People often seem to confuse Philosophy with a science. It’s not. The only way you can disprove any philosophical viewpoint is by conclusively demonstrating, to the satisfaction of almost all other philosophers, that it inherently contains some irreconcilable internal logical inconsistency with itself (a relatively rare outcome). Other than that, philosophy is an exercise in enumerating, naming, and classifying, in the absence of any actual evidence on the subject, all the possible answers that could be true to interesting questions on subjects that we know nothing about, and agreeing to disagree about which of them seems more plausible. Philosophical progress thus normally increases the number of possible answers to a question, rather than decreasing it. Anyone criticizing human philosophers for not making enough progress in decreasing the number of answers to important questions has fundamentally misunderstood what philosophers actually do.
Once we have actual evidence about something, such that you can do the Bayesian thing, falsify some theories and this finally reduce the number of plausible answers, then it becomes a science, and (gradually, as scientific process is made and the range of plausible answers decreases) stops being interesting to philosophers. There is a border between Philosophy and Science, and it only moves in one direction: Science expands and Philosophy loses interest and retreats. If we’re eventually able to build artificial brains and “upload” ourselves, the resulting knowledge about consciousness will be a science of consciousness, and philosophers will gradually stop being interested in discussing consciousness (and presumably find something more obscure that we still have no evidence about to discuss instead).
Morality is part way through this process of retreat. We do have a science of morality: it’s called evolutionary ethics, and is a perfectly good subfield of evolutionary psychology (albeit one where doing experiments is rather challenging). There are even some philosophers who have noticed this, and are saying “hey, guys, here are the answers to all those questions about where human moral intuitions and beliefs come from that we’ve been discussing for the last 2500 years-or-so”. However, a fair number of moral philosophers don’t seem to have yet acknowledged this, and are still discussing things like moral realism and moral relativism (issues on which evolutionary ethics gives very clear and simple answers).
People often seem to confuse Philosophy with a science. It’s not. The only way you can disprove any philosophical viewpoint is by conclusively demonstrating, to the satisfaction of almost all other philosophers, that it inherently contains some irreconcilable internal logical inconsistency with itself (a relatively rare outcome). Other than that, philosophy is an exercise in enumerating, naming, and classifying, in the absence of any actual evidence on the subject, all the possible answers that could be true to interesting questions on subjects that we know nothing about, and agreeing to disagree about which of them seems more plausible. Philosophical progress thus normally increases the number of possible answers to a question, rather than decreasing it. Anyone criticizing human philosophers for not making enough progress in decreasing the number of answers to important questions has fundamentally misunderstood what philosophers actually do.
Once we have actual evidence about something, such that you can do the Bayesian thing, falsify some theories and this finally reduce the number of plausible answers, then it becomes a science, and (gradually, as scientific process is made and the range of plausible answers decreases) stops being interesting to philosophers. There is a border between Philosophy and Science, and it only moves in one direction: Science expands and Philosophy loses interest and retreats. If we’re eventually able to build artificial brains and “upload” ourselves, the resulting knowledge about consciousness will be a science of consciousness, and philosophers will gradually stop being interested in discussing consciousness (and presumably find something more obscure that we still have no evidence about to discuss instead).
Morality is part way through this process of retreat. We do have a science of morality: it’s called evolutionary ethics, and is a perfectly good subfield of evolutionary psychology (albeit one where doing experiments is rather challenging). There are even some philosophers who have noticed this, and are saying “hey, guys, here are the answers to all those questions about where human moral intuitions and beliefs come from that we’ve been discussing for the last 2500 years-or-so”. However, a fair number of moral philosophers don’t seem to have yet acknowledged this, and are still discussing things like moral realism and moral relativism (issues on which evolutionary ethics gives very clear and simple answers).