Facts don’t matter

... when it comes to morality

The difference between scientific progress and charlatanry is falsifiability.
Make a prediction about the boundaries of your hypothesis and tell people what
– according to your theory – is utterly impossible.
If you test it and it happens anyway, your theory is wrong. Too bad, it was probably an elegant one, but that’s how we gain knowledge; propose, try, fail, rinse & repeat.
You can never proof your theory is right; you can only show it isn’t.

This basic process is well known. The person who codified it, was an intellectual giant of the 20th century: Karl Popper.
Popper was not “just” a philosopher of science and the scientific method. He was also an ardent supporter of liberal democracy. Having Jewish ancestry, he fled from Europe to New Zealand, where he wrote his major opus: The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945.

In it, he made or at least restated, one of the most astonishing observations about ethics: critical dualism

Critical dualism thus emphasizes the impossibility of reducing decisions or norms to facts; it can therefore be described as a dualism of facts and decisions.

Or to put it more bluntly:

Facts don’t matter!

This may seem rather surprising at first coming from a mind so deeply involved in the basics of the scientific method itself, but let me borrow an example from Popper to exemplify the idea.
If we think about the abysmal institution of slavery, it becomes blatantly apparent that societies decision to oppose, shun and later fight slavery did not depend on “all men being born free and equal, and no man is born in chains”. Not being born in literal chains around the wrists had little impact upon the decision of almost all “great” societies to put untold millions of people in chains later on.
Nor did the fact that people were born into slavery from a legal perspective lend any value to it.
The abolition of slavery, one of the great achievements of the 19th century, was not brought about by a sudden change of facts about a baby’s “objective state of freedom” at birth; it was made possible by a change of moral sentiments, courage … and probably the appearance of a new economically powerful class of people, workers, spurred by the technological advancements of the industrialization.

People decided to start treating all human beings remotely humanely … and slavery was gone. There was never an objective reason why certain groups of people were destined to be slaves and and another group of people was destined to be masters; it was “just” the result of people acting in a certain way and believing in a certain narrative.
Once the story that people told themselves and believed in changed from:
“Duh! Obviously there just have to slaves!” to “All men are born free and equal”, and people started to act accordingly, a new moral norm and and new normal was created.

If we consider a fact as alterable, then we can always base a number of different decision on this fact: we can try to change the fact, we can try to resist any attempted of changing it, we can decide to do nothing at all.
Let’s say there were an identifiable group of people with low cognitive capabilities.
Should we spend more resources to educate them, because they need more help? Should we not educate them at all, because it’s an inefficient use of resources? Should we help them with brain-machine-interfaces or gene therapy? Should we make them our leaders? Or should we sterilize them? There is nothing in objective reality that would make one of those things intrinsically more moral. It’s up to us to make up our rules. This frees societies and individuals from stale traditions and the verdicts of ancient, imaginary entities like ghouls, ghosts or gods. But it simultaneously burdens societies with the full brunt of responsibilities: When it comes to ethical norms, there is nobody to blame but ourselves.

This lack of objective reference points for our ethical moorings has often been conflated with arbitrariness; “if there is no objective standard”, the critics would say, “all is null and void. Everything goes!”
But this criticism doesn’t recognize that the duality of facts and decisions does not negate the factual consequences of our decisions. Different sets of ethical rules will create different outcomes. People can still judge the outcomes their agreed upon ethical systems give rise to. If people are not oblivious to material well-being, an assumption that seems safe to make, the differences in the moral systems will lead to measurable impacts on the lives of the members of societies. These impacts can, are and will be used to rank order the sets moral norms. Some will just “work better” than others.

This, of course, will be called consequentialism, a “the ends justify the means” – morality.
And it’s true, this view-point measures ethical norms by the preferences of societies in respect to the resulting consequences. But this is of course true for all ethical systems. Nobody tries to implement something that they themselves think will bring about terrible consequences for themselves, their families or societies. Instead they try to enforce societal standards they deem “good”, like in bringing about heaven on earth or at least buying a ticket for eternal bliss in the afterlife. Or eradicating polio and handing out vitamin pills to combat malnourishment. Whatever is preferred.
All ethical systems are dealing with a cost-benefit analysis. At least implicitly. Some take into account unproven, heavenly benefits or hellish costs, some are rather sticking to tangible, measurable or at least plausible costs and benefits.

Critical dualism can not decide on the veracity of that. It merely states that even proof of the existence of Zeus would not tell you anything about whether or not you should follow the moral guidelines associated with him.

You just can’t get to an ought, from an is.

This leaves us with a daunting realization: there is no higher power stopping us from implementing the moral norms we’d like. Let’s hope we’ll choose wisely.

Or better yet: let’s have system to iteratively improve on our morals.