How should we understand morality and questions about good and evil? David Hume postulated that one cannot necessarily arrive to an ought from an is, and many people have taken this idea to the conclusion that science, the tool for answering is-questions, cannot be used to answer ought-questions. That is, science cannot make a distinction between right and wrong, good and evil or be used to make moral judgments. The neuroscientist and author Sam Harris has long argued against this position, especially in his book The Moral Landscape, and instead argues that not only can science answer moral questions, it is the best framework for doing so and the only one in which one can do so reliably. Although he has articulated his points on this matter a myriad of times, he has been missing a certain specific justification for his assumptions which this article tries to supply.

How do one define morality, good and evil in a satisfactory way such that science can be a useful tool to understand these concepts? Sam Harris does so by first of all defining morality to be concerning the well-being of conscious creatures, and second of all that pointless suffering for the sake of suffering should be avoided and can be described as ‘bad’. From this he argues that since the well being of conscious creatures can (potentially) be understood through factual claims about reality, one can use science to navigate the moral landscape of how one ought to behave. The remainder of this article tries to justify this kind of definition of morality. By the end of this I will not in any way have developed a complete definition, only argued for why any understanding of morality must contain a few key features.

Imagine for a second how one would define, not morality, but mountains. What is a mountain? Is Kilimanjaro a mountain, is the Empire State Building a mountain or is your left shoe a mountain? Well, that depends on how one defines the meaning of the word. For most of human history, we didn’t really have a clear definition of the word. What we had instead was a very clear and strong intuition that certain massive geological formations were similar enough to be considered part of the same concept, and things like ones left shoe was most certainly not among those things. As humanity developed the scientific method we decided to formalize this intuition into a concrete definition, and by doing so hopefully getting a better understanding of what our intuitions were modelling. The way we make these definitions is by encapsulating as much as possible about our strong intuitions into formal axioms while excluding as much as possible of what we intuitively feel does not fit.

What if we made a definition of ‘mountain’ that included your left shoe and excluded Kilimanjaro? Then this definition has no reason to exist since it inhabits none of the characteristics we were trying to model and understand in the first place. It is meaningless and useless.

It is roughly this method that has constructed any formal definition we have at our disposal and there is no apparent reason for any definition of morality to not exhibit the same characteristics.

Through evolution humans have developed very strong intuitions about right and wrong, and although history’s multitude of cultures have differed wildly in the specifics of their moral codes, some things are more or less constant throughout all of them. A brutal, unprovoked murder of your own kin is bad, but no harm has been done if you smashed a random stone into another, breaking them both.

Let’s assume we have a definition of morality in which questions of good and bad are completely orthogonal to questions of well-being of conscious creatures. If any experience any conscious entity can have has nothing to do with our understanding of morality, what preexisting intuition we had could this definition possibly model? If on top of that absolute, pointless suffering of anything that could possibly suffer doesn’t satisfy our axioms of ‘bad’, what is it exactly we were trying to formalize in the first place? How could this definition possibly be a formalization of our intuitive understanding of morality if it has absolutely nothing in common with our preexisting ideas?

If this morality has zero of the characteristics of our ingrained intuitions, it is as useless as defining your left shoe to be a mountain.

Therefore axiomatizing morality to at least be concerning the well-being of conscious creatures and ‘bad’ to be an accurate description of absolute suffering, not only makes sense, but not doing so makes no sense at all.