How to count well-being
In the wake of some discussions of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape I’ve been dipping into a few other books on morality, all of which are (frankly) much more rewarding to read than the Harris book. Mary Whitlock Blundell’s Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: a Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics, for instance, the title of which is self-explanatory. Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, which summarizes a lot of research in a number of fields. And Bernard Williams’s Morality. From the chapter on Utilitarianism:
For we are going to be able to use the Greatest Happiness Principle as the common measure of all and everybody’s claims, only if the ‘happiness’ involved is in some sense comparable and in some sense additive. Only if we can compare the happiness involved for different people and over different outcomes, and also put them together into some kind of General Happiness, can we make the thing work.
Just what I said, only of course not so well.
Bentham’s version, pleasure and the absence of pain, didn’t do the job, not satisfying the conditions of being calculable, comparable, and additive, or the condition
of being an indisputable objective: the more it looked like the sort of pleasure that could conceivably be dealt with in those quasi-arithmetical terms, the less it looked like something that any rational [person] must evidently be aiming at…Apart from anything else, there is the difficulty that many things which people actually include in the content of a happy life are things which essentially involve other values, such as integrity, for instance, or spontaneity, or freedom, or love, or artistic self-expression…
Well-being is not sufficient.
So what is sufficient? That’s what keeps going through my mind in observing the debates on this: if well-being is not a sufficient basis for morality, what is the basis of morality? So far, everything I’ve considered for moral actions has a concern for well-being within it, but I’ll admit this could just be correlation, not causation.
Just something of interest that I read, that among all the moralising and virtue ethics among the ancient Greeks, very little if anything was mentioned about the plight of slaves. Much the same can be said throughout the history of Christianity and Islam, it was only among the European enlightenment that people began to seriously consider the inequalities among women and of course slaves.
That’s an awful long philosophical and theological history to have such a blind spot.
Lucien, well no one thing is sufficient. It’s not a one-word subject. Well-being of course is highly relevant, but it’s not the end of the subject.
Egbert, quite. The subject wasn’t completely ignored, but what was said about it was mostly not impressive. The Romans (that is, a few of them) did a bit better.
There’s a very good book on this from the 50s by M I Finley.
Would levels of specific neurotransmitters and scans of localized brain activity be a way of quantizing pleasure? I agree it is only an ’in theory’ sort of idea for individuals, and practically impossible on a societal level, but it could conceivably allow pleasure to be an objective, calculable (or measurable), and comparable concept.
Well-being interpreted broadly is as useful for what it is not as for what it is. The well-being of humanity is not the will of the gods. The well-being of humanity is not survival of the fittest, as some misguided historical figures have claimed. The well-being of humanity is only about the happiness of humanity and that which will lead to the happiness of humanity.
Some spontaneity is a good thing, because it keeps things interesting, exercises the brain to prevent atrophy due to boredom, and keeps people alert. On the downside spontaneity can lead to decreased efficiency of societal systems and if taken too far, outright chaos, so spontaneity and order in a perfect world ought to achieve a balance.
Integrity is worth making some sacrifices for, because integrity fosters trust in people, trust in the system, and goodwill toward others that in turn lead to less need for burdensome security measures and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.
Similar arguments can be made for any other ideal you care to mention, so long as one keeps in mind that well-being of humanity is the ultimate goal.
The insistence that well-being is paramount may seem simplistic or even so broad as to be useless to those well versed in philosophy, but only because you are so well-versed you have forgotten how ignorant the public is: the public thinks god said it and that settles it.
The difficulty in quantifying and comparing various types of well-being may make philosophers despair of ever codifying perfect utilitarian rules, but utilitarianism rules out many dead ends of moral philosophy, and it is the foundation of all ethical thought worth reading.
Utilitarianism hardly settles communism vs. capitalism, but it provides a framework to tackle the question that is far better than this-or-that authority says we should do this, which is the most common way most people attack the question – think of all the appeals to the founding fathers or dead philosophers instead of addressing their arguments and the arguments of their opponents, or the evidence of real world societal experiments.
Harris is trying to get people to abandon that mode of though, even if he can’t prove mathematically that well-being is the correct way to do things. I don’t see why so many atheists fight him on this.
The (pagan) Roman jurists were pretty good on the status of women, but not slaves. The later Roman Christians were better on slaves, but worse for women. A decent textbook on Roman law (Borkowski is good) shows the relationship to be almost inverse; pagans are better for (Roman) women; their status as citizens ensures they have capacity (to contract, to own and manage property, to earn income, to bring suit, to initiate divorce etc). The Christians, by contrast, show compassion for the poor and the sick, but at the expense of women (all the earlier ‘rights’ were progressively whittled away). By this reasoning, women were disabled by original sin, while the poor were elevated by their poverty.
The ‘pagan’ morality I get without endorsing — it has modern echoes (think of the US in its treatment of non-citizens at Gitmo; because they are non-citizens, they have less in the way of ‘rights’ — the modern version of the Roman ‘capacity’). The Christian morality, while commoner historically, is almost impossible to grasp, depending as it does on belief in a fable (Adam and Eve in the Garden). I don’t like differential doling out of rights (the Roman and American practice), but I can at least grasp why countries would want to do it (it’s useful being surrounded by people you can trust, and citizenship is a proxy for that).
Nice timing, Ophelia! I’m about to register an essay on Rationally Speaking about this exact issue. In short, I think well-being is a sufficient starting point, a much better one than, say, religious dogma. But as you make clear, morality demands more than just a starting point.
Bernard Williams makes it even clearer, Michael. :- )
Miles –
Because he’s doing it badly; because he’s not the only one doing it, and he’s not doing it well; because it’s a subject that many many non-theist philosophers and others have addressed, so there’s no obvious reason to find Harris’s contribution particularly helpful, and some reason to think it unhelpful. And by the way I’m not fighting him; I’m saying what I think is wrong with his book.
I haven’t read Harris’ book, only some of the interviews and commentary. It all sounds highly unsatisfactory.
I can kind of see what he means – if you can scientifically establish what best promotes well-being, and well-being is what ethics is about, then there is no gap between is and ought.
Where this goes wrong, for me, is that although well-being is what ethics is about – or partly at least – it probably isn’t possible to establish scientifically what best promotes well-being.
And in any case, it doesn’t solve the meta-ethical problem. Even if well-being really is the be-all and end-all of morality, the question remains: why be moral? And that is where the is/ought gap remains, even if Harris is right about everything else. Which it seems he isn’t.
Perhaps you could argue that “you should always do what is ethical – because the ethical is what you should always do”, tautologically. But it’s still possible to ask – “why should I care about any of this?”
Dan
In re-reading my posts and yours, OB, I realize fighting was too harsh a word. By all means criticize Harris, particularly the shallowness, redundancy, and poor quality of his work, but I would hope that you could recognize and praise the intention behind the book: to provide a basis for secular ethics and to undercut the religious/authoritarian font of morality.
Dan, as I read Harris, he leaves it up to the individual’s conscience to compel them to give a crap, but if you do feel a need to care, then he seeks to provide a way for differing individuals to agree on the correct path. The Moral Landscape is not so much a philosophical tome attempting to prove as a popular polemic attempting to persuade.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but has moral philosophy over the last two or three centuries been bogged down in theology? Goodness, moral philosophy since Hobbes and Locke can scarcely be thought to be theological to any great degree. So trying to find a secular basis for morality is really, in some sense, already a done thing. From the common sense morality of Adam Smith to the deontology of Kant, from Bentham’s utilitarianism to the duty ethics of WD Ross, from the expressivism of Braithwaite to the positiivism of Ayer, ethics has had very little to do with god for centuries, except for the churches, and even they have tended to back away from theological ethics. The whole New Morality of the sixties, with its origins in protestantism, was certainly secular ethics. I simply don’t know what the story is all about. Did Harris really do his homework on this one?
Dan:
Actually it’s generally thought that’s exactly what science is in fact good at. Hume’s dichotomy for instance starts by saying that in fact that kind of answer is the only answer that reason has to give us. The problem as he sees it is that what counts as well being can only be determined by the emotions.
Eric – if he did, he didn’t put it to good use.
Miles, sorry, but no, not really – for the reasons that Eric indicates. Harris isn’t doing anything new or novel, and he seems to be misleading a lot of people who think he is.
Eric, my impression is that Harris is/was aware of the history, he just thought it would bore people. I think we should probably avoid doing the equivalent of a courtier’s reply to Harris just because he doesn’t pay his respects to the philosophical record. He’s mistaken in a variety of ways that have been discussed by others, here and elsewhere, so it’s probably best to just say what’s wrong with it first and cite later.
Oph, one thing I don’t think he’s wrong about is the idea of comparing wellbeing. It’s an philosophical exercise, not something that makes for a viable empirical study. A “hedon” (unit of happiness) is a pseudo-quantity, which we treat as being additive for certain purposes even though it isn’t. And IQ is a pseudo-quantity, too — supposing I have a IQ of 130, that doesn’t mean I am Double Smart as the guy down the road with an IQ of 65. That doesn’t mean we’re going to accuse someone is being a silly scumbag just because they measured the average IQ of a city. It does mean, though, that IQ is (in a sense) unscientific.
(Though of course he’s wrong to think it’s a scientific thing he’s doing.)
Because it is pseudo science. Harris claims that there is a scientifically objective morality based on calculations of “well being” for humans, except there is no objective way to define well being. It sounds simple and potentially quantifiable, but that is illusory. Deciding what variables to judge “well being,” and in what proportion is an inherently value based rather than objective process. Libertarianism? Or Communism? What do do about over population. Abortion? Good or bad? Religion, yes or no?
Harris can no more define “well being” than Paul Nelson can define “ontogenetic depth.” Perhaps we should start an anniversary for every year Harris fails to provide a definition for well being as PZ Myers does for every year Paul Nelson fails to define ontogenetic depth (though Nelson just tried to claim it is undefinable, but still valid, just as Harris seems to do.)
Harris tries to get out of defining well being by providing extremes we can all agree are examples of poor well being that can be improved upon–except morality isn’t about obvious extremes we can all agree on, morality is about the in between areas, which is where The Moral Landscape fails utterly.
Ben, well he’s aware of the history, but his thinking as expressed in what he wrote doesn’t bear much evidence of it. He writes as if from the beginning.
That Guy Montag
Mm, well I think I would agree that science can *sometimes* elucidate an answer. It might be able to tell us which approach would cause the most harm, and which the least.
I can also imagine circumstances where to act before the facts are in would itself be unethical. I’m vaguely reminded of WK Clifford’s shipowner.
But I don’t think all moral dilemmas are constructed so as to be solved in this way, and even when they are I don’t think science is always capable of providing an answer.
I would say that evidence can be *relevant* to ethical problems, and that includes evidence about likely effects on well-being.
I guess until I’ve read Harris properly there’s not much else I can say on this.
Dan
Pseudo science is exactly right, or not science at all. Where is the evidence, where is the theory? How is well-being a scientific theory? A science of morality needs to be just that: scientific.
If we attempt to reduce morality to one single all-encompassing principle (happiness, pleasure, well-being, goodness, etc) it seems that the principle will end up being somewhat hard to pin down conceptually. This seems to hold true for concepts in general (I think). For example, we may be able to come close to answering the question “What is Cubist art?” But it’s much more difficult to find a satisfying answer to the question “What is art?”
Nonetheless, I think most of us would agree that such things as happiness, pleasure, well-being, etc., do matter morally regardless of how difficult they may be to pin down conceptually, or how difficult they may be to measure in different people over different outcomes.
Perhaps this is just how morality is at times: Messy and unable to provide definitive answers in many cases.
But does not Harris, after talking about ‘science’ and being ‘scientific’ about morality, anyway dilute what seems at first to be his position by saying that by these terms he merely means ‘rationality’ and ‘ rational’? Well…
I’m not the first to say this, but I think our moral rules are more aimed at avoiding certain kinds of outcomes that most people consider highly objectionable – physical suffering, social collapse, and maybe others along similar lines – rather than maximising well-being. The historical grounds of morality are probably a bit messy, but it all makes more sense when you ask what sorts of outcomes are being resisted by our moral norms.
Russell, it’s not clear that that dichotomy is a good one. It’s reasonable to construe “maximizing well-being” in a way that is consistent with the idea that morality’s primary purpose is to avoid negatives. All you have to do is grant that it’s epistemically difficult to choose between goods (because bonum est multiplex) — but easy to figure out / prefer the good to the bad, and easy to figure out / prefer the lesser of two evils.
Perhaps when we “ask what sorts of outcomes are being resisted by our moral norms” we’ll find clearer cases with less gray area.
Hmm, I’ll think about that, but I don’t think it works. It makes the genealogy of morals unnecessarily complicated, as if more down-to-earth and definable things like social survival, ameliorating suffering, and so on were somehow chosen as proxies for this other undefinable thing that no one really understands. It’s much simpler to think we have developed moral constraints to avoid the definable things for its own sake.
But I have other reasons – e.g. I just don’t think we care all that much about making people who are happy even happier. I don’t think I’d feel bad about a missed opportunity to make someone who is already happy 10 hedons happier if my action made myself or a loved one 5 hedons happier. I just don’t think morality works that way. Suggesting it “really” does at some deeper level seems like an unnecessary rationalisation if what’s going on. I could go on, but really mustn’t – it’s the subject for a large part of a book. I’ll just say in the space of a comment that lots of things make more sense if we think of moral systems as systems of constraints that function more to avoid a loose and contestable set of fairly definable bad outcomes while leaving people free to act as they wish within the constraints … rather than as systems that are somehow “aimed” at maximising some quantity of something.
That last comment was for Ben, by the way.
That’s interesting, Russell. One of my professors in college talked about certain actions “super-nice,” as opposed to morally obligatory, which would certainly fall in line with what you say here. Maximizing well-being would in fact make some of the actions he talked about obligatory, instead of just a really nice thing to do. Example: if I were lying in the hospital sick, and only the touch of Harrison Ford’s hand on my brow could cure me, is Mr Ford obliged to fly in from where ever he happens to be and touch my forehead, regardless of what movie he’s in the middle of making?
I’m trying on a Moral Realist approach, if I may.
Does Harris even say anywhere that well-being needs to be countable? If not, you’d need to show that that is what is requisite. In Harris’s view, and he is channelling Mill to that extent, it just needs to be broadly comparable, so that we can distinguish the clear-cut cases; in other cases, where our critically rational comparison remains inconclusive, we would have pretty good reason to say that the matter at hand is not one of morality but one of preference. Not all questions are moral questions; even in our everyday understanding of morality, we see a question as a moral one pretty precisely to the degree that it allows of unambiguous answers.
History supports the idea that “thou shalt not” works well, and it’s embodied in politically theory as limited government. Clearly the bad is easier to define than the good, which is kind of an open-ended project. We don’t know what freedom and democracy will require of us under new conditions. It’s an algorithmic process where the only way to know what decisions will be required is to run the program, be confronted with the new problem and respond, generally by adapting successful generalities to new cases, as has recently happened with gay marriage. Who knew, 30 years ago, that we’d get to this point?
Russell, I think it’s important to distinguish welfarism from hedonism. There are lots and lots of different welfarist theories, but not all of them are hedonistic. Some folks endorse an objective (non-hedonistic) theory of goods, but they’re still welfarists all the same.
Your insistence that our story of the moral genesis of goods ought to be parsimonious is, I think, a conviction that is shared by monistic theories of the good. It’s a powerful consideration, but it is actually consistent with there being an infinitely large number of goods (or, bonum est really really multiplex). For example, suppose for the sake of illustration that “autonomous preference” were our theory of the good — the good is “whatever is preferred”, and the bad is “removing the ability to choose”. Well, we can prefer an infinitely large number of things (goods), though there is one common denominator that must be thought to be bad: namely, restrictions upon the ability to choose. In one sense that’s not parsimonious (since the list of preferences is potentially infinite), but in a deeper sense it’s perfectly parsimonious (since at heart it’s a monistic theory of intrinsic value). And in this system, allowing for people to choose for themselves is just the same thing as letting them optimize that which is intrinsically valuable.
Yeah. Screw Kant. :)
Right. And Harris doesn’t seem to recognize that.
Kant, of course, tries to do this with his Categorical Imperative. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction… Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end…Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.”
But all metaethicists try to do this, and they all come up with… semi-plausible… answers.
Heh, that’s a paraphrase from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”, with the actor updated from Henry Fonda. She calls it the difference between being compelled to be a Minimally Decent Samaritan and a Good Samaritan. One standard objection to utilitarianism is that it blurs the distinction between duty and going beyond the call of duty (“supererogatory”); a utilitarian is always obliged to do the thing that produces the most utility.
An aside: Insofar as what Harris is suggesting is that we use science to streamline applied ethics, I’m pretty sure everyone is with him. But this is actually what we’re doing now. Take, for example, maternal mortality rates. Pretty much everyone is in consensus that regardless of the underlying metaethics, it is bad for women to die in pregnancy and childbirth. It would take very little money to get a trained childbirth attendant, a malaria net, a tetanus vax, and the requisite amount of magnesium sulfate and pitocin to treat eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage into the places that need it, but there are practical issues. People who work in public health use reductionist scientific method *now* to find the best workarounds to the practical issues. They test Method A against Method B and implement the one that is the most cost-effective way to lower maternal mortality and then move on to testing the next incremental improvement.
But would anyone expect a positive response from Random Guy if you told him that a scientist with an fMRI of his brain has decided that $50 of his next paycheck should be dedicated to reducing maternal mortality in Ghana because it will maximise well-being? Seriously?
For the most part the problem is not that we don’t know what will maximize overall well-being. As Ophelia notes, it’s getting people to decide that’s *all* that matters.
Thank you, Caryn! I could NOT remember where the professor was taking that from, and it was kinda bugging me.
It seems “do the least harm” has greater weight than “do the most good”.
Hippocrates knew what he was doing.
I think some of this stems from an impoverished definition of “well-being”. Take the torture discussion from the other thread. Most of us are innately revolted by the idea of torture. So someone else being tortured diminishes our well-being in and of itself, because we find it revolting.
That’s where concepts of fairness, etc., can spring quite naturally from well-being. H. sapiens tends to be less happy when denied personal autonomy, justice, etc. So those values all rightly fall under “well-being” as well.
Ah no – I don’t buy that. Someone else being tortured doesn’t diminish our well-being (for most values of “our”) because we don’t even know about it, or we know about it but don’t think about it all the time, or we know about it but think it’s justified and so are not revolted by it, and so on and so on. X being tortured in secret far far away does not diminish my well-being.
No we can’t just give Harris the present of pretending to think that all of morality fits into the box “well-being” and any unsightly lumps can just be ironed away by redefining something. He needed to make the case and he didn’t do it. The fact that readers can manage to cobble something together for him doesn’t translate to his having done it. He didn’t do it.
I’ll admit that when I first was reading TML I was having a hard time finding something wrong with his argument, which could be because for the longest time reading it I was waiting for the argument to START. He’d made a few assertions, some assumptions, but didn’t seem to be defending them. I think I got through the entire book wondering if I was just not seeing something and feeling a bit foolish. I found myself trying to make the argument for him as I read through it. That didn’t work out so well. So, yea, he didn’t make the case.