Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape
Sam Harris asks an interesting question in the introduction, after laying out his central (and not really controversial) claim that questions about values are questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that certain people are incapable of wanting what they should want?” Of course, he answers; there are always people who get things wrong. But that question doesn’t exhaust the difficulties that arise in moral discussion, yet Harris separates it out as if it did. The really hard question, which he generally gives short shrift, asks “is it possible that there are many people who are incapable of wanting what other people want?” In other words is it possible that many people do just fine at wanting what they should want for themselves and fail only at wanting what they should want for other people? Yes it is, and this is why the world is not a happy Utopia of people adding their bliss together to make a sum of Megabliss. The owl’s well-being is to eat the mouse, and the mouse’s well-being is to dodge the owl. We have an impasse.
It is surprising that Harris doesn’t put more emphasis on competition, on rivalry and scarcity and zero-sum games and prisoners’ dilemmas, on exploitation and labour and hierarchy, on the fact that more well-being for me is not the same as more well-being for you, let alone for everyone, and that this fact by itself is enough to make morality contentious and difficult. He does address these issues eventually, but not until well into the book, and then only briefly and somewhat perfunctorily. The emphasis is all on insistence that “the well-being of conscious creatures” is pretty much all we need to consider.
He does tell us some interesting things in the process, though, such as that “neuroimaging has also shown that fairness drives reward-related activity in the brain, while accepting unfair proposals requires the regulation of negative emotion.” That is a hopeful observation – but it is vulnerable to the familiar fact that humans are brilliant at rationalization, which means among other things that we know how to understand “fairness” in such a way that it maximizes our own well-being at the expense of other people. Tax-cuts for the super-rich make a tidy example of that, since one can view both sides of the debate as defining “fairness” in their own favor. (Michael Moore performed this dialectic in one of his films: on being told that his new book had just hit the New York Times best-seller list he said, “Oh! Well now I believe in tax-cuts for the rich.”)
The depressing truth that Harris never really confronts is that no one really wants to maximize the well-being of everyone. Economies depend on not doing so: cheap labour is the engine that drives various economic miracles and tigers. Lip service is paid to the idea of eradicating poverty, but meanwhile all sorts of visible and occult mechanisms make sure that there will always be plenty of poor people around. Rich countries subsidize their own cotton farmers at the expense of desperately poor African counterparts. Where is the brain reward for the feeling of fairness then? Africans are far away, and easy to ignore, so their immiseration doesn’t interfere with the well-being of prosperous Europeans.
This isn’t an issue of not understanding that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. It’s an issue of not caring, of selective attention, of studied ignorance, of institutions, regulations, habits, expertise – it’s a myriad of things. It’s easy to get people to agree that well-being is good; the hard part is getting them to agree on what that implies they should do, and getting them to do it.
Harris spends most of the book hammering home the point that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, which means he spends far too little time considering the difficult questions that arise even if everyone agrees on that. He also frequently treats those questions as easily settled, for instance when he says, “I think there is little doubt that most of what matters to the average person – like fairness, justice, compassion, and a general awareness of terrestrial reality – will be integral to our creating a thriving global civilization and, therefore, to the greater well-being of humanity”.
Almost halfway into the book he does suddenly admit the difficulty – “population ethics is a notorious engine of paradox, and no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a way of assessing collective well-being that conserves all of our intuitions”. He then quotes Patricia Churchland saying, “no one has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of five million against the broken legs of two…” Quite so, and this acknowledgement should have come much earlier and been woven into the discussion throughout. Because it isn’t, the first part of the argument seems much too quick and effortless. If it were that simple, the reader keeps thinking, why wouldn’t everyone just do it?
About the Author
This review was written for issue 53 of The Philosophers’ Magazine.
[…] did a review of the book myself a few months ago. Related postsIs-ought and all […]
There certainly is a discrepancy between what increases the well-being of an owl compared to that of a mouse. Or, for that matter, an American and an Iraqi. And I don’t think there ever could be a final and satisfactory solution – it’s something that will continually have to be debated.
I do appreciate Harris’ attempts to turn questions of morality into a rational discussion, rather than pitting one knee-jerk reaction against another. I view Harris’ arguments as being more directed at pulling the rug out from under those who support mindless religious morality, moral relativists, and bigotry. I don’t think that what he is pointing toward is so much different from what we do now (calling out and ridiculing, maybe passing laws, against actions we feel are immoral), but only without baseless ideas, religious or otherwise. I think the reason religious leaders would feel threatened by this is that it takes away their power to be society’s sole, moral arbiters. A distinction they never deserved but one of their few claims to relevancy.
I just picked this book up from the library, and having read your critiques and Russell’s series and having talked to Russell on the radio, I am really looking forward to reading it.
I do have a question on the premise that everyone agrees that rape and murder are negative well-being: If so, why are these crimes committed on such a regular basis and why are they often justified morally by those who commit the crimes? Why are the victims of rape treated much more horribly by society than the perpetrators?
I don’t know if the book addresses this.
I think morality is very much linked with sentimentalism, especially sympathy. However, having pondered the subject for several months, I’ve come to the realisation that morality is inadequate for real justice. How does our capacity for morality deal with suicide bombers, or someone who believes that women should die in childbirth?
It seems there are limits to morality, where we must ourselves become immoral in order to act against the immoral by use of force, sometimes lethal. In fact, the realisation of this limitation has recently given rise to the idea of the monumental disaster of humanitarian wars. The NATO action in Libya, for example, uses force on the premise of protecting civilians, which obviously leads to civilians being killed. It’s both irrational and immoral, but extending morality beyond its limits leads to exactly this kind of blindsighted idiocy.
We use simplistic universals like ideals and laws to fill in the inadequacy of morality, and we must somehow come to terms with the limitations of our moral feelings to the reality of the world, but to confuse those ideals with morality only seems to lead to more dangerous idealogical delusions and suffering.
A morally virtuous person is rather doomed to passively preach or teach how we ought to live, and then find themselves thoroughly demoralised as they are ignored, or worse persecuted, even by their own friends and family. In a sense, a moral person needs to learn a bit of wisdom too.
Mike, the book addresses it in a way, but it doesn’t get to grips with it. He just skips over the things that make morality and meta-morality truly difficult.
I bought the book yesterday and have recently watched the Harris/Craig debate where the central thesis is laid out. I haven’t opened the book yet (I always seem to have a reading backlog) but first of all I would like to see some justification for the existence of an objective morality before addressing how it is derived or measured. I hope Harris doesn’t leave this as a given.
I don’t get the critique. Isn’t the whole point of Sam Harris’s work that if we agree that the well-being of everyone is the goal we should achieve, the way to attain the goal is using the scientific method? Of course he doesn’t provide the answer to that, because that is still an ongoing work. But it seems very sound to me. The objection that some people do agree on wanting well-being for everyone but don’t agree on how to achieve it is not an objection but just showing our lack of knowledge for the present. This need not be a permanent state. We know that slavery is not desirable and have come thus far. Would anyone still agree with slave holders that slavery is actually good? Is that what you are arguing Ophelia?
Well, if all we need to have perfect morality is perfect knowledge, that’s that sorted, then.
I’m holding my breath for the Benson-Harris debate at NYU. Should be good.
Raskolnikov, no, that isn’t the whole point of Harris’s book. It may be what he means, what he has in mind, but it isn’t what he argues in the book. He skips over a lot of necessary spelling out, and just jumps to some conclusions. He needed to do the spelling out.
Who is “we”? Yes, of course anyone would agree that slavery is actually good. Many millions of people would – people who marry off their daughters for example; people who themselves have slaves; people who traffic slaves; people who believe slavery is ordained by a god; and so on. Harris of course is opposed to all that, but that isn’t the issue; the issue is what he argues.
I got about a third of the way through last night. Harris’ brand of Ethical Naturalism is superficially appealing, especially to an atheist because it would automatically preclude religion as a falsifiable source of morality. But apart from Ophelia’s real concerns about the scaleability and practicality of defining morality this way it also allows for a different form of tyranny. We could make truth statements like “smoking is BAD for you” and point to evidence of toxins and cancer rates, death due to heart disease etc. but does that still give us the right to make normative statements like “you ought to give up smoking”? Is an increased risk if HPV infection due to multiple sexual partners really anymore reason to condemn promiscuity than recourse to the Bible? At best increased knowledge may help individuals make better decisions, but as Ophelia say’s we are good at rationalising our own actions to suit our own moral preferences.
It seems to me that you’re being somewhat unfair to Harris.
I agree that it’s important to stress the ways that people rationalize lack of concern for the welfare of others, and point out e.g., the flaws in how social systems actually work, and how people use superficial moral intuitions about rights and transactional fairness as a distraction from big-picture issues of fairness of outcome. If I’d written TML, I’d likely have gone there, because I agree that it’s a tremendously important issue.
I also think that likely would be a mistake, and Harris was right not to go there in TML. He’s bitten off plenty—arguably way too much—just making the basic ethical and metaethical claims he’s making, and shouldn’t go too far into political philosophy. He’d just be piling up claims that people could rightly or wrongly take exception to, and inevitably would get a whole bunch of reviews using his particular claims about that particular subject as a reductio ad absurdam of his basic ethical and metaethical positions. (Think of how Peter Singer gets vilified and dismissed for his views on abortion and infanticide.)
Look at Malik’s review, where Malik latches onto his anti-Islam stuff (which I think he largely misinterprets) and uses it as evidence that Harris is basically misguided, and shouldn’t be listened to.
Now imagine that Harris said the kinds of things that you and I do think follow from the basic things he does say. Even if he’s right that they do follow, for many people who aren’t on board yet, they’d be a huge distraction from the basic points he’s trying to make. Many readers would shut down and not follow the argument he is making, and many negative reviewers would find it convenient to attack his conclusions rather than his arguments.
E.g., if one of the consequences of Harris’s view is that well-of people should be in favor of higher taxes on well-off people, you can bet that a lot of reviewers would latch onto that as evidence that he’s clueless, stupid, and so obviously wrong that his arguments for prior points can be dismissed.
Look at books on basic ethics and metaethics by professional philosophers. They frequently avoid making a lot of specific claims about the most important political applications of a lot of the moral principles they’re trying to demonstrate, because they’re trying to lay the groundwork for that sort of thing, but not yet engaging the complexities of actually doing it—in particular a lot of stuff that isn’t mostly about moral theory, but about what works in practice. Even if they get it right, it’s largely a distraction, and if they get it wrong, it may seem to reflect badly on the prior points, even if it really doesn’t.
I do agree that there’s good stuff Harris left out. I don’t think it’s quite fair to criticize him quite as harshly as you do for not having written the particular different book you’d have liked better. There’s plenty to criticize in the book he did write, which could have been better. :-)
“The depressing truth that Harris never really confronts is that no one really wants to maximize the well-being of everyone.”
No one? Really? If you asked everyone if they would want everyone else on the planet to be healthy, safe, and prosperous, you think all of them (let alone the majority) would respond with no? What on earth makes you think that?
(whether or not it’s possible in terms of resources or so-called human nature is beside the point)
David – oh sure, if you asked everyone if they wanted all people to be healthy, safe, and prosperous, of course some if not all would say “You bet!” I didn’t say “no one really wants to say it would be great if everyone had maximal well being” – I said “no one really wants to maximize the well-being of everyone.” It’s easy to say “let everyone be happy, amen”; what’s difficult is making that happen, and no one really wants to do what trying to get to such a state would require.
Paul – same as before – I think you’re being overgenerous to Harris. We differ! :- )
@Steve Bowen, regarding your first post: Why do you require a justification for the warrant that “moral objectivity” exists? I don’t see why a science of morality should be self-justifying anymore than a science of health must be. Harris addresses this criticism in his book, no? We don’t require medical science to justify itself, do we? We take for granted that studying human health, let’s say, is worthwhile. Similarly, objectively studying human morality–or what we consider good and bad moves on “the moral landscape”–is worthwhile. I don’t think this is a facile view; it’s reasonable and, as Ophelia suggests in her post, uncontroversial. The best thing about Harris’s thesis is that it does indeed presume that moral values can be objectively studied and that questions about what constitutes well being for everyone can be answered. Imperfectly at times. Subject to review. In short, this seems a most flexible and reasonable approach to guiding human behavior which does not require an anchor in something outside itself nor flies apart at the hands of relativists.
@Rossana
I didn’t say there was anything wrong with studying morality objectively, morality itslf does not have to be objective to do that, But Harris is a moral realist, although a weak one, which is a position I’m conflicted about. I sometimes find myself making points with an anti-realist or even error theory root, although personally I’m not sure I am comfortable with that either. I guess what I was hoping for was that Harris had an argument for the existence of an objective morality. He doesn’t, but as he assumes “the well-being of concious entities” (uncontentious from a practical point of view, probably) he is able to examine <i>that</i> objectively.
Harris’ method addresses these people. It says they are wrong. They are not using the scientific method to make their argument for slavery. Simply because this madness continues is not an argument for the weakness of Harris’ philosophy.
While I agree that Harris does not address the issues you mention, Ophelia, I don’t think that these omissions are a problem for the book. The point of the book is to argue that values can be illuminated by scientific inquiry. Harris is not trying to resolve ethical issues per se. He is arguing that science is powerful tool for solving ethical issues.
To make this point, he takes as an axiom that morality is on some level about human well being (I agree with Blackford that Harris has not solved the “ought from is” problem, so this premise really must be asserted axiomatically). He is then free to argue that science is in a good position to evaluate claims that X or Y promote well being in individuals. I believe you will agree to that much.
You are right that such neurological studies are essentially impotent to help answer how to apportion the well-being. However, this hypothetical research would allow you to throw out a great deal of baloney (genital mutilation, etc) that is the main target of the book. While Harris hasn’t closed the book on ethics with this line of argument, not hardly, this message is well worth making, and I think Harris does a fair job at it in the book.
Wouldn’t you want to maximize the well being of everyone if you believed that was the best course open to you to maximize your own well-being?
Harris won the debate with Craig, imo, by showing that moral authority is, in principle, totalitarian, and hence, immoral. Moral suasion is the only moral means to a shared morality.
Science can convincingly sway us about what is best for our own well-being. Science can also, in principle, convince us about whether and what kind of shared morality would be best for our own personal well-being. Hasn’t that, in fact, been why and how we have become more, not less, civilized in the course of human history?
We don’t need to get everyone to buy into this idea of well-being for it to work as a guide to morality. If people weren’t killing and exploiting we wouldn’t need to have the conversation in the first place. So, just saying you have some thoughts on it acknowledges the “depressing truth”. The “well being” basis works for self-defense, property rights, criminal punishment, safety laws and many other important aspects of civil society.
It is important to keep in mind what he is debating against. I am with Sam that we need to eliminate some of the competition first, then we can get on to dealing with the more difficult particulars of the moral landscape.
No. If that were the point, there would be little if any disagreement. Harris claims more than that, and that’s where the disagreement is.
Sure, but why would I believe that?!
No no no it doesn’t. You can’t make an argument by just “saying you have some thoughts on it.”
Yes I know people can supply what Harris left out for themselves, but the fact that they can do that doesn’t translate to Harris’s having done it. Harris didn’t supply what he left out! He left it out!
Harris is on last Monday’s Start the Week on BBC R4. It’s a decent discussion, though they don’t really go into the territory of the above comments. He gets in some digs about women in cloth bags and paedophile priests too.
Here’s the podcast
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/stw/stw_20110418-1230a.mp3
After reading the book I arrived at the same conclusion (that the point is to express how science can have a say in moral issues). Since you disagree I’d like to know what you think the book’s claims are.
Ophelia: No no no it doesn’t. You can’t make an argument by just “saying you have some thoughts on it.”
Acknowledging that there is a “depressing truth” is not the same as making an argument. I didn’t make an argument, I acknowledged a truth. Harris is arguing that science can and has had a say in moral issues. You are making some sort of supposition that if a moral system based on well-being is to work, it must be agreed upon by those who would act immorally under that system. I disagree with that, Sam probably does too and has no obligation to address your argument.
If someone disagreed with the system and acted outside its rules, they should be incarcerated, like we do now. If they changed their mind they would be considered reformed. I’m looking for a basis for a moral system that helps create a system of justice and helps to judge the justice system itself. This would include systems for making adjustments. You seem to be looking for a moral system that everyone agrees with, that works because they see it is logical and follow it with no need for the threat of punishment.
Something that was itching in the back of my mind has finally rearranged itself. The problem I have with Harris is not just regarding the question of what “wellbeing” means, but in fact what “consciousness” means. There are beings on the edge of personhood, of course. There’s a lot of abortion rhetoric about that of course, but we also have questions about what to do with people in various states of brain damage, and non-human animals, and that sort of thing. So, on top of “How many mild headaches is my broken leg worth?” we can ask questions about how many chimpanzee lives are worth a human life (or, even more uncomfortably, how much different human lives are worth compared to each other, and what degree of error there might be in the statement “all men are created equal”).
Perhaps there will actually be a way to scientifically quantify consciousness some day, which would give us a way to compare different sorts of experience which occur in different sorts of conscious being. But that’s a really huge if, and not something within sight of cognitive science. I say cognitive science, and not neuroscience, because if we really had a good theoretical foundation here, it would have to at least outline an approach that could apply, not only to humans and close relatives thereof, but to other sorts of consciousness we might encounter (animals with radically different cognition, aliens, artificial intelligence or even artificial life, and all that science fiction-y sort of stuff).
I think we’re more or less stuck with fuzzier methods in the meantime. Certainly, in the political sphere, I don’t think it would be wise to try to undermine certain presumptions of equality among human beings, especially since when we do so, we tend to do it by playing favorites and oppressing others. The not-fully-conscious-human cases are rather more confusing. (Does a newborn have greater or lesser moral value than an adult bonobo, and more importantly why?)
Sean – yes – lots of fuzzy borders there. It’s a very daunting task trying to figure out how to do what’s moral in such areas.
jwolforth, no that wasn’t my point at all.
Ophelia,
It does seem at some point that Harris might have decided to weight in with an alternative to a religious basis for morality and ethics, not to have the final say but to start a discourse? I must say that there are some holes in the web that he has started weaving, but my immediate reaction (post watching his debate with William Lane-Craig, I must admit) is that even though his may be a fledgeling theory, it is still all together more coherent and lucid that the alternative.
His bias and some of the less well articulated point might just be that he looks at the world from an American point of view, and possible through a lens skewed by arguing against fundamentalist Christians.
Taking either side of the philsophical divide, and trying to answer a question on whether China’s one-child policy is moral would be interesting.
You mention the impact of farming subsidies on developing countries, which is similar to the assessment of whether there is a way forward on climate change. If it means that the population of western countries need to reign in some of their emissions (and by that I mean driving around in cars that chew up more fuel than necessary for a trip), and whether it is fair to impose emission restrictions on developing countries (like China and India) which has a direct impact on the populations of those countries?
I think the answer may be yes, as Harris proposes a more elegant version of “the most good for the most people” that focuses on human health and wellbeing, which is in a lot of cases measurable in a population sense, via established disciplines like epidemiology, and ultimately the moral landscape should be measure by the impact on the human population, and the ethical response of countries like USA, UK and Australia must be measure by how much we are willing to forgo to improve the long-term health of the world’s population.
Mark – sure – but it’s just not the case that a discourse on an alternative to a religious basis for morality and ethics didn’t exist before Harris wrote his book. It’s not the case that he has started such a discourse. There’s a huge existing discourse, most of which is better conducted than his contribution.
[…] demands that he justify hedonism makes sense to me. Here’s a question, though, on a topical theme: could Sam Harris, who bases the ethics of his book The Moral Landscape on a notion of […]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions_in_Man_and_Animals
Ekman, Paul (editor) (2003), Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f003767c-5c61-4597-abdc-02d159294a0c
Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He has been considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. The background of Ekman’s research analyzes the development of human traits and states over time (Keltner, 2007).
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Does Darwin Illuminate Emotion?: A Discussion with Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman. Recorded in collaboration with Wonderfest, in Berkeley, CA, on November 8, 2009.
Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology, is a social psychologist who focuses on the prosocial emotions, such as love, sympathy and gratitude, and processes such as teasing and flirtation that enhance bonds.
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02. DACHER KELTNER: Role of Darwin in Human Emotion03. Principles of Expression / Serviceable Habits04. Principle of Antithesis05. Nature of the Startle Response06. Evolution of Emotions
http://fora.tv/2009/11/08/Does_Darwin_Illuminate_Emotion_and_Spirituality#fullprogram
07. PAUL EKMAN: Misconceptions of Darwin’s Work08. Darwin’s ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals’
http://fora.tv/2009/11/08/Does_Darwin_Illuminate_Emotion_and_Spirituality#fullprogram
In Episode 44 of the Brain Science Podcast a talk with Daniel Siegel, MD about meditation and the brain. Dr. Siegel is the author of several books including The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being.
http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/2008/8/22/meditation-and-the-brain-with-daniel-siegel-bsp-44.html
Google Talk: Dr. Daniel Siegelhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr4Od7kqDT8
“Why neuroscience matters” On May 11, 2011 Dr. Ginger Campbell gave a talk entitled “Why Neuroscience Matters” at the London Skeptics in the Pub.
http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/why-neuroscience-matters.html
http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2011/05/12/london-sitp-dr-ginger-campbell/
David Eagleman on The Secret Lives of the Brain (BSP 75) Ginger Campbell, MD In his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain neuroscientist David Eagleman describes consciousness as “the smallest player in the operations of the brain” (page 5) because most of what the brain does is outside conscious awareness (and control). In a recent interview (BSP 75) Dr. Eagleman reviews some of the evidence for this startling position as well as the implications both for the average person and for social policy.
http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/
This Emotional Life
1
Rethinking Happiness
http://www.hulu.com/watch/227955/this-emotional-life-rethinking-happiness#s-p1-so-i0
2
Facing Our Fears
http://www.hulu.com/watch/227956/this-emotional-life-facing-our-fears#s-p1-so-i0
3
Family, Friends and Lovers
http://www.hulu.com/watch/227957/this-emotional-life-family-friends-and-lovers#s-p1-so-i0
Host: Daniel Gilbert is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is a social psychologist.
Rationally Speaking podcast
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http://www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs32-value-free-science.html
RS37 – The Science and Philosophy of Happiness
http://www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs37-the-science-and-philosophy-of-happiness.html
[…] from the review I wrote of Harris’s book for The Philosophers’ Magazine. It’s easy to get people to agree that well-being is good; […]
[…] of new relevance, my review of The Moral Landscape for Issue 53 of TPM. Posted at ur-B&W April 16, […]