A Defense of Moral Realism

Francis Bacon: author of the "Novum Organum"

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

                          Introduction:        The Promise of Science

In grade 9, I had a really good Science teacher. He loved Science, he loved kids, and he loved getting the two together, which is all a good teacher really ever has to do. On a cool fall day in Edmonton in 1963, he taught my Science 9 class a basic lesson: the scientific method – what it says, how it works, and why it gets the amazing results that it does. I’m sure that I have embellished the picture in the years since that day, but basically, I recall clearly that on that day I got the scientific method, and it filled me with hope.

I saw that prior to the arrival of science in my society, when people had had a question about some events in their lives – a question for which they had no stock answers – they had consulted wise women and men who were supposed to be able to give them answers. Often, the answer was: “Because the gods decreed it that way; our lot in life is to accept their decrees, not question them.”  In fact, people generally believed that the profound truths of the universe were too complex for them or almost any other humans to grasp.

A few specially gifted people could see those awesome truths by slipping into a special state of consciousness in which they received “revelations”. This special state of mind was a gift which could not be attained by logic or discipline.

Lesser truths – about how to deliver babies or keep goats healthy or similar practical issues – could come to some human minds via years of apprenticeship under a master of midwifery or goat husbandry or whatever. Even the master’s knowledge had come via masters of previous generations. In other words, most of the tribe’s knowledge was passed down via its total store of knowledge – its culture – older people training younger ones in the knowledge and skills that the tribe had accumulated over generations, mostly by trial and error.

Without revelation, humans could grasp only lesser truths. Why the universe exists or what the purpose of life is weren’t matters for ordinary people to know. Each tribe accumulated bits of wisdom gradually, and even then, a tribe’s total stock of wisdom was tiny compared to its ignorance. What is a rainbow?

The scientific method changes this picture. With the scientific method – what Bacon called the “Novum Organum” – people could go beyond explanations like “we’ve always done it that way” or “the gods decreed it that way.”

People could choose to respond to a problem that they wanted to solve by first, studying it closely, then forming a hypothesis about why it was the way that it was, i.e., why events unfolded in the ways that they typically did, or to put it another way, why things in the physical world acted in the ways that they did.

Then, if I were the seeker of understanding in this picture, I could imagine an experiment by which I could test to see whether my hypothesis worked: that is, I could imagine future circumstances in which – if my explanation of what was going on was correct – I would be able to predict what was going to happen next. It is useful to note here that any hypothesis that can’t be tested in this physical way is not science. Science has no interest in untestable hypotheses.  

Note that the future circumstances about which I was making my prediction might be ones I could set up at will. For example, if I hypothesize that making a lever longer will increase the load that I can move with it, then when I get a longer lever under this boulder I’m straining to remove from my field, I should be able to move the boulder with less force applied to my end of the lever.

Similarly, if I have by coincidence found a new chemical substance that I think will kill coddling moths, I can spray it into an enclosed chamber of a few cubic meters of air set up in my lab, one in which I have already trapped a dozen or so adult coddling moths crawling about on a small apple tree. If all the coddling moths die in the space of a few hours, then I will be able to conclude, tentatively, that I have found a new pesticide which kills coddling moths.

But it is also worth noting here that there are some hypotheses for which I can’t set up test conditions. Hypotheses in astronomy are clear examples of ones that I can’t test at my behest. I can’t check right now or any time soon on whether comets reflect more blue light than yellow light because I can’t summon up a comet any time I please. But comets large enough for me to study through my telescope do come by the earth every ten years or so. I can test my hypothesis if I just show a little patience and wait for a comet to soar past my planet.

In either case, when the phenomenon that I am interested in happens, if I am a serious scientist, I will observe changes to the physical properties of the things I am studying. I will carefully record all of my observations or data, and after the events I’m watching are done, I will study my data to see whether the outcome that I predicted would happen, did, in fact, happen as I said it would.

Sometimes, the prediction comes true in obvious ways, as when the coddling moths in the chamber all die. Whether the pesticide I’ve found is safe for other species is another question, but the moths are dead. With the longer lever, I can move the stone I could not move before. My hypotheses can be confirmed.  

Sometimes the predictions made by scientists doing the experiment come true visibly, even dramatically. But often in our era, the results of research are only observable via instruments (microscopes, telescopes, etc.), and even then, only over very long or very short timespans. Scientists today often use instruments to cause a change to happen, then use more instruments to record data as it happens. They save the recorded data and study it after the experiment is done.

Let’s reiterate that in all cases – ones of very large phenomenon or very tiny ones, very fast or very slow ones – in order for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must be testable in some objectively verifiable way. The intention is that the data will objectively confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. I’ll see the results I predicted happen or fail to happen. What I see won’t be ambiguous. If a hypothesis can’t be tested in an observable way, it is not science.

And sometimes we find out that what we ought to be trying to do is steer nature with much more care and nuance than we have been doing. For example, my new moth-killing pesticide may also cause birds in my area to die, which may allow other pests to breed rampantly. Meanwhile, by more experiments I may learn that there are other species in the orchard that control coddling moths without upsetting the natural balances there. Today, everything we know about nature is leading us to the conclusion that, yes, we can affect those natural balances, but we must learn to do so very carefully if we don’t want to create side-effects that will be unpleasant for us. Instead of using a pesticide, I may choose to breed predator species that eat coddling moth eggs. Then, if I release large numbers of these predators into my orchard, I may be able to all but wipe out coddling moths – for this season at least – in my whole region.

It is also useful to say here that humans are a hypothesis-making species. We like to try to figure things out, imagine possible explanations for the events we see happening around us. We’re curious. What the scientific method did for the more curious of our ancestors is that it gave them a systematic series of steps to follow, steps that would lead them to more and more models and theories that work better and better for predicting test results. Such models then enable us to steer nature and, consequently, to live healthier, safer, more satisfying lives.

The overall conclusion to be drawn from this discussion of the scientific method, however, is that it does offer us a path toward better and better understanding of our universe and all the things in it. I got that insight at thirteen. I could see, via many examples, that the scientific method works. It gives us more control over nature, and thus, over our lives.

For all of my years since that time, I have believed that, given some time, science will solve every problem that we humans encounter. Sometimes, it does not give us reliable laws that we can apply to events in reality. Instead, in some fields, a new theory proposed by a scientist only gives us better odds; that is, it enables us to predict events in the real world more accurately and often than we were able to before we acquired the new theory, even though it doesn’t give us control over those events. For example, a new theory of how hurricanes occur probably won’t enable scientists to stop hurricanes from making landfall, but the theory may enable them to say when and where a given hurricane will do so. Then, people in the path of the hurricane can be warned to get out of its way.  

If that is the case, our logical next step is not to halt that line of research. Often, the next logical step is to test the theory further, via experiments more subtly designed to reveal why the theory is only working some of the time. Scientific testing – if it truly fits the term “scientific” – always points the way to better science. Science is not now, and probably never will be, complete. It is always telling us to think harder and test more. Form new theories; test them in subtler ways. We’re never done with any problem, but our explanations, and our ways of searching for better explanations, keep getting more nuanced and focused.

                         Picture of Earth taken from space 

                                    (credit: Wikimedia Commons)