Resenhas - The Moral Landscape

Moitta 14/12/2015

An incredible book.

“the Fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. In my experience, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion.”

“Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures - and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”

“Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His evidence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.”

“Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic and environmental goals.”

“I will argue that anyone who would seriously maintain that the opposite is the case - is either misusing words or not taking the time to consider the details.”

“But the mere endurance of a belief system or custom does not suggest that it is adaptive, much less wise. It merely suggests that it hasn’t led directly to a society’s collapse or killed its practitioners outright.”

“Every society that has ever existed has had to channel and subdue certain aspects of human nature - envy, territorial violence, avarice, deceit, laziness, cheating, etc. - through social mechanisms and institutions. It would be a miracle if all societies - irrespective of size, geographical location, their place in history, or the genomes of their members - had done this equally well. And yet the prevailing bias of cultural relativism assumes that such a miracle has occurred not just once, but always.”

"Because there are no easy remedies for social inequality, many scientists and public intellectuals also believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions."

"There are many tools one must get in hand to think scientifically - ideas about cause and effect, respect for evidence and logical coherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty, the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc. - and these must be put to use long before one starts worrying about mathematical models or specific data."

"When we say that we are reasoning or speaking "objectively", we generally mean that we are free of obvious bias, open to counterarguments, cognizant of the relevant facts, and so on. This is to make a claim about how we are thinking. In this sense, there is no impediment to our studying subjective (first person) facts "objectively"."

"I am not denying the necessarily subjective (experiential) component of the facts under discussion. I am certainly not claiming that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings - like the platonic Form of the Good - or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong. I am simply saying that, given that there are facts - real facts - to be known about how conscious creatures can experience the worst possible misery and the greatest possible well-being, it is objectively true to say that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice."

"Now that we have consciousness on the table, my further claim is that the concept of "well-being" captures all that we can intelligibly value. And "morality" - whatever people's associations with this term happen to be - really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures."

"And, as I have said, there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive - many peaks on the moral landscape - so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in this life, such diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science."

"This possibility - the prospect of radically different moral commitments - is at the heart of many people's doubts about moral truth."

"Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science."

Chapter 2

"As we better understand the brain, we will increasingly understand all of the forces - kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence, intuitions of fairness, impulse control, the mitigation of aggression, etc. - that allow friends and strangers to collaborate successfully on the common projects of civilization. Understanding ourselves in this way, and using this knowledge to improve human life, will be among the most important challenges to science in the decades to come."

"Being a fellow Homo sapiens, we must presume that the Dobu islanders had brains sufficiently similar to our own to invite comparison. Is there any doubt that the selfishness and general malevolence of the Dobu would have been expressed at the level of their brains? Only if you think the brain does nothing more than filter oxygen and glucose out of the blood. Once we more fully understand the neurophysiology of states like love, compassion, and trust, it will be possible to spell out the differences between ourselves and people like the Dobu in greater detail. But we need not await any breakthroughs in neuroscience to bring the general principle in view: just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health, it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being."

"However, it is interesting to consider what would happen if we simply ignored this step and merely spoke about "well-being." What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about "right" and "wrong", or "good" and "evil", and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important? And if important, wouldn't it be, by definition, a matter of someone's well-being?"

"Moral judgement is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an emotional nature."

"Moral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if they were... If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and sociology - not normative ethics."

"Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions. We must build our better selves into our laws, tax codes, and institutions."

"this is precisely what is so important about science: it allows us to investigate the world, and our place within it, in ways that get behind first appearances. Why shouldn't we do this with morality and human values generally?"

"Most of us spend some time over the course of our lives deciding how (or weather) to respond to the fact other people on earth needlessly starve to death. Most of us also spend some time deciding which delightful foods we want to consume at home and in our favourite restaurants. Which of these projects absorbs more of your time and material resources on a yearly basis? If you are like most people living in the developed world, such a comparison will not recommend you to sainthood."

"This is one of the paradoxes of human psychology: we often fail to do what we ostensibly want to do and what is most in our self-interest to do. We often fail to do what we most want to do - or, at the very least, we fail to do what, at the end of the day (or year, or lifetime) we will most wish we had done."

"It seems abundantly clear that many people are simply wrong about morality - just as many people are wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding. What scientific purpose is served by averting our eyes from this fact? If morality is a system of thinking about (and maximizing) the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people's moral concerns must be immoral."

"Am I free to feel that "opaque" is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me."

"consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our intentions become competely available to us."

"When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. Many people do not feel the same way about regulating mood with antidepressants"

"We do not feel as free as we think we feel. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion."

Chapter 3
"The greater activity we found in the MPFC for belief compared to disbelief may reflect the greater self-relevance and/or reward value of true statements. When we believe a proposition to be true, it is as though we have taken it in hands as part of our extended self: we are saying, in effect, "This is mine. I can use this. This fits my view of the world." It seems to me that such cognitive acceptance has a distinctly positive emotional valence. We actually like the truth, and we may, in fact, dislike falsehood."

"The point , of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning - norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties."

"As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hew a positive state of mind - to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt, for instance - this is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking" and "self-deception". Such a person will, of necessity, be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out nonepistemic motives in another's view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person's connection to the world as it is."

"a bias is not merely a source of error; it is a reliable pattern of error. Every bias, therefore, reveals something about the structure of the human mind."

"Of course, people do often believe things in part because these beliefs make them feel better. But they do not do this in the full light of consciousness. Self-deception, emotional bias, and muddled thinking are facts of human cognition."

"expectation can be, if not everything, almost everything. Rosenhan concluded his paper with this damning summary: "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals."

"As far as our understanding of the world is concerned - there are no facts without values."

Chapter 4

"This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide.
The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto - in a single brain, in an institution, or in a culture - does not mean that there isn't a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world's "great," and greatly discrepant, religions."

"The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to het them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself - conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc."

"The fact that certain people can reason poorly with a clear conscience - or can do so while saying that they have a clear conscience - proves absolutely nothing about the compatibility of religious and scientific ideas, goals, or ways of thinking.
It is possible to be wrong and not to know it (we call this "ignorance").
It is possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of admitting this publicly (we call this "hypocrisy").
And it may also be possible to be wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one's commitment to one's erroneous beliefs (we call this "self-deception").
It seems clear that these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion."

Chapter 5

"Throughout this book, I have argued that the split between facts and values - and, therefore, between science and morality - is an illusion."

"The claim that science could have something important to say about values (because values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures) is an argument made on first principles. As such, it doesn't rest on any specific empirical results."

"we have all evolved from common ancestors and are, therefore, far more similar than we are different; brains and primary human emotions clearly transcend culture, and they are unquestionably influenced by states of the world (as anyone who has ever stubbed his toe can attest)."

"But does anyone doubt that there are better and worse ways to structure an economy? Would any educated person consider it a form of bigotry to criticize another society's response to a banking crisis? Imagine how terrifying it would be if great numbers of smart people became convinced that all efforts to prevent a global financial catastrophe must be either equally valid or equally nonsensical in principle. And yet this is precisely where we stand on the most important questions in human life."

"Many people also believe that nothing much depends on whether we find a universal foundation for morality. It seems to me, however, that in order to fulfill our deepest interests in this life, both personally and collectively, we must first admit that some interests are more defensible than others."

"If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, than some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlighted than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needles human misery. Whether or not we ever understand meaning, morality, and values in practice, I have attempted to show that there must be something to know about them in principle. And I am convinced that merely admitting this will transform the way we think about human happiness and the public good."

Afterword

"Is it really so difficult to distinguish between a science of morality and the morality of science?
To assert that moral truths exist, and can be scientifically understood, is not to say that all (or any) scientists curently understand these truths or that those who do will necessarily conform to them."

"To summarize my central thesis: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall wiithin the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."

"I'm not simply claiming that morality is "fully determined by an objective realityy, independent of people's actual values and desires". I am claiming that people's actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of this - indeed, we must - in order to talk about what is actually good."

M. Zerbini 28/04/2013

Regular, no mal sentido.
Este livro não atingiu minhas expectativas e sim: elas eram altas; principalmente porque o autor é um dos Cavaleiros do Apocalipse, o nome criativo dado por apologistas religiosos a Harris, Hitchens, Dennet, e Dawkins, os principais autores do que começou a ser chamado de Novo Ateismo.

Sobre o livro. Ele tem muitos problemas materias: Não é organizado; as notas estão no fim do livro; e o autor fala de diversos assuntos ao invés de focar no tema do livro, que era estabelecer uma conexão real entre ciência e moral.

O livro é tão bagunçado que é difícil de escrever sobre ele, mas o ponto é que ele não desenvolve uma linha de racioncínio que explica alguma coisa! Sem comentar que o autor tem umas idéais alucinadas dignas de 1984 como controle de pensamento ( ele fala da possibilidade de criar detectores de mentira reais, que impossibilitariam mentiras, mas faz pouco caso da intrusão do detentor desta máquina (provavelmente o Estado) na vida dos outros (provavelmente seus cidadãos).

A estrutura do livro é quebrada, ele possui apenas cinco capítulos que pocuo se relacionam (compare isso com os 10 capítulos de 1o capítulos de Deus um Delírio, muito bem conectados), os capítulos são grandes e diversas vezs o autor volta em um assunto já abordado sem sequer fazer referência a primeira menção.

As notas, pqp... Eu não tenho idéia de o que leva uma pessoa a escolher colocar as notas no fim do livro se existe a possibilidade de colocalas no pé da página i.e.: Notas de Rodapé! A situação piora uma vez que o autor é absolutamente apaixonado por notas, e chega a fazer algumas com paginas (no plural) de extensão. Sempre que eu estava lendo eu tinha que ficar com um dedo no fim do livro.

Finalmente embora o autor estabeleça um link entre moralidade e ciência ele poderia ter aprofundado, ao invés de apenas pincelar esta idéia. O ponto é: poderia ser muito melhor.



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Simply put this book hasn't reach my expectations and yeah: They were high; mainly beacuse the author is considered one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the colorful name religious apologetics gave Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennet, the most prolific writers in what has been called the New Atheists.

About the book. It has some material problems: It is not organized; the notes are in the back of the book; and the author talks about many things at a time instead of focusing in the main goal, which is stablishing a real connection between science and morals.

The book is such a mess that it is actually difficult to write about it, but the point is it does not develop a line of reasoning that explains anything! Not to mention the author has some crazy 1984 ideas like thought control, he talks about the possibility of creation in the future of true lie-detectors, but makes little consideration about the intrusion of the owner of such a machine (probably the State) in the lives of the others (its citizens).

The structure of the book is broken, it has only five chapters seemly unrelated to each other (compare this to The GOd Delusion's 10 chapters very logically proposed), the chapters are to big and many times the author comes back to already exposed topics repeating what he has said and, without mentioning the other chapter.

The notes, oh my... I have no idea why someone would choose to put the notes in the end of the book, if there is the option of putting them in the foot of the page i.e.: footnotes! This is worsed by the fact the author absolutely loves notes, and makes some of them so long it takes pages (in the plural). Whenever I was reading I had to keep a finger in the end of the book.

Finally, though the author actually stabilishes a link between morality and science he could have done it more throughly instead of just glimpsing at this new idea. SO the point is: It could have been so much better.

Daniel Vieira 26/03/2012

Ciência da Moral
Uma proposta ousada, e ainda em sua infância (coisa que o autor deixa claro ao longo do texto), mas de qualquer forma uma possibilidade viável. A visão de que, quanto mais conhecemos os mecanismos físicos, químicos, biológicos e psicológicos que governam o pensamento e o "livre arbítrio" humano, o que chamamos de moralidade poderá ser melhor definido, em termos mais objetivos.