentation? What if the "is" that we happen to agree is that an afterlife exist?
Carrier assumes that his ideas are philosophically evident and unproblematic.
6-Carrier at least recognize the ontological subjectivity and relativity of morality in a naturalistic worldview: "It could have been otherwise, had we evolved differently."
In other words, the moral system of human is relative to the evolution of humans; therefore, if we had evolved differently, perhaps we would have a different morality. It means that morality doesn't refer to something external and objective to human beigns, but to something dependent on human beings and thereby ontologically dependent on them.
However, Carrier doesn't draw all the logical consequences and implications of such assumption. This is evidence that Carrier is not a logically coherent metaphysical naturalist.
Consistent metaphysical naturalists like Dawkins or Rosemberg realize that naturalism implies moral subjetivism and relativism. As has powerfully argued consistent naturalist Keith Augustine: "I think there is a certain degree of plausibility among atheists in the view that without some kind of transcendental intelligence in the universe, there can be no objective moral laws.
Moral laws are maxims which tell sentient beings that certain actions are to be deemed moral or immoral. But how could such laws exist in the absence of any mind or sentience in the universe at all? Are moral laws objective in the way that laws of nature are? They do not seem to be, for few would argue that "murder is wrong" existed in some Platonic realm of ideas when galaxies were forming over ten billion years ago and there was no sign life or consciousness anywhere in the universe. The use of the word "law" implies an objective existence of unchanging moral maxims independently of sentience. Yet it appears that there can be nothing objective about so-called "moral laws", because it seems absurd on its face to say that maxims which tell sentient beings that certain actions of sentient beings are moral or immoral could exist in the absence of sentience.
I realise this is very weak, and I've said I don't feel equipped to produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce arguments of a cosmological and biological kind. But I still think it's a separate issue from beliefs in cosmic truths."
Dawkins, realizing that science cannot deal with ethics, and assuming metaphysical naturalism to be true, draws the obvious conclusion: morality is relative and subjective, it's a matter of taste of society and individuals.
Consistent with Dawkins and Keith Augustine, naturalist Rosemberg argues: "There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem.
The only way all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population. If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence. Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us. It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree. That way lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism). The other alternative—that our moral core was selected for because it was true, correct or right–is an equally far fetched idea. And in part for the same reasons. The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology. Since natural selection has no foresight, we have no idea whether the moral core we now endorse will hold up, be selected for, over the long-term future of our species, if any."(emphasis in blue added)
Instead of begging the question, Carrier would have to refute Dawkins, Rosemberg and Keith's powerful naturalism-consistent arguments before he can defend his own moral speculations as the best ones.
And he can't, because metaphysical naturalism has exactly and demostrably the implications that Dawkins, Keith and Rosemberg (and many other naturalists) have explained.
I'll address Carrier's other objections in another posts.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Part 1 of this series here.
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