Misguided ideas in applied ethics: the neurophilosophy of moral intuitions

Patricia Churchland is one of the most famous and controversial contemporary philosophers. She and her husband, Paul Churchland, have for decades now being pushing a notion in philosophy of mind known as “eliminativism.” Eliminativists claim that people’s common-sense understanding of the mind (to which they refer to as “folk psychology”) is false, and that moreover certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not, in fact, exist. (Here is an in-depth treatment of the concept.)

Eliminativists’ favorite analogy is with the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric models in astronomy: in ancient times, people took the appearance that the Sun and the other celestial objects were rotating around the Earth at face value, but Science (note the capital “S”) dismantled that primitive notion and gave us the modern understanding of the world.

While the analogy seems compelling at first sight — and setting aside that analogical arguments are pretty weak arguments in general — it actually reveals the limitations of eliminativism itself. To begin with, we now know that the Copernican model of the solar system is in turn incorrect. General relativity very clearly tells us that there is no privileged frame of reference in the universe, so the notion that either the Earth or the Sun is at the center of anything is misguided. More to the point, people still talk about “sunrise” and “sunset,” and they do so not because they are ignorant of advances in basic astronomy, but because it is convenient, for everyday purposes, to talk that way. Language, and in fact science itself (which is, in a sense, a particular type of language) tend to adopt the most useful levels of description for any given phenomenon, regardless of what reality is like at its “fundamental” bottom. So when the Churchlands were hoping, early on, that talk of “folk concepts” such as pain would eventually be replaced by scientifically more accurate descriptions, like “my c-fibers fired,” they were somewhat naive.

(And that’s without getting into the more complex issue that, although the firing of c-fibers is part of the causal web that generates the subjective sensation of pain, the two are not interchangeable, as we still lack a decent scientific description of subjective…