The Value Dilemma
5 min read by Dani 1 June 2021
What should we value in life? This is the question that worries a person of reason the most. While objective questions seem to have objective answers, questions of value do not seem to obey this certainty.
For objective questions consensus can be reached, for example, by testing hypotheses, acquiring data, and using logic. On the other hand, we can’t seem to be able to test moral claims scientifically or logically. There is no physical law that states "You shouldn't kill", and if we dig inside a person's body or brain we won't find any evidence of human rights there. As much as we want to rationalize our beliefs about right and wrong, through the lens of science and reason they seem like empty statements. Or at least this is how it looks like at first sight.
In the moral landscape, Sam Harris claims that consensus can be reached on value questions, too. His philosophy is based on utilitarianism, an ethical philosophy that is grounded on the idea of maximising the well-being of all conscious beings. However, he emphasises that human well-being can take up many forms, not only the narrow view of happiness, so as to allow multiple ways of living in this world and still be at a peak on the so called “moral landscape”( Science can answer moral questions | Sam Harris.)
The struggle for the spirit of morality in the western tradition can be split in two categories.
On the one hand, questions of right and wrong tend to be dismissed by many western academics as objective impossibilities. Western academia is a slave to moral relativism following Darwin's "Origin of Species" and the revolutionary consequences derived from his theory of evolution. Homo sapiens are just another animal molded by natural selection. Our moral intuitions have evolved so as to maximize our likelihood of survival and there is nothing free about our judgements of right and wrong. There is no room for an objective morality in this post-evolutionary world. There are only animals pushed around by their intuitions and emotions shaped by millions of years of trial and error.
On the other side of the debate we have religious groups and individuals, who claim that their moral code, encompassed in their ancient texts and traditions, holds the ultimate objective moral truths. They follow those codes half-blindly without inquiring deeper as to their legitimacy. In the religious context, moral progress is impossible because everything there is to know has already been laid out by the word of God and if your moral intuitions are different then you should ignore and suppress them.
Historically, this can be seen in the endorsement of slavery in the Bible (e.g. Ephesians 6:5) and homosexuality being seen as sinful in the court of law. The brutality and extremism of religious dogmas is strongly exemplified in the case of Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science. In 1952, upon the British government learning that he was gay, he was convicted of gross indecency. This led him to be forced by the government to take hormones as treatment and to be stripped away from his security clearance. Two years later he committed suicide.
None of these views offer a satisfactory answer to the questions of values. Perhaps there is a third alternative?
This sounds like the initiation of a new project. A project that has been on my mind for the last couple of years. Since David Hume articulated the "is–ought problem" in the 18th century, we don't seem to have made much progress in reasoning out our moral judgements. This so called "Hume guillotine" has been a tremendous weight upon moral philosophers. And the question remains to this day: Can we use reason and empirical evidence alone to make judgements about what's right and what's wrong?