My stomach is mine, yours is yours
It occurs to me that Sam Harris could have helped his case if he had stated his core claim more fully from the outset. His core claim omits the very thing that makes morality non-obvious and disputatious*.
For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief:
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds – and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).
Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science.
Yes but. Yes but you left the difficult part out.
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds and on the fact that each mind is separate from all others.
The fact that each of us can directly experience only our own suffering and well-being is why we need morality and values at all; without that it would all be straightforward, like hunger prompting us to find and eat food.
Morality isn’t about “if you’re suffering, try to stop.” We already know that! Morality is about “you’re fine but those people over there are starving, you should share your food with them, with the result that you are hungrier and they are rescued from starving.” And then about arguments over dependency and causation and responsibility and proximity and 50 million other things, many of which benefit from scientific input but few of which are simply settled (or in Harris’s word, determined) by science.
Harris should have included that in his argument in brief all along.
*Update: I think that’s not really the right word. I think that word applies to people who like to dispute, as with “litigious.” But “disputable” wasn’t exactly what I meant…so I used disputatious anyway, despite knowing it wasn’t really right. The really right word doesn’t exist, so I bent one, thus possibly creating confusion. Language is tricky. (No one has emailed me to say that’s the wrong word…I just felt like saying.)
Was that supposed to channel Ford Prefect? (You don’t see. You don’t see at all. I haven’t got to the clever bit yet. You want to hear the clever bit?)
I still don’t see what is supposed to be so new about Harris’ claim. He’s clearly not doing the really difficult bit, which is truly naturalizing ethics, explaining how to get ought from is. Instead, he’s just saying that, assuming an a priori foundation for ethics, we should figure out the best way to implement that foundation. Sure, but…so? That isn’t the source of the conflicts he identifies — the conflicts are precisely about the foundations, and not how to implement them.
No, I don’t see it either. Maybe his idea is that it’s new to non-specialists, but I don’t think even that is true. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s not.
I must say I’m surprised by all the people who go wow, wow, wow, this changes everything, Harris is now the morality guy, etc.
Yes. There is also a worrying trend of people saying “”Wow! Harris has solved morality. Philosophy is clearly useless.”
Another major problem with Harris’ ideas is that even having an objective measure of well-being doesn’t answer questions about what you do with the readings of well-being. His views seems to me to be like saying that we don’t need any economists because we know the price of things. What are the relative values of short-term spending as against investment, for example? What about the differences between state control and free markets?
Even with some hypothetical true measures of well-being and suffering there are still difficult moral questions about what to do with the measurements.
Exactly. Which he finally gets around to admitting about halfway through the book, but that’s waaaay too late.
The pesky thing is that we can’t get the book here in the UK for some months.
It’s annoying how publishers have separate release dates for UK and US. These days, so much of the public conversation about noteworthy books happens online—where such geographic boundaries are moot.
The question is (or might be) whether Harris is committed to a form of moral realism (values just are facts) or a kind of pragmatism (values are negotiable but science gives us the tools to find the best answers). I don’t like the first option, but some of what Harris says suggest the latter version. Or the latter is his fall back.
The difference is that the realist thinks the job is over when we discover the fact, whereas the pragmatist will recognize the social nature and say our decision is informed by what the facts are, while choice is preserved.
I’ve had TML on my shelf since it came out, and I still can’t get round to reading it. What am I mssing? Obviously, the jury has come back on that one, and I think it says, ‘Not much!’ He talks about different peaks in the moral landscape. But how do you find a peak if someone doesn’t value something? Surely, the peaks are not determined solely on the basis of whether something is an aspect of human flourishing, for anything might be thought to be a matter of flourishing. Isn’t that a big problem? Unless flourishing is the way you sneak values into the landscape. After all, you might say that pain is not a matter of human flourishing, but clearly there are lots of people who think that someone else’s pain is related to their flourishing. Doesn’t this end up with the same problem that Bentham faces, that sums of pains and pleasures can be traded off, just so long as the total amount of flourishing is greater? Because, after all, to suggest that everyone must count, is already to have introduced a value consideration that science cannot determine. I know I’m doing this without reading the book, which seems pretty perverse, when Steve is still waiting for his copy, and considering that I already have it on my shelf. But should I really take it down? I’ve a lot of other things to read.
I have this concern: the price of failure in this area could be high for Sam. He is one of the architects of Gnu Atheism. Like it or not, he is therefore a “representative” of atheism. If he fails on something as significant as redefining morality, there may well be gloating. Will this be harmful? Will it look like “atheism” is a moral failure? I don’t know. But I am concerned.
I am left baffled as to why Harris never considered that he was discussing such a vague abstract term as ‘well-being’ as forming the foundation of his moral project.
How does a mind experience well-being exactly?
Blackford attempted many times to pin down what well-being was, and the replies were never satisfactory.
It seems well-being is either happiness, in which case we are down the well-worn path of utilitarianism, or it’s pleasure, in which case we’re down the well-worn path of hedonism. If it means health, then medical ethics. Nothing is new here.
Still, I stand my suggestion that morality is based on sympathy. It’s a little bit more than only sympathy, like life experiences and reason informing sympathy, but the underlying basis for morality is sympathy.
“The fact that each of us can directly experience only our own suffering and well-being”
..but what about those pesky mirror neurons? They seem quite real for me, at least. When I see someone making a fool out of themselves, it also makes me a bit uncomfortable also. Not so much mirroring of physical pain in my case, but you milage may vary…..
And even if we can’t feel it, we can assume that the effect something has on one person will be somewhat in the general direction if how it will be for most people, and infer something from that. That is part of learning, and these powerful brains of ours..
Honestly, I don’t get what’s revolutionary about Harris’ book, but sometimes even the banale has to be spelled out for people.
‘conducive to disputation’, perhaps.
I don’t have SH’s book, and, like Eric MacDonald, I don’t really feel any strong desire to read it in consequence of what I have read about it. Ethical problems, in my experience, arise constantly and in a variety of forms in one’s own life and in life more broadly conceived, and, yes, there are a few rough-and-ready rules (the Golden Rule) that have value, but to claim that there are right and wrong answers that can be objectively determined by the methods of a very broadly defined science, by some sort of moral calculus, seems absurd to me.
And, having just read Egbert’s comment, I think Egbert is right.
I think the interesting stuff is in the footnotes of “The Moral Landscape”. He has a nice rebuttal to Russell B. in and around there.
Still, I didn’t get far into the text itself before I lost all motivation to keep reading. I can buy moral objectivity, and I can buy moral truth. Moral realism, however, is much too expensive.
Once you skip to the endnotes, you find that his realism depends on the “lawful dependence” of mental states on the states of the universe. He says that this relation is what allows us to say that actions bring about goodness or harm.
But you have to wonder where lawlikeness comes from. There are prescriptive laws: e.g., thou shalt not kill. There are descriptive ones: e.g., if it’s raining, then there are clouds.
Presumably, realists will argue that competent moral deliberators will tailor their prescriptions about what ought to be done are grounded entirely in descriptions of how the world is. For instance, the naive consequentialist will claim that the right act is simply the act that produces the good. An anti-realist might take on a great many positions, including (say) that a competent moral deliberator can be largely deluded or ignorant — for example, the protagonist in Dostoyevski’s “The Idiot”.
I would certainly like the gnus to take up morality or ethics as a gnu project, as one of our positive endeavours.
Steve Zara (#6) – “The pesky thing is that we can’t get the book here in the UK for some months.”
You can get it relatively cheap from Amazon.de’s Marketplace, wherever it says “Internationale und Inlandsversandkosten”. Shipping to the UK is €3. There are a couple of listings on Amazon.co.uk, too, at a somewhat higher price.
No…quite frankly I don’t think anyone needs to read it. I read it because James asked me to review it (and sent me a copy); otherwise I might have for the sake of the conversation, or I might have just read the conversation and decided not to bother. Not to bother is the better option, I think, unless you’re really curious.
Egbert,
I don’t see any need for gnus to take up morality as such. That is, if a gnu has something useful to say about morality, fine. Russell and Udo should go right ahead. But specifically as gnus? I don’t see it. That’s part of why I think Harris is kind of daft: it’s almost as if he thinks there is no secular moral philosophy out there. I say “almost” because I know perfectly well he knows there is: he says he’s read a lot of it. But he talks as if he were breaking new ground that way.
It’s much the same with Paul Kurtz’s four thousand page New Humanist Manifesto or whatever it’s called. People are supposed to sign it! It’s long enough and detailed enough to be instructions on how to build a seventy room hotel on one of the moons of Jupiter, so how could anyone sign it? How could anyone be expected to agree with anyone on leventy million different items?
I don’t have any new gnu morality. I don’t have any new ground to break. There’s no god; big woop; it doesn’t make any difference to anything. (Ok I don’t actually believe that, but it doesn’t call for a brand-new morality at this stage, either.)
Eric MacDonald (#9) – “for anything might be thought to be a matter of flourishing”
For one thing, ‘perishing’ cannot be, for that would entail the idea that words can mean anything (even their logical opposite), which in turn would make communication impossible. And that contains two relevant arguments: the first is Harris’s, namely that it cannot be a goal for living, conscious creatures to die as quickly as possible and have the most horrible experiences, since that would be self-defeating, physically and logically; the second is mine (and, I suppose, Steven Pinker’s) and says that ‘morality’ can only be applicable in a social situation–if there is only you, then otherwise moral questions reduce to either what you want or what is conducive to some goal you set yourself. If the answer were only applicable (or not applicable) to you, then you behave as if there were only you. That, however, is not morality. Morality, by definition, asks for the right thing to do; its question are not about ‘what should Ido?’ but about ‘what should someone in this position do?’.
Ophelia (#3) – “I must say I’m surprised by all the people who go wow, wow, wow, this changes everything, Harris is now the morality guy, etc.”
But we’re not talking about random commenters on blogs, are we? Otherwise, I’m at a bit of a loss to say who all these people are…
Peter – hahaha; busted. I’ve already admitted to that somewhere (I forget where). It’s a fair cop.
Egbert, Harris explicitly refuses to define well-being in mental terms (e.g., happiness). He treats it as a primitive concept — a kind of placeholder which we are expected to fill in using some commonsense uses. All plausible candidates are up for grabs.
That’s not a remotely helpful argument, of course — and it’s certainly not strong enough to be called a “scientific” argument. But for what it’s worth that’s what he says.
Peter, when I was an undergraduate, I had the same opinion that you and Pinker have. The assumption was that morality is primarily about sympathy (and empathy) bringing rise to comfort, and not duty or ego integrity. But I’m not so sure anymore.
Suppose Paul is the last human on Earth. Paul promised his late wife that he’d return her ashes to Portland so that her remains could be close to those of her daughter. However, the burdens of travel are very hard, and Paul would prefer to just kill himself. This is not a social situation, since everyone else is dead — Paul is alone. Also, it seems presumptuous to say that Paul’s attitude towards himself is merely amoral. It’s not really up for us to decide whether he’s being moral or not.
Ophelia,
Rather than a prescriptive morality for people to follow, which I think is a bad idea, I was thinking more a clarification, description or explanation for morality, so as to answer questions posed by believers who genuinely don’t know how morality can be separated from religious belief.
Since a lot of our criticism are related to moral judgements on the actions committed by believers or the irrational, or to their beliefs, I think it might be a worthy project to perhaps discuss about.
I think Paul Kurtz has more or less burned his bridges with his hysterical manifesto, and Sam Harris’s approach is probably the wrong one. I think the lone wolf approach is probably doomed to failure.
This is why I think it might be interesting to see if some gnus together can come up with their own project and then bounce it off with the rest of the gnus (or whatever we are!).
I havent finished the book, but he usually seems to be arguing that even if you have some conflicting corner cases , they are still distinguishable from You are hoarding food by the tons and people are starving. And that even if you dont have a precise measure you can still compare two cases now.
I also think some of his other arguments haven’t been answered by most critics (e.g. Science can’t be used to prove Science , nor can logic be used to prove logic) or his analogies to health.
Though I dont think Sam is right. Morality also deals with in principle matters (not with just well being). If say a spouse has cheated on his/her partner, is it more moral for him/her to forget about it(and not repeat) or more moral to come clean to his/her partner. Even assuming his/her partner can never find out about this event , I think truth telling would be the moral case.
I think Tim Harris’ comment is specifically what Sam Harris was trying to answer.
Tim says, “to claim that there are right and wrong answers that can be objectively determined by the methods of a very broadly defined science, by some sort of moral calculus, seems absurd to me.”
Now think about it a moment. Is there any other endeavor in human life – other than the purely arbitrary, such as appreciating modern art – that you could say this about? Is there any field of human behavior so crucial and yet automatically assumed to be impervious to any kind of scientific, biological, objective understanding?
Sam’s entire book is merely trying to say: “Morality is an evolutionary tool, and like all evolutionary tools, it is an objective, measurable, and understandable phenomena.”
If you bring up corner cases, like “suppose every other human is dead and…” well, guess what. You’re not going to get an objective moral answer, because you can’t get a moral answer. Morality only functions in a limited context: helping self-aware naked apes survive in groups. Outside of that context, it does not apply. Inside of that context, it’s fairly obvious what “well-being” means.
To the extent that morality applies to a situation, it can be profitably studied scientifically, and given the definitional purpose of a moral mechanic, various strategies can be objectively evaluated as better or worse at fulfilling that purpose. That is all. That is all Sam is trying to say; and while you might think it’s trivial, plenty of commentators in this thread still don’t get it.
To dismiss the roots of morality as unimportant is to lose the argument to the religious at the outset, in the same way Creationists lose the argument at the outset by dismissing facts as unimportant. People know that morality and its origins matter, and if you don’t think so, nobody needs to pay attention to you because you’re not being serious.
(To assert that morality is purely arbitrary, a social construct with no fundamental roots in nature, is to lose the argument, period. I won’t even bother to discuss why.)
I concede that Sam may not have made his point, or even that he might not have needed a tome to do so: but the fundamental idea – that morality describes a set of human behaviors, and therefore is as scientific and objective as any other set of human behaviors – is both simple and widely disputed.
“Morality also deals with in principle matters (not with just well being)”
To put it bluntly: No, it does not. It only deals with well-being. That is all it can deal with; any other application is an unjustifiable and unprofitable extension.
This is why people get different answers to absurd hypothetical questions. You can’t apply Newtonian mechanics to electrons – well, you can, and you get absurd and contradictory answers. You can’t apply morality to situations that have nothing to do with well-being – well, you can, but you won’t get any meaningful answers.
All of this absolute morality – this idea that acts have moral value independent of circumstances or indeed even when merely separated from a transactional analysis between two human beings – is just wrong, in the same way astrology uses the language of astronomy but is just wrong. Or perhaps non-Euclidian geometry is a better example: you can make up lots of different sets of premises, but only one of them means anything in the world we actually live in. The fact that religious people have mis-applied morality to judge acts that have no moral status (wearing mixed fabrics?) does not mean that a) morality must be applied to these things, or b) morality is a flawed concept.
Some moral questions don’t have answers, because they are not well-formed moral questions. Just like “What about before Time and Space?” is not a well-formed question about physics. The fact that certain people make a living babbling about such nonsense does not invalidate physics; nor should centuries of religious propaganda invalidate actual moral thinking.
I have other objections to Harris’ ideas. One of them is the matter of tractability. Sam talks about a Moral Landscape. That’s not really helpful, as we can get an overview of landscapes, and see where to go. It’s common in science to deal with ‘landscapes’ that we can only explore locally, within a certain range of parameter values. I suspect that measures of well-being may be like this. We end up with a complex landscape of possibilities, and finding out where we are on it and were to go next may be extremely difficult. This reminds me somewhat of the Foundation stories of Azimov, with Harris trying to be our Hari Seldon. Predicting and exploring moral landscapes may be equivalent to long-range weather forecasting – not possible in principle.
A bit late in the day, but here’s Ian McEwan in an interview about assisted dying:
‘The trouble is that some people, not all, but some people with religious persuasions take a universalist view to all their ethical positions, which I suppose is maybe the nature of ethical positions anyway. ‘
If all Sam Harris is saying is that ‘To the extent that morality applies to a situation, it can be profitably studied scientifically and, given the definitional purpose of a moral mechanic, various strategies can be objectively evaluated as better or worse at fulfilling that purpose’, then I don’t think anybody could object (though ‘scientifically’ might be better put as ‘rationally’, and might it be possible to re-word ‘the definitional purpose of a moral mechanic’ as meaning, more or less, that the purpose of a moral decision is to change a situation in such a way that the outcome for all involved in that situation is better, or at least not worse, or as near to either of those alternatives as is possible?). And certainly I agree that the more narrowly scientific study of our moral nature is of great importance. To suggest that morality derives fundamentally from sympathy and is also very dependent on situation is not to suggest that morality is irrational, or that its roots are unimportant or that it is arbitrary. The more genuinely scientific study of morality there is, the better, I think.
And another thing I should like to add is that morality is not some hypostasised something that stands out particular situations to which you apply it, but is immediately and intimately involved in situations, is from the beginning a part of such situations.
‘outSIDE particular situations’
“then I don’t think anybody could object”
But they do, over and over again.
The Right believes morality is supernatural; the Left believes morality is artificial; both agree it’s “beyond science.”
The entire point is that we (assuming I can speak for Sam here) disagree with Ian: it is not the nature of ethics to be universalist, even though it is the nature of religion to insist that ethics be universalist. What we are fighting for here is for people like Ian to not give up the territory without even trying.
What McEwan said, is that it is the nature of ‘ethical positions’ to take a ‘universalist view’, which is, in my understanding, shorthand for the observation that people who take ethical positions tend naturally to suppose that their positions are, or should be, universally applicable, an attitude that he clearly thinks is wrong. (By the way, in my last post, the words ‘stand out’ should read ‘stand outside’, but I imagine that is pretty obvious.)
Surely, there is a lot of good scientific work being done on the roots of morality, work that is becoming steadily more known and influential. Yes, many religious people are incorrigible, and no doubt there are a number of holdouts in anthropological and, perhaps, literary departments who subscribe to the idea of ‘cultural (and therefore moral) relativity’, but it seems to me that as a result of that scientific work, and as a result of people like Ian McEwan, and, I should add, Eric MacDonald, who have thought seriously and not merely abstractly about morality (McEwan, incidentally, takes a great interest in science, in particular the theory of evolution), things are changing. To be very honest, from what I have read about Sam Harris’s book (for, as I said above, I have not read the book itself – so if what I say is misrepresentation, then I apologise in advance), I do not think that its influence will out-weigh that of genuinely scientific studies, or the witness of such as McEwan, MacDonald, Mary Warnock and others.
Funny but I’ve argued that in that example it would not be the moral case. ‘Coming clean’ under such circumstances is more of a selfish act on the part of the guilty party, using confession* as a means of assuaging his/her feelings. So it winds up throwing pain on the partner so the guilty one can feel that they have ‘owned up’ to their act.
*Confession is a universal notion, both inside and outside of religion. Even in secular law there is the pressure to confess. There is the pressure to ‘turn oneself in’ in order to make a clean start (as if, some judge or legal system actually has any real power to forgive your bad actions.
I suspect its evolutionary roots may have been in some form of group cohesion advantage, but I’m not sure.
I don’t think there’s any common moral concept for gnus to sign up to other than ‘whatever is morally true is not ultimately justified by appeals to the supernatural’.
We can be caring or selfish, tolerant or bigoted, whatever: its just that we can’t justify our moral choices by saying ‘God says…’
That’s it, that’s the only common moral project I’m prepared to sign up with based entirely on my atheism.
Morality to me, seems to be, as Tim Harris remarked, from a psychological perspective of particular persons in particular situations. And it is those situations from which we develop more general laws or abstractions (which are then further debated and evaluated in courts). Morality would be the underlying basis for laws and even politics. And so ethics or morality is an important subject for a society to organize itself.
What religion does is take laws as the foundation of morality–rather than morality as the foundation of laws–and these laws are treated as both universal truths as well as absolute commands from their deity.
No wonder then, religious people are so confused and rife with internal contradictions and guilt when it comes to their moral feelings. Rather than think or evaluate what is right to do in particular situations, they turn to obey some dogmatic authority instead, or are commanded to obey some universal and misguided notion of absolute love or charity which is not always applicable to a particular situation.
And this is why the Bishop of Phoenix, for example, got things so spectacularly wrong. Because rather than evaluate a particular situation where a mother’s life was threatened, unless an abortion was committed, he instead stood by the authority of the church which simply says abortion is wrong and that is it. His internal ability to morally evaluate a situation was turned off. This is what makes religion so dangerous, no less dangerous than authoritarian nationalist ideologies of national socialists or communists, which share exactly the same misguided notion of morality coming from universal laws or absolutes.
And that is why I think understanding morality or ethics is important, especially if we are to support notions such as human rights. Those require justifications as much as scientific theories.
Sometimes people throw the context morality the other way, as in ‘is it ever moral to torture’? Then the ticking time bomb postulate. The bottom line is that there is something appealing about consistency and there is something appealing about
True, but there is this constant tug, between ‘principle’ and ‘context (or relativism?)’. The trouble is, we want it both ways: We want consistent rules, yet we want to bend the rules when they don’t seem to be working out the right way. The problem is, however, that different people will come to very different conclusions about what constititutes ‘not working out the right way’.
This is, in my mind a fundamental problem. Despite all our attempts to define it logically, our sense of morality is, at its core, irrational (or more accurately non-rational). It’s a product of evolution and evolution did NOT design a coherent set of behaviors. It merely selected behaviors that worked for survival. I sometimes use the example of a person who creates a new rule in his email box whenever a new type of spam hits. It works, but in the long run, the rules that accrue have no obligation to be logically consistent. Each one (roughly) handles a situation that occurred in the past but is not beholden to any of the other rules.
oops line should read
The bottom line is that there is something appealing about consistency and there is something appealing about fluidity.
If you 1) apply science to tell how moral values are determined don’t you get a different result than if you 2) assume that science tells you what the values are without first investigating the process? How do you “keep faith with scientific values” if you attempt the second process while ignoring the first?
If you want to be descriptive first and then proscriptive like a scientific valuer you can’t do it the second way. You have to first describe (what are values in use, how are they formulated?) then you can proscribe changes like, say, an increased role for the factual over the mythical or traditional. That is, you can do that if your commitment to the utility of science survives the frustration of simplistic realism. f you want to be scientific about values you have to study the process that makes them just as you would any other natural process, and not as abstractions with justifications found in other abstractions.
The idea that the ethical pseudo-proposition “murder is wrong” can be found by science to be equivalent to a factual proposition that “murder is wrong” is just naive, I’m sorry. Harris thinks he can get an equivalent by appealing to Darwinism and the notion that science as intrinsically ethical. I think he’s mostly right, but it doesn’t require or permit his realist move.
Short version: If you want scientific values you first must be scientific about values. Which requires, to my delight, that science be chosen as a value. :-)
Yahzi @ #26 –
That’s very careless. Saying science can objectively determine what is right and wrong is not at all the same thing as saying that what is right and wrong is impervious to any kind of scientific, biological, objective understanding.
This oscillation between an absurd claim and a reasonable claim is one of the major problems with Harris’s book and his public presentation of it; it’s also something his fans keep doing.
Lots of people already agree that science can and should contribute to moral reasoning. Harris says it can determine values. Please note the distinction.
I guess I’m saying that, too. And Harris will also say something like that when pressured. At least that’s what I get from the “Great Debate” panel discussion on YT. Hey, I’m watching Sam now and he just said it!
Ernie – you’re saying what too? The item you quoted has two possible things to say.
@Jay
Which is why I specified it as forget about it (assume an Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind scenario if you will where you could literally be made to forget about the incident). The choice is between telling the truth (damaging to well being of all parties involved) v/s Telling a lie (and no guilt involved).
In any case Im sure you can come up with scenarios where “Duty” or “Truth” conflict with well-being(as commonly understood). So Sam’s core argument that everything related to morality is related to well-being (placeholder) may not necessarily be right unless he can make a stronger case that our preference for Truth, Duty, Responsibility is also directly related to our well-being (Answering your spouses Do I Look fat in this dress truthfully isnt a rewarding experience).
Seen the Geico ad with Lincoln attempting to deal with that problem? Fckng hilarious.
Sorry, Ophelia, I meant that science saying what values are and science helping are different things, and Harris is careless about the difference. Harris suggests he’s saying the first thing then under pressure says he means science helps. When he says the latter he draws the same distinction that you and I do (I think).
No problem ernie! I didn’t mean to sound cross – the italics was to make clear what I was asking, not to sound cross, but it sounded cross.
And, yeh.
@Ophelia
Just saw it on youtube. Hilarious indeed.
I do not understand the difference. How does science contribute, except to produce a series of objective truth-statements? Science is not philosophy; it can’t give you a logical analysis independent of observed facts. All science can do is assemble observations, which are objectively true or false.
It already has. There is only one moral value: well-being (by definition – morality is defined as a mechanic for aiding survival, so by definition its only goal is to aid survival). For self-aware creatures that are roughly equivalent in biological endowments, there is one best mechanic: fairness. This is a scientific definition and a conclusion supportable by observed facts.
Translated from scientific terms to ordinary terms: making people happy is what morality is for, and the way to do it is through creating justice. This sounds just like lots of other moral reasoning, and it should. The point, however, is that this moral statement can be supported by scientific observation, while many other moral statements cannot. In other words, if you can’t trace your moral principles back to a behavior strategy that helps naked apes survive in social groups, ur doing it wrong.
And this is Sam’s point. I think it’s his whole point.
Many relativists get hung up on the values problem. “How can we claim that humans continuing to exist is objectively better? Mightn’t the world be better off without us?” And Harris is trying to point out, you’re doing it wrong. Morality is a tool for helping people survive. By definition, it comes with a value attached, in the same way that wings are a tool for flight, and by definition if they help you fly better they are objectively better.
There is nothing mysterious about morality. It is not a feature of cosmic law. It is simply a game-theory strategy for maximizing a particular set of gene’s chance of reproducing. Recognizing this frees morality from absurd problems like defending God’s honor, and allows scientific discussion to reclaim this important territory.
One thing that we can safely say that evolution and natural selection are NOT: fair.
Not necessarily. In any case, morality probably only exists in social animals. I provides a kind of stabilizing tool to prevent the group from becoming consumed in self destructive conflicts.
In a fair world, my typos would not be so visible.
What else could it be directly related to? If it is not a genetic inheritance from the biological arms race, what else could it be? Where could these preferences come from, if not from evolution? And if they are from evolution, how can they be anything but related to well-being?
This is what I meant. By saying that morality is not merely about species survival, you are automatically endorsing either a) relativism or b) supernaturalism, because there’s no other options.
(As for why fairness is the root of all morality, see John Rawls: A Theory of Justice)
Jay:
I don’t understand. I was saying that fairness is the mechanic we use to be moral. This mechanic is a product of evolution and natural selection. I was not implying that evolution itself was fair; indeed, I explicitly stated that morality is not a feature of cosmic laws like evolution and natural selection.
Not probably; but by definition.
Oh lordy, Yahzi – wellbeing isn’t even the same thing as fairness.
You’ve got a lot of flatly dogmatic assertions going there, and I haven’t got the energy to say what’s wrong with all of them.
Easily! It’s not well-being that drives natural selection!
I don’t understand your comment. Well-being is the goal; fairness is the method for achieving it. I think this is pretty clear from my comments, but if I was confusing, I apologize.
Which is itself a flatly dogmatic assertion.
These are my assertions:
Human behavior is a product of evolution.
Morality is a human behavior.
Evolution has an objectively quantifiable “goal:” fitness or well-being or species survival, however you want to name it.
Fairness is a game-theory strategy that maximizes well-being for social, physically equal, self-aware creatures.
Which of these strikes you as too dogmatic to refute?
Well then, it’s all explained. I have no idea what you are talking about when you say well-being, and you have no idea what I am talking about.
For the record, I am talking about the same concept that evolution calls fitness: adaptation to environment that maximizes chances of genetic reproduction.
I suspect you are talking about some kind of individualistic expression of personal desire, which is, to my mind, a chimera of fitness. We desire those individualistic things because they are projections of our evolutionary desires; much as we desire sex even when not procreating because of projections cast by our procreative instincts.
Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by well-being. I would also appreciate your thoughts on where these non-evolved desires come from, given that they can’t be a) natural, or b) supernatural.
@Yahzi
which accurately summarizes one of the problems with the argument Harris makes.
@Yahzi
No no no – You have to prove it is related to well-being (after you atleast set some boundaries as to what you mean by well-being). Or you are falling into the “if evolution is not true , intelligent design is” fallacy.
No I dont agree. Various societies which are distinctly immoral (by my standards) survive and continue to do so. Morality by your definition should apply to any species not just human. Also faithfulness to a loved one is considered moral , but the evolutionary drive is to spread your genes by mating with multiple partners isn’t it?
Besides not every moral question deals with species survival.
Also faithfulness to a loved one is considered moral , but the evolutionary drive is to spread your genes by mating with multiple partners isn’t it?
I think this goes back to my earlier position that our moral sense is a collection of disjointed rules. A period of mate loyalty (though probably not lifetime) had a distinct advantage to the current crop of young. However that behavior did not rule out other behaviors that might logically be considered to be at odds with it.
When we look at our makeup as a lot of individual behaviors, each one likely a product of selection, our mixed bag makes much more sense.
I’m not being careful. That first line should be quoted.
John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness is a theory of distributive justice. It is not meant as a theory of morality. Hence, it has no conception of practical morals (‘partial compliance theory’), nor any conception of the justice of institutions in general, nor anything to say about international relations and free informal associations.
Well, Sam and I know what we’re talking about. We don’t seem to have a problem there. Maybe it’s not us?
Let’s try this again. The proper definition of morality is that it deals with survival. The fact that other people have improperly attributed other domains to morality does not matter. Harris is trying to point out that there is, in fact, a thing called morality, it is objective, and its domain is limited.
You keep responding by, in effect, saying, “But Bob defined morality to be about cheese, so tell me how you relate cheese to species survival!”
Morality, by definition, applies only to moral agents. Not all species are moral agents. I leave it as an exercise for you to work out the conclusion.
Why wouldn’t a theory of distributive justice have anything to say about international relations? Are you implying there are no things to distribute between collections of people known as “nations,” but there are among collections of people known as “society?” Is this inane hair-splitting your idea of “contributing to a conversation?”
Maybe. But you are trying to convince us, aren’t you?. Saying we know what we are talking about and if you don’t get it , its your problem isn’t going to be helpful to that end.
And you keep responding , don’t look at Bob’s definition, look at Yahzi’s – If you are going to change what is well accepted , you have to make a stronger case – Its not that you might be wrong , just that you haven’t done it so far.
All I’m saying is commonly accepted questions about morality do not necessarily deal with species survival(e.g. should I lie to my wife). You say that this isn’t a moral question. As far as I can tell , this isn’t Sam’s position either (he chooses to define it in terms of well-being which means a lot more to me than just species survival).
Well yes. but it isn’t what you said. Besides isn’t the goal of evolution – survival to reproduce (and not purely to survive) which you dont seem to factor into your moral questions.
Yahzi, I’m getting the sense that you have not read A Theory of Justice, because everything I just said comes straight off of section two (i.e., five pages into the book). By Rawls’s admission, it is simply in error to think of “justice as fairness” as being a theory of morality.
You have further questions. If you want answers to those questions — and they are legitimate ones to ask — then I suggest you direct them to Rawls. He’s the one who put the limits on his own theory. My point is that it’s no good to invoke his name for purposes he would disavow.
By the way, who are you quoting when you say “contributing to a conversation”? Not me, in this thread at least.
I must say that I repeatedly find it odd that many people who openly admit that they haven’t yet read Sam’s book or in some cases that they have no intention of ever reading it are willing to condemn his ideas as though they had read the book.
In the end, the main point I took away from the book is that what Sam is pushing for is scientific research that helps us to decide what is moral and basing this on neurological states known (or eventually will be known) to reflect “well being,” however that comes to be defined. He isn’t saying that he has the answer or that the job is done. (I think some commenting here realize that). He’s saying that the question is more than worthwhile to ask. He’s saying, “We should continue looking into this further using the technology that we have now and that which will be developed in the future.”
Suggesting to intelligent people that Sam’s book isn’t worth reading seems like arguing against the very idea of at least making an attempt at a science of morality. Maybe it will prove to be fruitless (Sam admits to this possibility more than once in the book), but isn’t it at least worth trying? I mean, it’s only one of the most important questions that we could possibly want an answer to. The book is obviously a conversation starter, even for those who disagree with certain of it’s premises. It’s a good conversation to have – all the more reason why those engaged in the conversation be familiar with Sam’s actual arguments. Watching Sam’s Ted talk it, or reading someone else’s opinion of it, or reading Sam’s discussion of it with Russell Blackwell or reading Sam’s own capsulized version of it is no substitute for actually reading the book.
PS: Although they are annoyingly lengthy and technical at times, the endnotes are an essential part of the book. If you skip those, you miss a lot.
I think there is a big question to be asked: What is the point? I mean, really? Who is it a conversation starter for? What will this achieve?
Those who have faith-based ideas of morality won’t take any notice, apart from making accusations of scientism.
Those who have humanist ideas of morality probably won’t need to both to take any notice, as it will mostly be telling them what they already know. We know well enough what well-being is, and that is helped by modern psychology and biology.
Do we really need things shown on a meter to know that there is great suffering in the world? Who would take notice of the meter reading in a way that would change what they are already doing?
I would echo Puleteresa’s point. However, I’d go a bit further by saying that, for those people who have already been studying these issues before Harris started talking about them, the endnotes are actually more edifying than the main text.
pulseteresa,
But Harris has also presented what he himself presents as the argument of the book, in places other than the book, so it’s not necessary to read the book to argue with at any rate the argument as Harris himself presents it.
Anyway I have read the book, so I’m off that particular hook.
No it doesn’t! Of course it doesn’t. Harris isn’t the only person in the world who has ever written about the subject. Mind you, I probably would also argue against making an attempt at a science of morality, because I think a science of morality is a bad idea. I don’t think a scientifically informed morality is a bad idea, but a just plain science of morality, I do think is a bad idea.
But he generally puts it much more strongly than that. Talking about scientific research that helps us to decide what is moral is pretty uncontroversial. Harris mostly didn’t put it in such a limited way.
But there are better conversations, and better ways to start them.
We have made the stronger case. And you already agreed to it.
Morality cannot be a supernatural, cosmic institution. As atheists, we’ve all already signed off on that. So – what else is it? You may have noticed that I keep asking that and not getting an answer. The reason is because there are only 2 answers left: evolution, which for some reason people in this thread want to dispute; and arbitrariness, which thankfully no one in this thread is willing to defend.
Sam’s point is really, really basic here. We’ve allowed the religious to commandeer yet another field of human existence and it is time to take it back. Remember when religion owned the word “love?” We won it back for the secularists. Now it’s time to do the same thing for morality.
The point is that morality is important. Not talking about it simply reveals you as not serious. We should not, and need not, surrender this entire topic to the mystics. Morality is an ordinary, earthly process, like sex and love. Atheism cannot be the dominant world view until it can intelligibly discuss all the topics a worldview needs to have – and morality is one of those.
Why? (Please don’t say, because it will be abused: that’s like saying studying genetics or atomic forces are a bad idea).
I can understand your saying you don’t think it’s possible; but stating that, even if it were possible, it would be bad, seems like it requires some explanation.
I didn’t evoke his name. I gave a reference to how morality can be shown to equivalent to fairness. I don’t particularly care what Rawls thinks he showed; I reserve the right to use his arguments for my own purposes. Much like I don’t care if Darwin recanted on his death-bed; it does not change my right to use the arguments for evolution.
I can see you are unfamiliar with standard literary conventions, so I’ll stop bothering you now.
Almost sounds like… accommodationism.
:D
Because morality is so many things and sometimes contradictory(to me) and sometimes conflicting(to me). As before that I dont know doesnt mean your hypothesis is the only valid one. My answer to your question is I don’t know. I know what I consider to be moral questions but I don’t have a clear or precise definition.
My understanding is the most important evolutionary goal is survival to reproduce (And in some species reproduce even at the cost of survival). Now you seem to be making the case that , that is the only important moral question and all moral questions must be answered through that lens. I dont think Sam is making this argument. I think Sam himself states in his book that not everything we have today is directly related to evolution (I think his example was preference for democracy, but Ill have to look it up)
The rest of your comment seems to be directed to the religious , who dont frequent this blog I think.
Yahzi, you are, of course, entitled to your own idiosyncratic conventions. However, it is common for quotation marks tend to be reserved as a way of mentioning words without using them. The reason this matters is that you run the risk of misrepresenting the people you’re talking to (in this case, me). I’m entitled to resent that.
Anyway. To be clear — it seems you now agree that for anyone who wants to know why justice-as-fairness is not the root of all morality, they had better go and read John Rawls: A Theory of Justice; and if they want to find out why it is the root of all morality, they had better consult with you for your interesting opinions. Aces, sounds good to me.
@jay
is this speculative or an accepted evolutionary theory (I genuinely don’t know). It seems this would apply to multiple partners too (not necessarily single mate).
It has been possible to discuss morality as an atheist for thousands of years.
But that isn’t my point. I see a problem here.
Sam Harris launches a new Atheist product: Scientific Morality! It’s launched with a lot of ceremony. It promises much: a new broom, sweeping away that dusty old philosophy and theology, changing humanity for the better, With Scientific Morality(tm) there is no more of this moral relativism nonsense. Just point the meter at any situation, and it will give you a clear Reading of Morality. Even the batteries are included!
So, we send off the cheque, and get a nice big box back. We open the box, and what we find is not quite what was promised. Sure, there is an Objective Morality Meter, but it first needs to be calibrated based on experience – it’s objective providing you can define what objective is. If that wasn’t bad enough, the instruction manual is bits of dusty old philosophy books stuck together. There is a label on the front, which when peeled off, shows that “Utilitarianism” has been covered up.
Finally, the batteries are built-in and only last a few days. You have to send off for another box, and do all the re-calibration over again each time.
Sales don’t go well. The religious certainly won’t buy it, and the atheists who buy it find they can do just as well without it.
Here’s the real problem: the product will damage the reputation of Atheist Morality. Reviewers will say that Atheists gave Morality their best shot, and flunked.
It’s not going to change the way we do morality any more than the Segway will change public transport.
Spirituality means so many things to people, too. But some of those things are nonsense, and some aren’t.
Harris is trying to explain what kinds of moral questions make sense, and what kind are nonsense, and how you tell the kinds apart.
Demanding that he also satisfy every nonsensical definition is like refusing to let atheists talk about spirituality or spiritual feelings or inspiration until they account for the soul. We were wrong to surrender all talk about spiritual feelings, inspiration, love, etc. to the religious; we are wrong to surrender all talk of morality to them. Morality, like our sense of community, etc., is a perfectly natural phenomena, which implies it can be studied by science and has a limited domain of applicability. What is controversial (to atheists) or dogmatic about that?
I do not believe that Harris introduced his concept with anywhere near that kind of hyperbole. You seem to have constructed a straw man.
I would ask an important question here: but is it true? Is Sam’s central claim – that morality is merely an evolutionary adaptive strategy with no supernatural components and no applicability outside of its domain – true?
Because if it’s true, and you agree that this unintuitive fact is true, then you’re just complaining about the tone. And you know what we call people who object to truth statements by complaining about the tone?
Since you seem to prefer argument by citation, I will provide you with this link (scroll down to the section titled “Irony”):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark
If you want to raise objections to these rules — and they are legitimate objections to raise — then I suggest you direct them to the rest of the English-speaking world.
That’s surely not his central claim. He central claim is on the cover of his book: that science can determine human values.
@Yahzi
I merely answered that I cant give you a clear or precise definition as to what morality is about. Its your assumption that such doubts must be nonsensical questions.
We haven’t surrendered arguments about morality to anybody. we discuss it all the time and we have our own views that sometimes conflicts with religious viewpoints on morality. Do you see anyone surrendering the argument?
@Steve
I think I disagree with you,
The customers never believed that Atheists have morals in the first place. There is no reputation to be damaged.
To me the book is successful because it held my attention and it made me reevaluate some things that I thought I know. Whether it has long term effects? who knows – but its not why I buy a book.
Im also sympathetic to some of Sam’s claims. Do Moral questions have a right and wrong answer? If yes then there must be some way (in principle) to arrive at the right answer(a dogmatic assertion). That way must be scientific(experience).
That’s a good point.
Yes, Yahzi. And the definition of irony is the opposite of what is expected or implied. Hence, you put forward an idea in an obviously insincere way. And, as you correctly inferred, I really do expect people to refrain from misrepresenting their sources, as much as I expect people to be vaguely cooperative in conversation. So your comment is only ironic if you genuinely do think it is “hair-splitting” for a person to take you to task for completely misrepresentating authors that you invoke.
Is that what you still believe? Do you honestly think that these two things are the same? Because that’s barking lunacy.
So I suspect you don’t think so. I think you just made a mistake. But you’re making it hard to interpret you otherwise, when you add comments like “prefer argument by citation” with a touch of derision. It’s really not a big deal to make a mistake, but it’s ridiculous to parade around acting like you’re entitled to them. It’s like I told you your fly was undone and in response you pulled down your pants and pretended your genitals were the bat signal.