Ethics, beliefs and knowledge II

Doc, reading your last comment, I feel the need to ask you for some clarifications about your position on ethics. In a comment, some time ago, you said :

(A) Ethics is also a technology for utility. [...] Given a set of goals, we can synthetically construct a system of ethics from our scientific knowledge of human behavior.

Then, more recently :

(B) We can study what laws will make society stable, prosperous, and accomodating to individual pleasure and self-actualization. We can call this "ethics" if we want...

But, in your latest comment, your position seems slightly different :

(C) You talk about two alternatives: [(1)] working from the current status quo, and [(2)]using a "scientific" approach to reinvent ethics from scratch. [...] I don't see approach (2) as being the "scientific" one. It is unrealistic and idealistic...

Also, in the comment from which (A) came, you said :

(D) Ethics are not absolute, and cannot be derived purely from theory.

I think these remarks are very interesting because they faithfully represent a fairly widespread view of ethics, with recognizable roots in LP and other forms of scientism. (A) and (B) represent the original, full fledged, scientistic view of ethics. In the mid XIXth century, thinkers like Marx, already had similar views. I think we can summarize it as the pre-WWII scientistic take on ethics. Indeed, Nazism, Communism and other recent nasty discoveries seem to have forced people to be more sober and prudent. Hence (C) and (D), which are, nowadays, the only formulation mainstream thinkers allow themselves in public.

Now, correct me if I am mistaken, but it seems to me that (A) and (C) are contradictory, since to 'synthetically construct a system of ethics' looks pretty close to 'reinvent ethics from scratch'. My interpretation of this contradiction (if this is indeed one) is that, in your case, (A) and (B) remain what you think at heart, even when you say (C) or (D). An additional indication of this can probably be found in the fact that, just before (C), you say : "Even if we decided to radically overhaul ethics...". So being 'radical' is not something you completely rule out, or do you ?

In any case, even if full blown tabula-rasa is indeed ruled out, as it is, most of the time, nowadays, I think using a scientistic approach to ethics is harmful nonetheless, even if you take the status quo as a starting point and take a gradualist stand. This takes us back to the title of this post. The scientist strand in our culture rests on making a strong distinction between knowledge and beliefs. I am going to try to expose first why this is detrimental to ethics and seconds why I think it is just not helpful to make such a distinction on more general grounds.

Within what I choose to call the 'scientistic tradition' (others would call it otherwise), knowledge is presented as something you can rely on because it has been empirically verified. Scientific knowledge is thought of as the prototype and, sometimes, as the only form of knowledge. By contrast, beliefs are what is not knowledge and hence, the word takes on an automatic negative connotation : mere beliefs, or worse. What consequences does this has in practical situations ? When presented with an assertorical statement, a person under the influence of this view will ask himself : 'Is this a belief or a piece of knowledge ?', and then 'how can I know ? I must check'. In a very natural way, the next step will be that he will start to verify, or, at least attempt to do so. He will behave like a scientist faced with a new theory. Now we may ask a question : is what is obviously good in the lab also good in other situations ? I believe there is no reasons to believe so and that it is the root of the scientistic mistake : to make the implicit assumption that what has proved sucessful in science can be equally profitable in all areas of human life.

Why is this detrimental to ethics ? Ethics is a set of behaviour rules. In practice, they often take the form of 'tit for tat' statements like 'if you follow the dress code, people will be nice to you' or 'if you report a gang member to the police, your whole family will be murdered'. All these rules rely on an anticipation of the future behaviour of others. In the absence of trust, this anticipation cannot work. Indeed, one of the main use of the word 'trust', in our language, is to describe just such anticipations. But as we have already amply shown, verification is detrimental to trust. The ability to verify is good for trust, provided it is kept unused most of the time. Frequent actual verifications have the opposite effect. Ergo, excessifve verification is detrimental to Ethics.

So, where are we now ? We have shown sucessively that :

1. To oppose knowledge and beliefs prompts people to verify the assertorical statements they are presented with.
2. Frequent verification of statements kills trust.
3. Trust is necessary for behaviour rules (Ethics) to function.

Hence, I believe we have shown that opposing beliefs and knowledge is bad for ethics. Doing it a lot (statements (A) and (B) above) is very bad. Doing it a little (gradualist, post WWII, approach) is less bad, but bad nontheless. It cannot overthrow civilization as a whole but it can still produce the likes of the Unabomber.

Now, let us turn to the second argument announced above : what can we think, in general, about the idea of separating knowledge from beliefs ? First, as you pointed out, Doc, there is a powerful urge in us to go for knowledge because we crave for security (survival, avoidance of pain, etc.). Knowledge has an air of certainity that seems to fill that need. Secondly, When we enquire about how to define knowledge, the answer that comes back most of the time is 'justified true belief'. There seem to be a more or less complete consensus among analytic philosophers about this definition. Very well, but what dose true means in the above statement ? One can try to appeal to logic but (you know my opinion about this) this is open to criticism. Another way, that you have tried yourself, is to appeal to the notion of 'complete' statement. Your own theory of 'completable' statements is basically that : it accepts as valid those statements that can be transform into a complete one in a finte number of steps. As I discovered a few days ago, other have already tried that route :

the final problem is to conceive a complete fact...

This is a citation of A.N. Whitehead I found in an article of Charles Hartshorne, one of the leading thinkers of process theology and a vocal advocate of metaphysics. The aim of this citation is to describe the goal Whitehead set himself, in his later (post Russelian) philosophical period, and in the pursuit of which he designed his system of events and process. This system is undeniably metaphysical both in aim and in methods and, indeed, Hartshorn commands Whitehead as 'the greatest metaphysican since Leibnitz'. Now, I do not mean to say it is bad to do metaphysics, though I must say I am none too convinced by Whitehead's system. What this just shows, in my view, is that trying to define 'complete' facts, or statements, is a metaphysical pursuit.

So we were led from knowledge to true statements, then to 'complete' statements (through your definition of 'completable'), which happen to be metaphysical objects.

Scientism starts by separating knowledge from belief and treat metaphysics as mere beliefs that should be abandoned for knowledge (Axiologist's Marx quotation). Then we discover that the scientists core pursuit is itself metaphysical in nature ! If you go back to the first point above, you even realize that it is a metaphysical pursuit we want to believe in because it helps us feel secure. In other words, it is the opium of the people.

Faced with this, we can choose to describe all of it as a 'difficulty', to be explained away, or we may choose to realize that the very notion we have of knowledge is defective : it is a source of problems and of no real benefits. The solution I propose is to drop the word 'true' from 'justified true beliefs'. My view is that the only things we have are beliefs, some of which are more justified than others. Scientific theories are extermely well justified beliefs and have great value as such. But ethics supporting beliefs are also valuable as we just cannot live together without them. The scientific method is inappropriate for justifying such beliefs for the reasons we have said. Metaphysical beliefs are unavoidable because imagining metaphysical entities is the only way we have to formulate the justification of ethical rules. The tricky bit is to choose the right kind of metaphysics. As I said, my view is that the scientistic picture of knowlege is bad metaphysics (dishonest metaphysics, for that matter) and, thus, should be rejected.

This does not mean that I find no use of the word 'knowledge' legitimate. For example, I have no objection to 'I know this play by heart' or 'I know the proof of the theorem X'. In these cases, what is known are pieces of purely formal content, not statements about the world. While you stay within the bounds of the a-priori, it is perfectly reasonable to say that one knows or does not know something. However, there are also, in everyday usage, statements like 'I know so-and-so' or 'I know he will come tomorrow'. I believe the trouble started from those statements, which express intimate conviction more than certainity, when people, impressed by the achievements of science, tried to find a way to obtain statements about the world that would be as certain as those we can have about a-priori content. Philosophers like Kant or Wittgenstein have tried to cure us of this mistake ever since. With mixed success.