Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Science of morality

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. There are also suggestions to merge the content with various other articles, but no consensus on how or whether to do that. Sjakkalle (Check!) 16:45, 19 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Science of morality[edit]

Science of morality (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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Although thinly disguised, the article is essentially about one person's theory, which is to say Sam Harris (author). William M. Connolley (talk) 13:52, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep, or Merge with The Moral Landscape. I somewhat agree with William Connolley that there is a tilt in the article skewed towards Harris's point of view. But I don't think that is a reason to wipe out the article; rather, balance should be restored. This is a tough philosophical subject and I think Tesseract deserves credit for working hard on this article. It needs more references and a good copyedit. It's an important topic in the media, essentially a debate between two prominent thinkers -- and that's what I think this article should focus on: their debate. Focus on this; and we'll achieve neutrality. The first paragraph captures this; but later sections tilt in favor of Harris. But these issues (imo) are best solved by working on it, adding references, copyediting, and seeking out the help of knowledgeable people like Pfhorrest (sp?) and others here -- they've done an excellent job on the Rights article and many others.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:25, 11 March 2011 (UTC) Additional note: the idea of Merge-ing The Moral Landscape with Science of Morality seems reasonable; didn't know about the TML article until now.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 12:30, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I mostly agree with Tomwsulcer. There is a too much of a concentration on Sam Harris, but the subject of the article is a valid and important one. One that is discussed by far more people than Sam Harris, and far pre-dates him. I find the claim that it is one person's theory, to be rather strange and blatantly, and factually, incorrect.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 15:58, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Philosophy-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 20:49, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 20:49, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. This article seems to be an attempt to extend The Moral Landscape into multiple articles. It should probably be merged there. --BozMo talk 20:54, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fix - Attribute the subject to Sam Harris, and avoid wasting folks time here on a near frivolous AfD, for someone's entertainment value. Zulu Papa 5 * (talk) 00:59, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • So are *any* of the people "near frivolously" voting keep-but-fix actually going to do any fixing? No sign of it so far William M. Connolley (talk) 18:55, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • okay, I'll work on fixing it, but not right away; I'm working on several other projects; and before I do anything, I'll consult with the others first. I'm not that keen to write about philosophy ever since my article which I created, Philosophy of Spinoza, was totally overwritten, and overwritten by an uncooperative and disagreeable and insulting type at that; but luckily I kept my article alive as a knol here although it gets the least amount of readers of my knols; kind of a snooze. My general approach is to avoid POV-battling by moving possibly controversial stuff (like philosophy) to knols, and working at stuff here at Wikipedia which is less controversial.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 23:56, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am optimistic. I have heard some passionate, but ultimately constructive criticism and discussion. I like writing, and I don't at all mind discussing what to write.-Tesseract2(talk) 01:58, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: There's been a lot of recent IP changes throughout the spinozaverse, none of which raised a peep. Maybe participating in philosophy articles is easier these days? IMO, Science of Morality wasn't a philosophy article however, and I doubt it's a good idea to turn it into one.—Machine Elf 1735 09:03, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's essentially about what can be examined by looking at evidence, logic and reason. How is that not a matter of philosophy?--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 09:08, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is unavoidably philosophical to some extent, because so is science. That having been said, I still think we should try to keep it from getting way too abstract. I was thinking the theory section is pretty loaded at this point- maybe more sources for the research section would be a good focus.-Tesseract2(talk) 15:24, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Why not merge the Science of morality page with Ethical naturalism? Some reasoning...

(1)WP:NTEMP The philosophy of ethical naturalism is old, and the idea that scientists (not just philosophers) could reasonably discuss "what is moral" was a relatively new concept. Even if more sources were not consistently becoming available (which they are) this has caused a great deal of discussion and received a great deal of coverage.
(2)WP:NRVE That coverage has not only been reliable, but from various notable people.
(3)Just as the multi-disciplinary positive psychology (the science of individual flourishing) needs a page for that particular scientific inquiry, so too does the even more controversial science of right and wrong.
(4)The main issue seems to be that Sam Harris is cited plenty of times. This has been because he has written one of few books dedicated to this new idea. As time has gone on, we have seen that he continues to be cited less and less (as he should be).
-Tesseract2(talk) 01:26, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Which book is so notable that his article doesn't even mention it. Meanwhile, all Deontology has to say about Bentham is Jeremy Bentham, an early utilitarian philosopher, criticized deontology on the grounds that it was essentially a dressed-up version of popular morality, and that the unchanging principles that deontologists attribute to natural law or universal reason are really a matter of subjective opinion. Nor is it at all clear that D is the same as SoM: what makes you think they are the same? William M. Connolley (talk) 19:01, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I find I must agree with that. I don't know about the notability of the book, or if it's relevant, but Bentham does not seem to have liked Deontology, and Deontology does not seem to be in any way similar to Sam Harris' or Bentham's ideas of morality. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ZarlanTheGreen (talk • contribs) 19:21, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hazlitt writes, "Nowhere is a more logical, better-organized, or more stimulating discussion of private ethics to be found than in the two volumes of Jeremy Bentham's Deontology: or The Science of Morality.". Colonel Warden (talk) 19:48, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article is about scientific approaches to morality. Bentham's utilitarianism has this character with its hedonistic calculus - a rational theory rather than one based upon tradition, rights or religion. Colonel Warden (talk) 21:05, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hmm... seems a bit weird, but as Bentham argued the same type of stuff as Sam Harris has, and which is discussed in the article, the issue about Deontology isn't really important.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 20:11, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • It seems to me they are both discussing various, sometimes different methodological issues of a science of morality. They are quite explicit. Dewey is I think too.
About Deontology, the book is basically highlighting what to keep and what to reject. Then Bentham says that, at best, Deontology reduces to another brand of scientific, consequentialist morality (like utilitarianism).-Tesseract2(talk) 01:58, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to ethical naturalism. The idea discussed in this article, as far as I can tell, is that facts about what is good or bad, right or wrong, etc, are empirical facts, and thus can be subjected to the methods of natural science; once we (at least operationally) define what natural properties we mean by "good" etc, we then just investigate what situations, actions, etc, have those properties. That is precisely the thesis of ethical naturalism, as it was first rigorously formulated (in opposition) by G.E. Moore; and it was an operating assumption of most modern-period utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that ethical naturalism was the only alternative to subjectivist ethical theories such as cultural relativism and divine command theory. (After Moore opened up the meta-ethical debate, other alternatives were noted, such as Moore's own realist Ethical non-naturalism, the rationalist-universalist subjectivism of Ideal observer theory, and aside from all the relativist forms of non-cognitivism, R.M. Hare's universalist form of non-cognitivism called Universal prescriptivism). This article seems to be about a more recent and popular debate about the same subject (although it seems to ignore everything that's happened in metaethics in the past century or so, and is still just arguing as though universalism = naturalism). I can thus see it deserving (appropriately weighted) inclusion in the article on Ethical naturalism, but I don't think it deserves its own article, and trying to flesh this article out to be more than a piece on Harris's discussion of the subject will end up duplicating effort best spent improving Ethical naturalism instead.

(Aside, on the subject of deontology: I think there is some etymological confusion in the discussions surrounding this here. The term literally means something like "the rational study of ethical duties" and so could be loosely translated "the science of morality", but in late-modern and contemporary ethical discourse it means something much more specific, a type of normative ethical theory that utilitarians like Bentham are directly opposed to, and so should not be confused with the broader sense that people in Bentham's day often used). --Pfhorrest (talk) 09:59, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment on idea of merging Science of morality with ethical naturalism. I'm somewhat opposed to this idea of merging because what I'm thinking is that if a reader of Wikipedia wants to know about science of morality, they're mostly interested in this term and the current debate in the media between Harris and Carroll, and I'm not sure they're ready to take the plunge into heavy-duty ethical naturalism. A reader might want to know what the debate is about; who's debating; when this has happened; the outlines of the debate in terms of major points; examples; and sources for further exploration; at this point, then, they may want to go further into ethical naturalism, meta-ethics, deontology. I bet many readers, if they typed in science of morality in the search bar, and then were plunked down into ethical naturalism, might wonder -- what am I doing here? It's like they had hoped to find an introductory class in philosophy, but found themselves in a graduate seminar.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 12:38, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
To add to what Tomwsulcer says: I don't (yet) have a good grasp of the formal terminology and definitions, but... Would Science of morality not also count as broader category than ethical naturalism? (thus meaning that it would deserve a separate page, much like how Atheism has it's own page, despite the existence of pages like Agnostic atheism and Apatheism)--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 12:54, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking of it as a new field of science, I'm not sure whether it is subordinate, superior, or somehow to the left of the philosophical issues it touches. Is there any widely agreed upon literature on this topic? Is natural philosophy superior or even wholly necessary for physics? To some extent I think it is possible that the scientific method is a particular philosophy- complete with specific times when it says "I don't know yet". Calling something a science seems to be saying that we are applying a certain bunch of practices (accepted premises) that span epistemology, metaphysics, and now presumably ethics and metaethics. In my mind, rejecting the premises of science amounts to rejecting it's particular philosophy.
Hopefully that made some sense. To some extent I'm also wary of Tom's point; there may be good reason to describe how science could prescribe social ethics without delving too deep into other uses of 'morality' in analytic philosophy. That is, we should mention the related philosophy of ethical naturalism, and definitely make that page better (it's surprisingly short).-Tesseract2(talk) 15:24, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: There's the thing, “it seems to ignore everything that's happened in metaethics in the past century or so”. Harris characterizes “philosophizing” as mere solipsism and he explicitly tried to make an end-run around it. I think we would need to cite philosophical WP:RS claiming him for philosophy, claiming he has a rigorous philosophical thesis, (I'm not saying it's the wrong assignment but “precisely the thesis of ethical naturalism” is fairly broad... it may have accumulated some unclaimed baggage in the last hundred years). I think it's prudent, given that Harris makes no pretense whatsoever of engaging in professional philosophical discourse. To Harris, it's about science, and his advice to the scientist, as quoted in the ethical naturalism article:
“why would we listen to a [ solipsist ] in the first place?”.
I agree, the article has been “about a more recent and popular debate” and as I said yesterday, on the article's talk page, I don't think Harris' part should be played down in order to “flesh this article out to be more than a piece on Harris's discussion...” I think both articles will be stronger if they maintain their separate focus. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Harris' popular discussion is notable enough to support it's own article apart from the book, (a merge target where WP:UNDUE wouldn't be an issue).
I'm concerned about the weigh that's already been given in the ethical naturalism article. I don't see it supporting much more... On Feb 14, I moved down the "Morality as a science" section {Main|Science of morality}, from it's place at the top of the article. That may be more indicative of the need to expand ethical naturalism... but I think one way to cope with the enthusiastic support Harris and other pundits enjoy, is to allow that notoriety room to flourish where it won't eclipse the dull humdrum of mainstream professionals.
With apologies to Pfhorrest for so many quotes but a different conclusion... I do agree, mostly, and I couldn't have said it better myself. Thanks.—Machine Elf 1735 17:53, 13 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]


  • Keep if it's broke then fix it, don't delete it. Nergaal (talk) 23:56, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge. This article merely attempts to extend The Moral Landscape into multiple articles. It should probably be merged there. Within the large field of neuroscience, there are less than a handful of moralists/essentialists trying to turn science into morality. As it stands, it's their personal opinions in a sea of NO scientific consensus.--Tallard (talk) 07:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Interesting point; I didn't know about The Moral Landscape before casting my vote; I'm in favor of merging the article The Science of Morality with The Moral Landscape.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 12:27, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • You seem to be implying that "mere hypotheses", don't deserve their own page. That's hardly a valid point, is it? There are many pages on hypotheses: String theory, Atkins diet, Detoxification (alternative medicine), Creationism, Aquatic ape hypothesis... Please note, that aside from string theory, none of my examples are particularly respected by scientists. Indeed, most of my examples are pseudo-science, if that. They are still subjects that require their own pages. Also, while Sam Harris does emphasise neuroscience (many have stated he greatly overemphasises it. Both amongst critics and proponents), that branch of science is by no means the branch that most proponents of a Science or Morality focus on, nor is it the only way that Sam Harris claims that science can investigate morals.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 14:38, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I must also disagree that the Science of Morality page "merely attempts to extend The Moral Landscape". The fact is that Sam Harris is not the first (or the last) to support- more than just any ethical naturalism- the idea that scientists as well as philosophers can discuss normative ethics. The Moral Landscape attempts to focus on Harris' points, complete with his slight aversion to engaging philosophical issues more satisfactorily. In contrast, the philosophy of the scientist (and of science) takes some important stances on various philosophical issues, and ultimately there have been various thinkers who think the resulting scientific methods of the day is integral to answering questions like "What ought we, morally, to do as a rule in situations like this? What about this situation in particular?". Hence the Science of morality page.-Tesseract2(talk) 15:03, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Strong" keep. No valid grounds for deletion were given. Theory of relativity was also "one person's theory". Should we delete it or merge that page as well? "The article is essentially about one person's theory" is no argument at all. The article may have some minor WP:UNDUE issues (I'm not claiming it does), but the subject is clearly notable[1], sufficiently neutral, and perfectly valid. The page can obviously be improved, but that should be solved through regular editing. As for the idea of merging, the Moral Landscape is only one of hundreds of works that deal with the subject, and even though the pages may have a bit of overlap, the scope of the article clearly goes way beyond the subject of Sam Harris' latest book. — Rankiri (talk) 17:31, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd just like to state, though it may be unnecessary, that I wholeheartedly agree on all points.--ZarlanTheGreen (talk) 17:50, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge with Ethical naturalism. This seems to be a new name for an old idea, and the use of the word "science" is not any more illuminating than its use in Christian science" or "scientology". There should not be two separate articles that deal with what is apparently the same concept, neither of which distinguishes itself from the other --JimWae (talk) 21:51, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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