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I've been hoping someone more versed in the field of philosophy would make some comments about the article. All I can say is I found it very impressive.Philosophy Now wrote: ↑Thu Jun 01, 2023 8:56 pm Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/156/Et ... _Mechanics
Uh, in ethics?Criticising one of history’s most important-ever scientists can sound like a sketch from Monty Python: “OK, but apart from breakthroughs in optics, mathematics, mechanics, explaining gravity, inventing calculus, something about trigonometry, predicting how planets move, and other stuff that we don’t understand, what has Isaac Newton ever done for us?”
Newton’s work transformed science, and eventually, society. But Newton’s legacy comes with an ugly side: he inspired ‘physics envy’, which, in turn, led humanity to some truly dark places. ‘Physics envy’ is the desire to find Newtonian-type mathematical formulas or algebraic laws in other disciplines.
Not to worry. As long as the terms they use are understood by them to be the moral equivalent of mathematical formulas and algebraic laws, then, ethically, if they believe something, well, that makes it true!Sometimes the endeavour is absurd, as when economists try to explain their economic opinions in algebraic equations. But when applied to psychology, history, class warfare, or evolution, thinkers with physics envy usually end up describing humans in dangerously oversimplified terms.
Or, again, for the moral objectivists among us, their theories work because that is basically what they are...theories about ethics. And others out in the real world can be treated by them as though they have no value at all because they are "one of them".Their theories would only work for model people – humans who have been stripped of their nuance and complexity. Moreover, as too many twentieth century tragedies have shown, when people become just elements in an equation, they can be treated as if they have no value at all.
No, seriously, in regard to a moral conflagration of note has anyone actually attempted to calculate what would constitute the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people? And how close might that come to the assessments of the moral deontologists?Physics envy infected philosophy, too; in particular, ethics. Mirroring Newton’s Second Law that force equals acceleration multiplied by mass (F=ma), the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson proposed that good equals the greatest happiness of the greatest number (G=gHgN).
Same thing. With respect to a moral conflict most here will be familiar with what might that look like "for all practical purposes"?Jeremy Bentham adapted Hutcheson’s idea into what he called his ‘hedonic calculus’ – a phrase which draws deliberately on Newtonian mathematics.
On the other hand, Kant predicated this universal law on the assumption that there was a "transcending font" out there able to impose an ultimate judgment on whatever we mere mortals came up with down here.The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant plumped for a different type of formula to define what we should do: we should “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”
I'm certainly willing to explore that with anyone here who does believe that a law pertaining to the morality of, say, abortion can be articulated as objectively as astrophysicists can encompass the motion of planets around the Sun.So Kant was using the Newtonian idea of a universal law to tell people what to do. Both Kant and Bentham believed they had unlocked the secrets of moral philosophy as surely as the Cambridge professor had demystified the cosmos.
But are moral laws really like this – something as real as planetary motion, waiting to be discovered and defined?
Instead, in the West, we are still in the same boat now going all the way back to the Pre-Socratic philosophers: mired in "conflicting goods". What "foundations of ethics"? Especially when compared to the extraordinary achievements in science.It would certainly be helpful if they were, and if those discoveries were subsequently made, and the foundations of ethics at last established. All those testing moral dilemmas would melt away. Difficult decisions could be solved as easily as pressing the ‘equals’ sign on a calculator. People would only need to apply the right formula for the answer to be clear.
Still, on the other hand, how can any moral positions taken in regard to any human behavior be demonstrated to in fact be inherently and necessarily evil in a No God world?Certainly some moral positions do seem like absolutes. Genocide is truly appalling, and anyone who tries to say that it isn’t evil is beyond the pale. ‘Genocide is wrong’ is to us as certain as gravity.
Let's face it, one way or another, virtually any behaviors that we choose can be deemed irrational or immoral by others when we choose them in a social context. Some clearly more trivial than others.But many moral quandaries seem much more like a matter of opinion. Is it okay to wear a yellow shirt to a funeral? Or to crush a beetle underfoot when running for a bus? These sort of questions depend on taste and context. They’re still moral questions, but for each one the balance between convenience and causing offense is open to debate. We can agree to differ on these issues and remain friends.
Well, my point of course is that, in the absence of God, we cannot know in a Newtonian sense when something is either moral or immoral.Clues to Moral Reality
One problem for those seeking a Newtonian formula for ethics is that it’s hard to see how ethical statements can be like other facts about the world. For instance, society has a huge influence on what is perceived as right and wrong. Even absolute taboos like genocide have been accepted in Ancient Rome, Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere. How can we know we’re right about it now? After all, eating meat and burning fossil fuels – widely acceptable behaviours for most of human history – may well come to be seen as morally reprehensible in just a few years’ time.
Yep, that's my own point of course. So much pertaining to morality here at PN gets discussed in the Ethical Theory forum. Worlds of words defining and defending other words by and large. Which is why I am always suggesting that our theories about right and wrong need to be examined in regard actual sets of circumstances. Circumstances that are often become entangled in contingency, chance and change.Also, how do we detect right and wrong? They’re not like planets to watch in the sky, or apples which hurt when they fall on our heads. We can’t smell, taste, or hear moral values. Instead, we conjure them in our minds – just like things we imagine which don’t really exist. This means right and wrong apparently have more in common with the Tooth Fairy than with the mass, distance, and time with which Newton mapped out the world.
Only out in the real world, it's not very often that you can point to two or more sets of circumstances which really do completely overlap. At least pertaining to the is/ought world.But if we look closer we can find five clues about how right and wrong operate, and they point in a very interesting direction.
First, when you label an action ‘right’, you are forced to label any identical actions ‘right’, too. Only if you can point out a morally significant difference is it okay to describe, say, one killing as an awful murder, and the other as an acceptable homicide. In theory, by saying a particular action is right or wrong, you’re determining how right an identical action is, even if that twin is many miles or centuries away.
Only to certain things. Some things being fairer than others. Good and bad in the either/or world versus good and bad in the is/ought world. You use a well-constructed chair to clobber another over the head repeatedly, killing her. Was your reason a well-constructed one or a badly constructed one? One can admire the craftsmanship that went into the making of the chair. But what about the killing involving the chair?Second, the labels of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ only apply to certain things. An action can be good; as can be a state of mind or an intention; and outcomes can be compared in similar terms, some being fairer than others. But an inanimate object, like a chair, isn’t good or bad in quite the same (moral) way. When we describe art, engineering, or dental work as ‘good’, we are showing a different sort of admiration or assessment of it. It’s not usually a moral judgement.
Exactly. Are your intentions and behaviors precipitating a particular outcome ethically coherent of not? Says who?Third, it’s only possible to develop a coherent form of ethics when we apply labels of good or bad to just a single type at a time – intentions, or actions, or outcomes. Many moral dilemmas arise when we mix these ways of judging.
Okay, Mr. Deontologist, deconstruct Bentham here and propose the most rational assessment of, say, the Roman Games way back when.Bentham’s ethics, for example, offers a judgement for every decision, based solely on how happy people end up: for him, more happiness is always better. But his ethics seem odd when judged from the point of view of actions or intentions: would it really be right to force two innocent people to duel to the death if it made forty thousand spectators ecstatically happy? Twice as right with an audience of eighty thousand? It seems as if ethics can operate clearly in a single realm or dimension, but problems come when we shift from one dimension to another.
We'll need a context of course.Quantum Ethics
These five clues indicate that right and wrong are very odd things. Indeed, the Australian philosopher JL Mackie called moral values ‘queer’, and suggested they were so unusual it would be impossible to think of them as like anything else at all. But let’s look again at this list of how right and wrong operate in the world. We’ll see that, actually, they are much like something physicists have studied in thousands of experiments, two centuries after Newton.
Got that? Okay, here is how the author then connects this to morality...All these five clues about ethics come straight from the quantum world. ‘Spooky action at a distance’ is what Albert Einstein called a phenomenon more dryly referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’. Investigations have shown that, when a pair of already-related quantum entities, say, photons, are separated, the characteristics of one are determined (and not just known) when observations discover the matching characteristic of its partner, irrespective of the distance between them. This ‘non-locality’ effect goes against all our intuitions – much as it went against Einstein’s, who remained sceptical about it until his death. But repeated tests have proven that this is how sub-atomic particles actually do work. Indeed, the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, for finally proving this very thing.
I'm stumped again with this comparison.Another similarity between quantum physics and ethics is the limit to the things we can label. Just as ethics only applies to certain things, there is a finite number of different sub-atomic particles to study. The exact number is debated (seventeen, or more?); but quarks, leptons, photons, and gluons would qualify, recently joined by the newly discovered Higgs boson. Ethicists disagree as vehemently as scientists; but most would accept right and wrong can be assigned to intentions, actions, and some specific qualities in outcomes, but not to most other things.
Yeah, I suppose in a sense there is some measure of overlap. But neither the particles nor the waves to the best of my knowledge do what they do involving anything approaching...intention? Who among us would pass judgment on quantum interactions? Which approach comes closest to describing them...the deontological or the consequential?Quantum physics also shows that quantum-scale entities can behave like waves in some situations and like particles in others. Light, for example, can impact your retina as individual photons, like particles; but it can also come in waves which form interference patterns, leading to ‘wavy’ light and dark areas on screens after the light has been passed through narrow slits (just like the peaks and troughs of a sound wave which allow noise-cancelling headphones to work). The situation is similar in ethics, in which right and wrong seem to apply to actions in some circumstances (which Kant focussed upon), and elsewhere to a quality of outcomes (Bentham’s approach). In this way the ‘action-outcome’ duality (or in jargon terms, the ‘deontological-consequentialist’ duality) of right and wrong mirrors what is called ‘wave-particle duality’ in quantum physics.
Yes, no doubt about it: even regarding mindless matter there is always going to be some measure of uncertainty. If only because both "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" are applicable. Or, as Hume suggested, cause and effect is not entirely interchangeable with correlation.Then there’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg proved that we can know the velocity of a subatomic wave-particle, or its location, but never both; and similarly with other pairs of quantum properties. Just so, in moral philosophy, we can often be sure that something is right according to its consequences, or by judging the actions, but not by considering both at the same time. We criticise someone for stealing (a bad action), or we praise them for giving money to the poor (a good outcome); but combine the two and our moral verdict is complicated.
Again, assuming that "somehow" the human brain did in fact acquire autonomy when biological matter evolved into us, what can we know for certain about the continuities and the contrasts between an observer noting interactions in regard to physics and in regard to morality?Also, we have the observer effect. In quantum physics, as has been proven repeatedly, what and how the observer choses to observe will profoundly affect what is observed. Thinking about or observing an ethical decision will also affect our ethical choice profoundly. Accurate observer-unaffecting observation-based discovery, as practiced by Newton, is impossible for both.
Indeed, that might be construed as the most intriguing aspect of quantum reality. Connecting the dots between QM, the human brain and moral responsibility. My point is that, yes, what a particular individual has observed given all of the uniquely personal existential components of his or her life can have a profound impact on their moral philosophy.Finally, quantum physics may help answer the conundrum of free will. Only at the human level might everything be predetermined by the environment, by genes; generally, by what has gone before. At the quantum scale, subatomic particles can spontaneously appear from nowhere. If choices in our minds spontaneously appear too, this might help solve the riddle of free will.
Though I suspect that, other than in a wholly determined universe, it's the part where they are dissimilar that matters most.Right and wrong are very ‘queer’, just as Mackie said; but their share their queerness with subatomic particles in surprisingly similar ways.