UC Irvine

What is the role of science in morality? Some have proposed that science can tell us what we should value. I reject this notion, showing that it leads to the naturalistic fallacy. Instead of normative value, I argue, science has practical value for our moral deliberations. We should use science to understand the cognitive processes behind our moral behaviors. This informed introspection will allow us to see our own moral activities descriptively, exposing the ways in which they veer away from how we prescriptively conceptualize our own moral codes. Our informed introspection will illuminate our moral beliefs, intuitions, and judgements, pointing out incoherence between our moral behaviors and our moral principles. That is, at times we may unintentionally act in ways that are contrary to our deeply held moral principles. By incorporating scientific information about our moral processes into our moral deliberations, we will gain better agency over our moral behaviors. We will know when our moral processes are likely to pull us away from our moral principles, and we will have practical ways to correct for it. To illustrate how we can use science to make concrete changes in our moral deliberations, I provide three examples. First, an informed introspection reframes the way we think about moral regret. Second, it calls us to be skeptical of how we use factual beliefs in our moral deliberations. Third, it also calls for skepticism about our moral intuitions. Adopting these changes will help us build coherence between our moral behaviors and our moral principles, giving us more autonomy as moral agents and helping us make decisions we will be more satisfied with upon reflection.