Preview: Evidence Based Morality

Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand box at nursery school.

These are the things I learned. Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you are sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are food for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some and think some and draw some and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday.

Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out in the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup? The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why. We are like that.

And then remember that book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK! Everything you need to know is there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation, ecology, and politics and the sane living.

Think of what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or we had a basic policy in our nation and other nations to always put thing back where we found them and clean up our own messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
from "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten : Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things" by Robert Fulghum.

What Robert Fulghum says feels right, it seems like it ought to be true. For another a longer look at how to behave morally well, a view of Ptah-Hotep's instructions is also enlightening.

http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/texts/precepts_of_ptahhotep.htm

We need someplace to start, so rather than starting from nothing, I will take what I can find from the past as the starting point, and apply evidence and reason to confirm or deny. Then look at what Micheal Shermer has to say today ...

If there were one thing skeptics, scientists, philosophers, and humanists could do to address the overall problem of belief in weird things, constructing a meaningful and satisfying system of morality and meaning would be a good place to start. Micheal Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, P.278.

... and take the challenge by connecting the dots between them. Most people are pretty sure about what we ought to do to be good, and have a moral compass. The question to resolve is: where does it come from. How can knowing where it comes from help guide us when we are not sure about a moral stance? Here goes...

The purpose of life is what biology class in eight grade taught: metabolism & reproduction. A lot of people see that as reductionist. It isn't. One just has to look deeply enough to see how powerfully explanatory the concept is when taken together with the rest of scientific thinking.

I subscribe to the brights movement, and the words used today in nontheist circles would call me... a "strong atheist". A lot of plain folk seem to honestly believe that christianity in particular, and religionists in general have some kind of monopoly on morality. This is not justifiable. I am not in any way lacking in moral fibre for my deeply held beliefs. We need to fix these perceptions. Have to lay some ground work...

Scientific Method rules. It is the only way to get to the bottom of any question. If you cannot apply scientific method to a question, then the art of being a scientist is to figure out how to re-phrase the question so that it can be applied. The method is really just the application of brute force reason to problems. It is painfully slow, very cumbersome, and extremely difficult to get right. No one person ever does get it right. The mad scientist alone in his castle has always been a myth. The real picture is the mad scientist going to half a dozen conferences a year, and madly exchanging letters with peers. Science advances through conversation. Conversation only happens when people are comfortable talking to each other (not worried about getting turned in for talking about a taboo topic, or accused of espionage, or jailed for one´s ethnicity) When you propose an idea, the way to judge how effective it is is to match it against existing real data (sometimes that is hard to find.) The more facts & phenomena the idea explains, the better the hypothesis is deemed to be. You don't judge your own ideas, your rivals and successors, who have every interest in tearing your ideas down to make a name for themselves, do. If you can convince them, there is a pretty good chance that the ideas are sound.

This blog is a series of essays which proposes hypotheses to try to explain moral questions. I do not have the resources to perform the experimentation required to confirm or refute these hypotheses. I just see them as self-evidently true, subject to further evidence. I will make a good effort to cite sources as possible, but I am not a "real scientist". I don't have the background or time to pursue this as it needs to be pursued. My hope is just to inspire others with the elegance and simplicity of this world view.

People need to see that there are comprehensive world views that produce morally upstanding people without recourse to the supernatural. This will be a vast subject, my main problem is that it is so huge, that it will be very hard just to survey the landscape. So these essays will be a series of pickets, marking off where the foundations should eventually go for a study of morality based on the disciplined application of scientific method.

Medicine, in response to the pollution of the term "Scientific" by all manner of quacks from Naturopaths, to chiro, to herbalists, to... the list goes on, have had to come up with some way of defining rigorous medical research. The term in vogue now seems to be "Evidence based medecine." So I'm trying to figure out what "Evidence-based Morality" will look like. This is way too big... Help me out.

Some web sites that are important to me:

• http://www.the-brights.net
• http://www.skeptic.com
• http://www.religioustolerance.org
• http://slashdot.org (even though it's readers are often over the top)
• http://www.sciam.com
• Thanks to Jeepyjay @ the-brights.net for the ptah-hotep reference.