I have been trying to avoid too much self-consciousness as I write this blog. But where my ideas are taking us, at this point, is such a departure from “the norm” that I am somewhat concerned that I will lose you, the reader, along the way. After all, in the next few postings, I am going to ask to you to let go of 400 years of Western thought. Hang in there!
Are moral truths objectively true?
OK, I believe that there is Right and there is Wrong. We call this a sense of “righteousness.” But I refuse to consult any of the available Rulebooks offered to explain which is which. I stay in that Box, struggling to orient my life to the belief that my sense of righteousness is not an illusion. Is this enough to offer people as an underpinning of the pursuit of the Good?
It sounds like a truism: scientific truths are our bedrock. Science allows us to measure reality and make conclusions that we can use to work wonders. What we measure, based upon careful scientific study, can be both “valid” and “reliable.” These are the gold standards of measurement we teach our students studying for doctorates in science. A valid measurement, we tell them, is one that has a high congruence between the measurement results and what is “really out there.” And a reliable measurement is one that returns close to the same results every time we use it. Good science requires measurements of high validity and high reliability. You are pretty sure that you are measuring something that actually exists, and you get pretty much the same results every time.
Is this scale valid and reliable?
An example: If I were to stand on a scale, and it said that I weighed 50 pounds, we would question the “validity” of the measurement. A highly valid scale would return a value that was close to my actual weight, what is “really the case.”
If I stood on that same scale many times, and every time it said that I weighed 50 pounds, we would know that we have a highly “reliable” scale, but we also would question its validity.
On the other hand, if the scale returned results that were very different from time to time, but on average were much closer to my actual weight, then we would have a more valid measurement, but with some problems with reliability. Ideally, we want a scale that, time and time again, returns readings that are pretty close to past readings and which hover in a narrow range around my actual weight, highly reliable and highly valid. This is what scientists mean when they say that they have measured the Truth.
Applying “science” to public proposals
We will, in future postings, argue for establishing public policies that are aimed at achieving the Good. We will want to know that we are right in that which we pursue. If we want to know that the beliefs to which we try to orient ourselves as we live our lives in the Box are “real,” we would want some mechanism to measure them, with validity and reliability. Only then could we be “sure.”
And isn’t that, after all, the sine qua non of public debate, to hold claims to the test of scientific truth? At least, that is what I had been taught for many years.
Truth or merely opinion?
But this quest, for a “scientific” basis for policy proposals, gets murky when we talk about Right and Wrong. If I make the claim that “Position X is morally right,” I am doing one of two very different things. I may be stating merely my opinion, my subjective feelings, about this proposition. Or I may be stating what I believe to be “the Truth.”
But how can this be the Truth? After all, we are told, truth is a matter of objective analysis, not of subjective sensation. “Moral truths” may be powerful ways to express our folkways or our tenets of faith, but they can’t and shouldn’t be confused with scientific truths, which are testable against objective reality. Conventional wisdom says that, ultimately, moral propositions are either accepted as true because they are the subject of Revelation (a reversion to our roots in Traditionalism) or they are mere opinions, nothing more than subjective perceptions.
The currently common view is that moral truths and scientific truths are of a different order. They are not alike in kind. And therefore, they must be treated differently. Public policy might be motivated by our moral “sense,” but it must be based upon hard science.
If we live in a world that is divided into the “objective” and the “subjective,” into the real world on the one hand and our mere perceptions of that world on the other, moral truths are not going to be seen as compelling. If we are looking for the answer to the question posed earlier, “Why try to pursue the Good?”, we reach a dead end. Assuming we aren’t willing to rely upon Revelation, the best we can say is that “Many of us believe this to be a Good thing to do.” Not a very satisfying nor a potent statement.
What if we don’t live in a world divided into two realms, objective and subjective? Yes, I know that that is heresy, that everything you have read since 10th grade has assumed this duality to be the foundation of modern thought. But, lets see what happens if we let go of that certainty. What if there were only one world?
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