Ethics and Observation, Harman

(I'll explain the cat picture soon enough.)

I'm having great difficulty trying to pin down the difference between the role of observation in ethics and science that Harman describes (in "The Nature of Morality"). Not sure why, but I'm just unable to state the difference between ethics and science with regards to observation in any clear way. Anyway, here's my attempt to formulate it. Hopefully this will help me get closer to understanding it.

Harman's thesis: Observational evidence plays a role in science that it doesn't play in ethics. Specifically, observations can provide evidence for scientific theories, but observations can't provide evidence for ethical theories. Ethics fails to meet the standards of science, then.

So how does observation work in science? Harman begins by telling you how observation doesn't work in science. You might think that science works like this: you, the scientist, observe a new species of animal: looks kinda like a cat, kinda like a horse. It might be tempting to think that you're getting an usullied picture of the world when you make this observation. Like you're just downloading a bunch of data into your brain. But that wouldn't be quite true. Philosophers and psychologists know that this isn't the way that people perceive the world; there's a lot of your preexisting beliefs that go into your perceptions. Put another way, how you think about the world has a lot to do with how you see the world. For example, you need to know what a "box" is before you could possible perceive a box. For another example, suppose you experienced something totally unlike anything that you had experienced before. Would you be able to describe it? So perception is more like receiving processed data than it is receiving straight data. All of our data gets processed in the process of observation.

So does that mean that we should be skeptical of our observations? Why should we think that there is anything behind our observations, if our mind and preexisting beliefs color the way that we look at the world?

The answer, for Harman, is that we have good reason to believe that our observations are true because of inference to the best explanation. What is the best explanation of your observation? And by that I mean, what's the best explanation of the fact that you had the observation that you had? Well, let's list some of the possible explanations of the fact that you had the observation that you had.

(a) You were hallucinating, causing you to have the observation of something that seemed real.
(b) Your theory, your preexisting beliefs, colored the way that you observed the world. What you really saw was something that didn't have the kind of animal you observed, but you interpreted it in that way because of your theory and beliefs.
(c) You actually saw something in the world that looked the way you thought it did.

The best explanation is the third one. So in order to explain the fact that you observed something, we need to infer that you actually did observe something. It's inference to the best explanation.

Now, clearly this is right, but I'm not sure if it all adds up the way I'm describing it. What makes (c) the best explanation? Is it the simplest? What does simple mean? Does simple mean only one sentence long? Is it simpler to assume that you were hallucinating or simpler to assume that you actually saw a new species? By simpler, do we just mean "more likely to happen to a person"? So we assume that people see real stuff all the time, and from that we reason that the best explanation of a phenomenon is that you actually saw something? But that's gonna end up being a bit circular, because what we're interested in knowing is what justifies the thought that we're not hallucinating during observation.

Let me move on to ethics. Ethics, Harman says, is quite unlike science when it comes to observation. So, having told us how science works, we should be able to see that ethics doesn't work that way. Let's give it a shot.

So, Harman discusses the example of an ethical obseravtion. You're walking down the street, and you see a bunch of kids burning a cat (his example, not mine!). You immediately come to the conclusion "It's wrong to burn a cat." Now, you didn't necessarily believe this before you saw it. It might be that life never afforded you the opportunity to consider the case of a cat lynching. So we can call this a full-fledged observation of an ethical fact. Of course, of course, your pre-existing beliefs about what's right and wrong factor into your observation, but that doesn't matter because (as Harman argued above) the case is the same for any observation, including a scientific one. Every obseration is processed through the brain's machinary before coming to your consciousness, whether it's an ethical observation or a scientific one.

Now, in science we said that we have reason to believe that scientific facts are true because they are necessary for providing the best explanation for the fact that you had the observation that you did. Now, let's try this for ethics. What is the best explanation for the fact that you had the ethical obseration that you did, that you observed that it's wrong to burn cats? Here are a couple options:
(a) You actually did perceived something in the world that appears the way that you observed it, that is, you actually managed to perceive/see ethical properties in the world, the same way people observe that a ball is blue or that a tree is tall.
(b) You were "hallucinating." Your experience was that of an observation about something real in the world, but actually it was your brain and beliefs doing all the work.

Around here is where I get stuck. The idea is supposed to be that the best explanation of the fact that you had an ethical observation is (b). And so inference to the best explanation doesn't require any ethical facts to exist. But isn't this just to assume what what we were trying to prove? Oy. Need to get back to this.