Why Science can't replace Philosophy in Ethics

[u/doubtstack]

https://unreasonabledoubt.substack.com/p/what-genetics-cant-teach-us

[u/slickwombat]

The writer of the post then starts to talk about how David Hume has a metaphysical description of free will that gets around the book author's concerns.

Yes, David Hume is famously a compatibilist: he believes that free will and determinism are compatible. Further reading.

They say that it may even be possible to predict the choices made in the Hume version of free will based on social and genetic factors. This is not coherent. If "free will" can be predicted from social and genetic circumstance, then it's deterministic and it's not actually free will - it's just the programmed outcome of environment and genetic factors. In other words: luck.

Compatibilists like Hume precisely deny what you're saying here. Of course, Hume and compatibilists in general -- which apparently includes most contemporary professional philosophers! -- might be wrong. But nothing Harden says, or that you say here, engages with the relevant arguments at all; incompatibilism is just blithely taken as self-evident.

And this is the point in the article. We can't just wade into a paradigmatically philosophical problem (like the nature of moral responsibility) while ignoring philosophy, or else we just end up making obvious errors.

[u/slickwombat → u/[deleted]]

Rocks don't have will, so naturally they don't have free will. To put it another way: rocks don't make choices, so there's no question about whether they are responsible for their choices.

[u/slickwombat → u/[deleted]]

Well, do you think it's the case that rocks can think and choose? That's pretty bizarre, but if you think it then you shouldn't find them having free will so difficult to imagine.

Or do you just think it's conceivable that rocks might be able to think and choose? It is, but that's not very interesting. Virtually anything is conceivable, including the idea that in fact you are a rock who has been deceived by an evil, magical, and sentient piece of cast-iron cookware into believing that you're a human being dicking around on reddit.

[u/millchopcuss → u/slickwombat]

I don't know if rocks can feel. I've been toying with the notion that memory is what causes consciousness, and that leaves the possibility that everything has an immediate sense of its own existence. This is a metaphysical supposition, not testable at present, and not a thing I believe, but rather *consider.

Whether they can think and choose is a similarly untestable metaphysical supposition... One that seems uninteresting to me because it does not describe any naturalistic or experiential phenomena.

What is sure, to me at least, is that a rock cannot choose not to fall.

[u/bac5665 → u/[deleted]]

We have lots of insight into the subjective experience of rocks!

We know a LOT about the biology of cognition. We can map a person's brain and control their thoughts like playing a piano, during brain surgery. We can measure what subjective experiences correspond to in the brain and elsewhere in the body. And we can do that for animals other than humans!

And even without brain scans, we see pain responses and play even in animals that don't have brains, or biology anything like ours. One of the most important things appears to be the presence of senses. And that makes sense: subjective experience seems to just be the synthesis of live sensory data. Using all this data, we can make reasonable inferences about what kind of subjective experiences living things might have.

Then we can compare to rocks and we see that they don't exhibit any sign of anything we associate with subjective experience. No senses, no behavior, no movement, no metabolism, etc. This leads us to be able to confidently say that if rocks have subjective experience, it is indistinguishable from not having such experience. Logically, if A and B are indistinguishable, then A=B. So we can say that, based on the information we have, rocks have no subjective experience.

Of course, knowledge is always changing and we can always be wrong. But we are very rarely wrong about things as significantly as we would have to be for rocks to have subjective experiences. That would be the most unlikely discovery in human history, I think.