Schick, A Humanist Theory of Ethics

Summary will have three paragraphs. The first will identity the thesis of the chapter and summarize the argument it puts forth to support it. The second will critique that argument. The third will critique the chapter as a whole. Also, in the end leave a question about the chapter and no need for citations and quotation.

A Humanist Theory of Ethics: Inference to the Best Action

Theodore Schick

Muhlenberg College

(Published in Towards a New Political Humanism, ed. by Barry Seidman and Neil Murphy, Prometheus Books, 2004)

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

–Arthur C. Clarke

Few would claim that there can be no science without god. Most realize that making correct judgments about the way the world is doesn’t require having any beliefs about the supernatural. Yet many claim that there can be no morality without god. In a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 47% of the respondents said a belief in God is necessary to be moral.[1] According to this group, making correct judgments about the way the world should be does require having a belief in the supernatural. The notion that morality depends on God, however, is demonstrably inadequate. Not only is there no causal relation between belief in God and moral behavior, there is no logical relation either. Any attempt to define morality in terms of God turns out to be circular or false. Consequently we cannot solve our moral problems by appeal to God.

How, then, can we solve them? I suggest that we can employ a variant of the inference procedure used to identify good explanations. When faced with a choice among competing hypotheses, scientists and laymen alike use a procedure known as “inference to the best explanation” to decide which hypothesis to accept. Similarly, when faced with a choice among competing courses of action, I believe we can use a similar procedure—inference to the best action—to decide which action to perform. Both of these procedures involve applying and weighing various criteria. But because these criteria can be specified without reference to anyone’s beliefs (including god’s), the conclusions arrived at through inference to the best action can be considered just as objective as those arrived at through inference to the best explanation. Thus there is no more reason to be skeptical about the existence of an objective humanist ethics than there is of an objective humanist science.

I.

The theory behind the view that morality requires god is known as “the divine command theory.” According to this theory, what makes an action right is that god wills it to be done. The problem with this theory is that if the god referred to is the traditional god of theism, the theory is vacuous. If not, it’s false. Either way, it cannot be considered an adequate theory of morality.

Traditional theism maintains that god is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. If being all-good is a defining attribute of god, however, god cannot be used to define goodness, for the definition would be circular; the concept being defined would be contained in the concepts doing the defining. On this alternative, all the divine command theory tells us is that something is good if it is willed by a supremely good being. While this is undoubtedly true, it is uninformative, for it doesn’t tell us what it is about god that makes him so good. If we try to eliminate the circularity by taking goodness out of the definition of god, we have no guarantee that what such a being commands will be good. Infinite power and knowledge does not necessarily incline one to the good, as the story of Satan illustrates. So the divine command theory does not provide a plausible account of the nature of morality.

Those who accept the divine command theory are committed to the view that nothing is right (or wrong) prior to or independent of god’s willing it to be done (or refrained from). But if no moral principles exist apart from god’s will, god’s moral choices cannot be principled. And a being that makes unprincipled choices, as Leibniz, the philosopher and inventor of calculus realized, is not a being worthy of worship:

In saying, therefore, that things are not good according to any standard of goodness, but simply by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory, for why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing the contrary? Where will be his justice and his wisdom if he has only a certain despotic power, if arbitrary will takes the place of his reasonableness, and if in accord with the definition of tyrants, justice consists in that which is pleasing to the most powerful Besides it seems that every act of willing supposes some reason for the willing and this reason, of course must precede the act.[2]

Leibniz’s point is that if actions are neither right nor wrong independent of God’s will, then God cannot choose one over another because it is morally better. Thus any moral choices god makes must be arbitrary. But a being who acts arbitrarily does not deserve our praise. So not only is the divine command theory implausible, it is impious as well.

Perhaps the most serious failing of the divine command theory, however, is that it sanctions obviously immoral actions. The 10 commandments appear in Chapter 20 of the book of Exodus in the Bible. These are not the only commandments recorded in the Bible, however. In Exodus 21:15, for example, we read, “He that smiteth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death,” and in Exodus 21:17, “He that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” Elsewhere in the Bible god mandates the death penalty for adulterers (Leviticus 20:10), homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13), those who worship other gods (Deuteronomy 13:6-11), those who work on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), and those women who are not virgins on their wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). Obviously the prohibition against killing found in the 10 commandments is not absolute, for according to the Bible, all of these people should be killed. We know, however, that anyone obeying these commandments would be acting immorally. The defense “god told me to” would carry no weight in either a court of law or the court of public opinion. The fact we know such actions to be wrong even though they are supposedly commanded by god shows that there must be standards of morality that are independent of god. One of the jobs of ethics is to identify those standards. Before we undertake that task, however, let’s take a look at the standards we use to judge the truth or falsity of beliefs so we have a better idea of how such standards function.

II.

Inference to the best explanation is probably the most widely used form of non-deductive inference. Doctors, detectives, and auto mechanics—as well as scientists, lawyers, and laymen—use it everyday. Anyone who tries to figure out why something happened uses inference to the best explanation. It has the following form:

1. Phenomenon P.
2. Hypothesis H explains P.
3. No other hypothesis explains P as well as H. (H is the best explanation of P.)
4. Therefore, probably, H is true.

What determines whether one explanation is better than another, however, is not simply the amount of evidence it its favor, for all hypotheses are undertermined by their data. Given any set of data, an infinite number of hypotheses can be constructed to account for that data. So the choice between competing hypotheses can never be made on the basis of the evidence alone. The criteria that we use to distinguish among competing hypotheses are known as “cognitive criteria of adequacy.”

We seek explanations because we want to understand the world, The amount of understanding produced by an explanation is determined by how well it systematizes and unifies our knowledge. We begin to understand something when we see it as part of a pattern. The more that pattern encompasses, the more understanding it produces. The extent to which an explanation systematizes and unifies our knowledge is determined by such criteria as:

• simplicity: the number of independent assumptions made by a hypothesis
• scope: the amount of diverse phenomena explained by a hypothesis
• conservatism: fit with existing theory
• fruitfulness: the ability of a hypothesis to successfully predict new phenomena

Neurophysiologist Barry Beyerstein provides a useful example of these criteria at work.

Psychologists have accumulated a diverse set of data relating mental states to physical states. Beyerstein classifies this data as follows:

Phylogenetic: There is an evolutionary relationship between brain complexity and species’ cognitive attributes.

Developmental: Abilities emerge with brain maturation; failure of the brain to mature arrests mental development.

Clinical: Brain damage from accidental, toxic, or infections sources, or from deprivation of nutrition or stimulation during brain development, results in predictable and largely irreversible losses of mental function.

Experimental: Mental operations correlate with electrical, biochemical, biomagnetic, and anatomical changes in the brain. When the human brain is stimulated electrically or chemically during neurosurgery, movements, percepts, memories, and appetites are produced that are like those arising from ordinary activation of the same cells.[3]

Experiential: Numerous natural and synthetic substances interact chemically with brain cells. Were these neural modifiers unable to affect consciousness pleasurably and predictably, the recreational value of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, LSD, cocaine and marijuana would roughly be equal to that of blowing soap bubbles.

These data can be explained in many different ways. They are even consistent with Cartesian view that the mind is a non-physical substance that interacts with the body. Very few neurophysiologists accept this view, however, because it does not provide the best explanation of the data. Beyerstein explains:

Despite their abundance, diversity, and mutual reinforcement, the foregoing data cannot, by themselves, entail the truth of the psycho-neural identity thesis. Nevertheless, the theory’s parsimony [simplicity] and research productivity [fruitfulness], the range of phenomena it accounts for [scope], and the lack of credible counter evidence [conservatism] are persuasive to virtually all neuroscientists.[4]

In other words, although the hypothesis that the mind is the brain is not the only explanation of these data, it is the best one because it does better with regard to the criteria of adequacy than any competing explanation.

These criteria are values or virtues, if you will. The more of these virtues a hypothesis exhibits, the better it is. Harvard professor Hilary Putnam explains:

Like the paradigm value terms (such as “courageous,” “kind,” “honest,” or “good”), “coherent” and “simple” are used as terms of praise. Indeed, they are action guiding terms: to describe a theory as “coherent, simple, explanatory” is, in the right setting, to say that acceptance of the theory is justified; and to say that acceptance of a statement is (completely) justified is to say that one ought to accept the statement or theory.[5]

To claim that a hypothesis provides the best explanation of something is to make a value judgment. Thus, contrary to popular belief, science is not value-free. But that doesn’t mean that scientific judgments are not objective because the criteria used to decide among competing hypotheses can be specified without reference to anyone’s beliefs. What determines the simplicity of a hypothesis, for example, is not what anyone thinks about it, but how many independent assumptions it makes. People may disagree about how simple a hypothesis is, but their disagreement is over an objective feature of the hypothesis, not about someone’s subjective state of mind. The same goes for the other cognitive criteria of adequacy. People may disagree about how to rate a hypothesis in terms of these criteria and they may disagree about how to rank the criteria in order of importance. Nevertheless, a judgment based on these criteria can be considered objective for the criteria themselves are not determined by anyone’s subjective mental states.

III.

When we’re faced with a moral problem, there are usually a number of different courses of action open to us. To decide which action is the best, we can make an inference similar in form to that found in inference to the best explanation. “Inference to the best action” has the following form.

1. Moral problem P.
2. Action A would solve P.
3. No other action would solve P as well as A.
4. Therefore, probably, A is the best action.

To decide among competing courses of action, we appeal to various ethical criteria of adequacy. These include:

1. • justice: the extent to which an action treats equals equally
   • mercy: the extent to which an action alleviates unnecessary suffering
   • beneficence: the extent to which an action promotes happiness and well-being
   • autonomy: the extent to which an action respects individual rights

Just as cognitive criteria of adequacy are values that help us determine what hypothesis we should believe, ethical criteria of adequacy are values that help us to determine what action we should perform. Cognitive criteria help us to evaluate the truth or falsity of a hypothesis while ethical criteria help us to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of an action.

These criteria should be viewed as ceteris paribus clauses. Other things being equal, we should choose that action that is the most just, the most merciful, the most beneficent, or the most enabling (the least coercive). Unfortunately, things are not always equal. The most just action may be the most cruel, or the most beneficent may be the most coercive. In these cases we must use our judgment to determine which criterion takes precedence.

“Where do these criteria come from?” a divine command theorist might ask. The proper response, I believe, is to claim that they are contained in our concept of morality. Not everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. We have a label for those kind of people; we call them “criminally insane.” Anyone who has the concept of morality, however, knows that other things being equal, the best action is the one that is the most just, the most merciful, the most beneficent, or the most enabling. That’s just part of what we mean when we say that something is moral.

Another way to look at it is this. Some truths are self-evident. A self-evident truth is one which is such that if you understand it, you know it’s true. Consider, for example, the statement, “Whatever has a shape has a size.” If you understand that statement—if you have the concepts of shape and size—you know that it’s true. You don’t need any additional evidence to support your belief. Self-evident truths provide their own evidence; they do not stand in need of any further justification.

This country was founded on the belief that there are self-evident moral truths, and I think the founding fathers were on to something. The statement, “Other things being equal, the most just action is the one that should be performed” is self-evident to anyone who has the concept of morality. You can’t refute this statement is by simply asserting you don’t believe it, any more than you can refute the claim that whatever has a shape has a size by simply asserting that you don’t believe it. If you believe that the statement is false, then the burden of proof is on you to provide a counterexample. If you are unable to do so—if you cannot cite a situation in which, other things being equal, the most just action is not the one that should be performed—then your assertion is irrational, for you have no reason to make it.

One of the primary reasons that people are attracted to the divine command theory is that they believe that if god is not the author of the moral law, then morality is relative and anything goes. As the existentialist saying has it, “If god is dead, everything is permitted.” The foregoing considerations indicate that this conditional is mistaken. There can be an objective morality, one that applies to all people at all times, even if it doesn’t have a divine origin. What’s more, we have seen that unless there is such a morality, there is no reason to worship god.

IV.

The foregoing ethical criteria of adequacy can be used to formulate the following procedure for arriving at an ethical judgment. The acronym for this procedure is the “I CARE” method:

• Identify the relevant facts.
• Consider the Alternative courses of action
• Rate the various alternatives in terms of the moral criteria of adequacy.
• Effect a decision based on the rating.

Let’s consider each of these steps in turn.

1. Identify the relevant facts. Moral judgments follow from moral principles together with factual claims. Many moral disagreements are about the facts of the case rather than the principles involved. To minimize disagreement, then, the first step involved in making a moral judgment involves identifying the relevant facts.
2. Consider the Alternative courses of action. When faced with a moral dilemma, there are usually a number of different actions you can perform. The problem is deciding which one of those actions is best from a moral point of view. To make sure you haven’t overlooked a possible course of action, you should take the time to consider all of the different options available to you. This involves not only identifying the different courses of action, but also considering their consequences. Who is going to be affected by the decision? How will they be affected? Those affected by a decision are known as “stakeholders.” So good ethical decision making involves identifying the possible courses of action, identifying the stakeholders, and considering the effects that the different actions will have on them.
3. Rate the various alternatives in terms of the ethical criteria of adequacy. Once the relevant facts are known and the possible courses of action have been specified, the next step is to rate the different actions in terms of the ethical criteria of adequacy. How well does each action do in terms of treating people fairly, avoiding unnecessary harm, promoting their well-being and respecting their rights? One can assess this by asking a series of questions: Does the action treat people fairly and lead to a just distribution of goods and services? Does it alleviate unnecessary suffering? Does it maximize happiness and minimize harm? Does it respect the right to self-determination? If the answer to all of these questions is yes, and if no alternative action does better with regard to these criteria, then the action is morally permissible.
4. Effect a decision based on the rating. Once you’ve identified the best action, the final step is to perform it. After you’ve performed it, however, you should continue to monitor the situation to see if things turned out the way you expected. If not, you need to analyze the situation to determine what went wrong. You can then use the results of that analysis in future decisions so that you don’t make the same mistake again.

Using this procedure, it’s easy to see why the Biblical commandments cited above are immoral. Although striking or swearing at one’s parents is rarely commendable, they are not capital offenses. Anyone who killed someone for either of these transgressions would be acting immorally, for such an action is not sanctioned by the ethical criteria of adequacy. It would not be just, for it would run afoul of the fundamental principle of retributive justice which says that the punishment should fit the crime. As the Bible informs us, we should take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Since the children in question did not take a life, they should not have to pay with their own. Killing the offenders would not be merciful because the suffering inflicted is not necessary to promote any other moral values. It would not be beneficent because the harm would outweigh the good. And it would not be enabling because it would permanently take away the power to choose from those who are executed.

This procedure also makes it clear why any form of discrimination, including discrimination against homosexuals, is immoral. To discriminate against someone is to make an adverse decision about them because of their membership in a group. Discrimination violates the principle of justice because membership in a group is morally irrelevant. What’s relevant from a moral point of view is how well someone performs their assigned tasks. Making an adverse decision about a competent person simply because they belong to a particular group fails to treat equals equally. Discrimination violates the principle of beneficence because it serves to promote the less competent over the more competent thus lowering productivity and reducing social welfare. It violates the principle of autonomy because it limits the choices of those discriminated against and diminishes their ability to advance according to their own merit. It violates the principle of mercy because it makes the victims of discrimination suffer unnecessarily. All those who practice discrimination, including racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-Semites, should be ashamed of themselves because they are engaging in immoral behavior, regardless of what the Bible or any other sacred text says about it.

When a practice is in the best interests of everyone involved, treats people fairly, and doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, then it should be considered morally permissible. This is the basis of the case for euthanasia. As long as euthanasia is confined to those who are suffering unmitigatible pain and choose it freely and willingly, it is consistent with the ethical criteria of adequacy. The fear of those who oppose it is that if it is legalized, it will lead to involuntary killing. Families may subtly coerce those facing death to end their lives sooner rather than later in hopes of preserving their inheritance. Doctors may covertly take the lives of those they consider to be medically hopeless. These are legitimate concerns because they suggest that legalizing euthanasia may violate the principles of autonomy and justice. But those who make this argument owe us some empirical evidence establishing the existence of the cause-effect relationship they posit. In the absence of such evidence, their objection is ungrounded.

Obviously, much more could be said about these matters. But I hope I have shown not only how an objective humanist theory of ethics is possible, but also how it can be used to solve moral problems.

[1]               Pew Research Center, “Americans Struggle with Religion’s Role at Home and Abroad,” http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/religion.pdf

[2]               G. W. von Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner Book Company, 1982) 292.

[3]Barry Beyerstein, “The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena,” The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal, ed. Kendrick Frazier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1991), 45

[4]               Ibid.

[5]               Hilary Putnam, Reason with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) 138.