Fact 1.5
More on Sam Harris’s 9 facts and why they don’t (I think) get us from is to ought. Just a little more, because the power is about to be turned off. Work is difficult around here these days.
FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of wellbeing for many sentient creatures…FACT #3: Our “values” are ways of thinking about this domain of possibilities. If we value liberty, privacy, benevolence, dignity, freedom of expression, honesty, good manners, the right to own property, etc.—we value these things only in so far as we judge them to be part of the second set of factors conducive to (someone’s) wellbeing.
Sure. But it’s more complicated than that, and Facts 4-9 don’t discuss some of the most important complications. The more common situation about cultural practices and the like is that they lead to well-being for some people and misery for other people. It just isn’t usually the case that cultural practice X leads to well-being for everyone or that cultural practice Y leads to misery for everyone. One of the things that cultural practices do is sort people and allot more well-being to some than to others.
I think we lose sight of how new and bizarre and non-natural liberal morality is. I strongly agree that it is a better morality, but alas that is not because it is natural. It’s more because it isn’t. It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well, it’s not natural to think that everyone should have equal treatment, it’s not natural to think that women matter just as much as men do. What is natural is, once one gets past close relatives, likely to be pretty disgusting. Primates are not naturally universally altruistic, to put it mildly. (Bonobos are closer to that description than most primates. But how much can we rely on bonobo nature to claim that humans are naturally generous and egalitarian?) What is natural tends to be zero-sum, and that means that self-interest (at least) is a lot more natural than other-interest. We have to buck our own natures in order to be good, or even decent. That’s fact 1.5, perhaps.
“…What is natural tends to be zero-sum, and that means that self-interest (at least) is a lot more natural than other-interest…”
Yes, OB. And also ‘yes, but…’
The anthropologist Colin Turnbull wrote a most interesting and horrifying book about this, about the Ik tribe of the Uganda-Sudan-Kenya border region: “He shows in detail how survival becomes a personal affair. Food is no longer shared. Men hunt what they can and eat it far from the village and women collect only for themselves.
“As starvation sets in children and old people die as they are not fed, the tribe becomes known for its cattle thieving among the neighbouring groups. The thieving becomes intense among themselves and Turnbull interestingly shows how this becomes the new norm. Honesty becomes foolishness and lying becomes an art…”
But in a Darwinian sense, such ‘communities’ are selected out. Moralities that trade naked unthinking self-interest off against altruism would appear to have (collective) survival value.
http://www1.dragonet.es/users/markbcki/trnbll.htm
Extrapolating on a similar thought, there’s also the fact that people are capable of finding happiness in social roles that also happen to produce avoidable misery, at least so long as they convince themselves that there’s no way out. People are capable of finding hope and courage in the most wretched situations, in true Stockholm Syndrome style.
I don’t know if this really bucks Harris’s argument though, because they’re concerns with how to make his views practical. And his point is that overall wellbeing is ascertainable in principle, but maybe not so easy in practice.
This sounds like Eagleton’s views against humanism. Unexpected friends?
I like this post Ophelia. I especially like:
“I think we lose sight of how new and bizarre and non-natural liberal morality is.”
Even though your wonderful linguistic talents could phrase that better. ;)
If sentience is the ability to feel or perceive, then even bacteria can do this. As individuals, we can’t possibly promote our own well-being without causing misery for other individuals. Instead of starting from a human perspective, we need to ask what leads to the well-being of our ecosystem. If ecosystems are functioning properly, then the organisms (humans included) living within are likely thriving. Even then, climate will fluctuate and species will go extinct and new ones will arise.
I agree that liberal morality is something unnatural – if wonderfully so.
One of the problems I have with the idea of morality being ‘natural’ is hinted at in OB’s reference to bonobos.
If we back up the notion of a natural morality by analogies with animal behaviour aren’t we also claiming that animals are also moral agents?
And if we did decide upon an objective definition of ‘morality’ and we find animal behaviour which matches what our ‘objectivity’ says is moral, do we then define those animals as ‘moral’ even if they are following blind instinct or is the behaviour itself not sufficient for it to be defined as ‘moral’ because we require a level of reasoning behind it?
Even if we put animals aside for one moment, is morality just behaviour or is it the thoughts that lie behind that behaviour?
OB:
I think you misunderstand Sam Harris here. His argument isn’t that there is a natural morality as in one that’s just there and we must follow or even that morality must ultimately match our intuitions or social institutions or anything like that. I think a far better way to understand how Harris thinks morals are objective is to think of them as somehow inevitable, that we will ultimately arrive at the right set of principles when we use the right tools to examine the question.
“It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well…”
Too true. People have been admonished for literally millennia to treat strangers better. I was struck by how many times stories like the Odyssey dealt with the obligations of civilized people to treat travelers well. Granted, your point about the novelty of extending this obligation to *all* people being new still stands.
Michael also brings up a different perspective where our empathy is expanded further to encompass entire (possibly planet-wide) ecosystems. Peter Singer has been arguing since the 70’s that we have an obligation to empathize with animals and minimize their suffering.
I’ve always thought that how far an individual was willing to extend their empathy said something important about that person. I have yet to pin down just exactly what that something is.
TGM – well I’m just addressing what Sam says in the list post. I’ve read only a bit of his other recent writing on the subject.
Shatterface, you might want to check out an article in Scientific American titled The Ethical Dog. There is a link in the Nota Bene section at Artsandlettersdaily.com
Now we’re getting into anthropology and primatology. I don’t agree with your assertions of what is natural and what isn’t, Ophelia. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think we have some strong natural urges that do tell us to treat foreigners equally (for instance)–and others that tell us the opposite. The task of morality is sorting through various natural impulses and choosing which ones to follow–not to “buck” or defy our own natures. I think liberal morality is obvious, but the problem is that it’s just one of many obvious choices that our “natures” present to us.
Basically you’re taking an interpretation of animal behavior as hugely self-driven and socially Darwinian, which is a rather old-fashioned picture of it. More recent research has indicated that the picture is more complex and does include strong reciprocal altruism.
@That Guy Montag: I’m not sure I understand how to interpret your meaning. Inevitably we will reach the “right” set of principles if we use the “right” tools? How does “if” fit here? Or do you mean it is only inevitable IF we use the right tools? Either way, where do we find the “objective” part here? Perhaps I’m brainwashed by too many centuries of Hume; or I’m just obtuse, which is certainly possible. Probable, even.
@OB: Wonderful post. I’m not following Harris here at all, I think. Definitely appreciate your willingness not to fall in line, and your unwillingness to let anything this important go by without comment.
I think Harris owes us all an explanation of what he means by “objective” and just who he is trying to convince. If he means that it is objectively true that some things are morally bad by “our” standards, and that we should say so, I agree with him. If he means that some things are morally bad by an objective standard whose bindingness transcends all definitions, affective attitudes, and human institutions (the definition of “objective” used in metaethics, but also the definition that is widely understood in Western societies, especially among people who argue for a religion-based morality), then I disagree with him. He’s gone nowhere near showing that morality is objective in the second sense, which is used by both philosophers and the folk.
Only the second definition is much use in intercultural debate with people who don’t share our institutions, definitions, and affective attitudes. But it looks from the TED video that his real purpose is to put steel in the spines of people who basically share his affective attitudes, i.e. people with essentially liberal values.
That’s fine, but he needs to be clearer, rather than expressing himself in a way that is going to make anyone who knows anything about metaethics splutter, “But … but … but …” And he may as well give up on all the “is/ought” stuff, which gets nowhere, except to set off a lot of alarm bells with many of his allies.
If the second thing is what he has in mind, all he has to say is, “Look, these other systems really do cause suffering, stifle human development, etc. They are wrong, based on non-arbitrary standards that we in this hall all accept. Stop being so damn tolerant of them.”
That wouldn’t be a very new thing to say, but it is always worthwhile to have a semi-celebrity say it.
I think I’m with TGM and Jenavir on this.
While Ophelia may choose to refer to strictly one presentation by Harris, I think it is unfair to judge that one as an all-encompassing treatise.
I would think the presentation was made within a “paradigm” of current thoughts on animal “proto-morality”, including various forms and degrees of reciprocal altruism. Not only primates (e.g. “Good natured”, Frans de Waal), but other species as well.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
I agree with TGM. Harris’s “argument isn’t that there is a natural morality … or even that morality must ultimately match our intuitions … . To understand how Harris thinks morals are objective … think of them as somehow inevitable, that we will ultimately arrive at the right set of principles when we use the right tools to examine the question.”
In other words, if you think about it properly, you can figure out what’s right. Animals can’t do that. Humans — a few of them, anyway — can. (Most won’t try; and presumably some can’t even if they try. But that is a different topic.)
Nice to see people agreeing with me for a change.
To make things clear, I agree with Russell that Harris hasn’t done nearly enough to make his case and with this being my first proper foray into Moral Realism I’m learning that this certainly isn’t easy philosophy.
That said the more I look at it the more I think Sam’s argument has a lot of leg to it. Specifically in relation to your point Michael, I think one way Sam would say morals are inevitable is in much the same way as the way that the way we do Science is inevitable. Secularism for example is inevitable once you stop and really think about the kinds of impact we want the state to have to on our lives; the religious might want a theocracy but theocracies will inevitably lead to persecution which doesn’t fit with principles of tolerance that tend to underpin even religious arguments here.
Now of course Russell has made it clear that this doesn’t address his criticisms, in this example the fact that we still need to justify tolerance and that justification still needs to be justified etc. but I still think that given work this line of argument could work.
“I think one way Sam would say”
What are we talking about here? Who cares what anyone thinks Sam would say? I’m talking about what he did say in that particular post. I don’t consider Sam a divinity or an oracle whose views have to be predicted and speculated about. I’m not invested in what he might could would say. I’m just addressing one particular post, and ideas that flow from it.
Jenavir,
“Basically you’re taking an interpretation of animal behavior as hugely self-driven and socially Darwinian, which is a rather old-fashioned picture of it.”
No I’m not. Read the post more carefully. It’s full of qualifications.
Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene made a similar point at the end of the book when he said “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators”.
Yes, I was partly thinking of that, along with the whole of the Devil’s Chaplain essay.
“People have been admonished for literally millennia to treat strangers better. I was struck by how many times stories like the Odyssey dealt with the obligations of civilized people to treat travelers well.”
Quite. And those are travelers – i.e. guest-friends, which was a special (moral) term in Greek. Strangers were another matter entirely. The first thing that happens on Odysseus’s trip home is that he and his men land at a settlement and kill all the men and kidnap the women and children. That’s what ‘strangers’ were for. It’s simply narrated, as one might narrate a story of finding an apple tree. There’s no worry, no guilt, it’s just what happened.
OB,
No I’m not. Read the post more carefully. It’s full of qualifications.
You do have some qualifications, yes. But statements like “It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well,” I think, overstate the case.
OB:
I don’t know why I should feel ashamed about pointing out the strongest argument Harris could make. I add the qualification only because I know that he doesn’t make it, but I think that sort of position is very strongly implied in his argument. Depite that even if I accept that Sam Harris doesn’t make that kind of argument, that certainly wouldn’t stop me from making that kind of argument.
As for the treatment of strangers I think that’s a very telling case. We’re all agreed that there is no natural fact that says we should be kind to strangers and many of our human inclinations stop us from doing so. What natural inclination could possibly stop us from treating strangers poorly? I’d argue the only possible human inclination that could force us to do so is consistency; that we can give no good reason to prefer the wellbeing of our own group over that of others. In other words, it’s a principle of reason that we treat others ethically, not an inclination, or intuition or even a question of human wellbeing but a simple and inescapable principle of how we make our beliefs, ethical or otherwise, match the world.
TGM – well I didn’t say you should feel ashamed! I’m just not sure what the relevance is of saying what Sam would say when I’m (I think) discussing what he did say. Sorry if I sounded irritable though.
I think the other thing about strangers is a matter of learning, and acquiring, and adding. We can expand our morality to include more and more people/animals. Those aren’t natural, but they can be learned. Hooray for the artificial!