Given that this is a topic I care greatly about, I spent some time thinking through his arguments along with various ideas on the science of morality that I've been pondering for a while now, and found that I actually had some objections to his thesis after all. So I decided to write an entry in the competition, which I've reproduced below.
I'd love to hear opinions, critiques, or any other feedback from anyone who has read the Moral Landscape. Of course I'm happy to hear from anyone, but this essay probably won't have much meaning if you're not familiar with the book.
The Moral Landscape – A Response
The main flaw that I can see with the central argument of
The Moral Landscape is not the concept of using science to uncover truths about
how to maximize well-being of conscious creatures, but the extension of this to
science being able to give definitive answers, even in principle, about what we
ought to do. The reason why I see this
as a problem is because it doesn’t seem possible to provide a single, obviously
correct definition of what it is that we’re trying to optimize.
Using the Moral Landscape metaphor, in order to work out
which peaks are higher than others, or how any two positions on the landscape
relate to each other, we need to define what this ‘altitude’ axis actually
represents. Since we’re talking about the collective well-being of all conscious creatures, we need some
way to aggregate the individual suffering and flourishing of each conscious
creature into a single value that can be compared with any other possible state
on the moral landscape.
This may sound like a problem in practice rather than in
principle, but I would argue that it is very much a problem in principle. I'm not
talking about how we would go about, in practice, calculating the well-being of
each individual creature in order to arrive at some collective well-being
value. The problem is how to define a formula for collective well-being that is
clearly correct, and is not just one of many possible ways to define collective
well-being. If there is no single, obviously correct way to define the
collective well-being of all conscious creatures, then we have multiple ways to
compare different states of collective well-being that will result in different
answers, and therefore no valid, scientific way that we could say one is better
than the other.
Assuming that we can devise some way to measure the
well-being of an individual creature, what then? Do we take the average of all
creatures and assign ‘heights’ on the moral landscape based on this average,
thus making the goal be the highest average well-being of all creatures? Or do
we add up all the individual well-being values and simply go for the highest
total score? How can we decide, even in principle, which is the more valid way
to measure collective well-being?
Further, how do we account for deviation from the mean? Say
we have two different states with the same average well-being for all conscious
creatures, but in one case, all creatures have the exact same value, i.e. the
average value, while in the other one, some are much higher, while some are
much lower, but they average out? Should these be equivalent peaks on the moral
landscape? Is each as good as the other? How can you scientifically determine
that answer, even in principle?
The other major problem here is how to account for creatures
with different ‘levels’ of consciousness. How much should we value the
well-being of a dog compared to a human? How does our aggregate value of
well-being weight the individual values of every type of creature that has some
form of consciousness? If we only cared about the well-being of humans we could
get away with weighting each creature equally, but it seems reasonable that
creatures with the capacity to suffer more and/or the capacity to have more
profound positive experiences, should somehow be weighted greater in the global
well-being equation than those that do not.
How many puppies should suffer before it’s preferable for a
human to suffer? Should human beings intervene in the predator/prey
relationships in nature, and the subsequent suffering that these relationships
cause to prey? Nature has evolved some truly horrible behaviours that various
conscious animals have to endure, and all of this suffering and flourishing
needs to be taken into account, along with humans and the animals we choose to
look after as pets.
We need to remember that well-being is often a zero sum
game. Many choices that affect well-being positively for some creatures, will
affect it negatively for others. This is what makes moral science a very
different thing to other areas of science such as health. Imagine if, whenever
a person took actions that increased their life expectancy by one year, some
other person would have theirs reduced by one year? How would the science of
health look then? It would suddenly look a lot more like moral science, where
we would need to justify exactly what it is we were trying to maximize, and a
single definition of health would suddenly become much more important.
Moral science is the study of collective well-being. We can
discover all kinds of truths about how to maximize specific aspects of
well-being. But there does not appear to be any single, unassailable definition
of collective well-being of all conscious creatures, and without this, we
cannot rely on moral science to tell us what we ought to do, because moral science can’t tell us what definition of
collective well-being we must use.
