1 for me, 1 for you, 1 for 6.7 billion people
I’m still faintly surprised by some of the reactions to Sam Harris’s book, and to the criticisms of it, so I re-read some this morning. I didn’t slap my brow and say “gosh it’s way better than I thought.” Nope.
Consider, for instance, p 199 n. 11.
…many people assume that an emphasis on human “well-being” would lead us to do terrible things like reinstate slavery…Such expectations are the result of not thinking about these issues seriously. There are rather clear reasons not to do these things – all of which relate to the immensity of suffering that such actions would cause and the possibilities of deeper happiness that they would foreclose.
That’s a terrible “argument” – it’s not an argument at all. It’s one of the many many places where he simply doesn’t make an argument, perhaps because he expects us to supply all the missing bits ourselves.
It is not self-evident that slavery would increase suffering overall – it is self-evident only that it would increase suffering for the slaves. Harris doesn’t even manage to say that much – and if he can’t manage that, what can he manage?
His defenders seem to think all that kind of thing is obvious. It isn’t.
Slavery doesn’t exist because people think “Aha, if some people were slaves, then everyone would be happier.” It exists because people think “If some people were slaves then we would be happier.” Harris’s note simply jumps right over that. He does that all the time, and that’s why the book is so irritating.
Take a look at pp 40-1, where he belatedly admits that “genuine ethical difficulties arise when we ask questions” about what’s good for other people as well as for me. He clears up that little difficulty as briskly as if it were a bit of lint on a sweater. Consider Adam and Eve. Surely they could have figured out how to maximize their well-being. There could be lots of ways to thrive, and ways not to, but they can do it
and the differences between luxuriating on a peak of well-being and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood. Why would the difference between right and wrong answers suddenly disappear once we add 6.7 billion people to this experiment?
Seriously. That’s what he said. I’m not making it up. Look for yourself.
Well, I think the argument that he’s grasping for is that the effects on a society as a whole that allowed slavery would, in fact, cause enough “suffering” (whatever that is) that it would make slavery the option that provides the least well-being.
The problem is that he never actually says that, and doesn’t really show that it actually would, like those who argue well for Utilitarianism do.
I had this sad feeling of an argument that was going to fall on its face when I saw his TED talk about this.
I’m also a bit sad seeing the endorsements of the book by people I admire. I find their opinions hard to understand. The book just isn’t very good, and he doesn’t support his ideas. The comparison of morality with health fails utterly (a category mistake?).
The flaw in the argument could maybe be described by way of an analogy with some science-y stuff involved?
Think about my air conditioning running here on a sunny Florida afternoon. If I crack open the windows and turn off the AC, pretty soon my house will be the same temperature as the outdoors. I’m not crazy enough to do that. I have the windows closed, and blinds over the windows to help keep the heat out. I’ve got the AC running and the heat pump dumping all the extra heat out into the yard, so that the temperature in the house stays are a reasonable level. As long as I can funnel electricity in, keep the sunshine out, and dump all the heat away from me, I don’t need to give much of a thought at all to what the temperature outside might be. You could probably express this in terms of thermodynamics, where you can create a pocket of cool, comfortable temps even though the overall system maintains the same total level of heat as it would if I didn’t run the AC.
Now I guess I could relate this to something like slavery. If I can collect the benefits of slavery, while dumping out all of the misery caused by it and preferably move it far enough away from me so that I don’t have to give it much thought, I can create a pocket of improved well-being for me and mine. The lack of well-being of others can be potentially put at such a far remove that it doesn’t impinge on my day-to-day at all. In fact, in our daily reality, this very situation exists. We get our cheap imported goods and enjoy the improved well-being that comes from having extra funds for other things like better food and medicine. The misery of unsafe and inhumane sweatshops is the cost of that, but other people pay that price and most of us at most see that as a meaningless abstract if we think of it at all.
Well-being for me works great for me. I like it a bunch. Depending on the circumstances, not only can it be based on the suffering of others but it can be that way without me ever having to consider that suffering at all.
As for the slave thing, slaves could be perfectly happy being slaves. And so, if you had a society of masters and slaves, where both were happy, then that would indeed be a perfect society, if we only take well-being into consideration.
Hence why Sam is embarking on a mistake by not bothering to really think about what he’s saying.
Slavery leads to stagnation. There’s a reason why ancient Grece was overflowing with great ideas but never moved on to industrialise. They were worse off because they had slaves.
@Ophelia–
I too was left wanting after reading The Moral Landscape. That many endnotes! I thought. Why that’s half the book right there! But though it lacks detail and the sort of fully developed arguments you rightly expect, I have to say that I am sold on the premise that slavery equals suffering as “obvious” because the fact that it may mean suffering “only” for slaves and that the rest of us could thrive in some way does not constitute an argument in favor of slavery if you see what I mean. We can, after all, look at slavery and reject it even if we have gained by it. We reject it because it fails to maximize well being, period, no matter who’s enslaved. We can say that about slavery, can’t we? It’s a bad thing; it causes misery, period. It violates the notion of human rights. Is it arguable that we should endorse slavery because it can maximize well being for some, many, all? I don’t see how. Harris is not arguing, so far as I can see, that A or B is moral if most people subjectively think they’re experiencing well being as a result of being materially or psychologically better off with slaves; he’s saying an action is moral if it can be proven to maximize well being for humans. Slavery does not maximize well being for humans because somebody somewhere is suffering. Now, how do we define “well being”? That’s where the analogy with good health does work, in my view. Good health is the same for humans everywhere; it’s not culturally relative, is it? And yes, we have to redefine good health from time to time given research findings. So why not redefine concepts of well being and human flourishing in the same way on this moral landscape thingy? Geez, I know that sounds naive even as I write it, and yet it makes perfect sense. What am I missing?
I heard an interview the other day with Sam Harris here in South Africa on a national, mainstream talk radio station (702), which he conducted via London. The interviewer (Jenny Crwys-Williams) noted that Richard Dawkins had endorsed The Moral Landscape, and then asked Sam Harris how Richard’s endorsement should be seen in light of this famous quote of his:
Sam Harris went on to reassure listeners that he and Richard are good friends, that this was an old quote, and that Richard has subsequently changed his views somewhat. Assuming this is true, I console myself – perhaps naively – with the thought that the younger Richard Dawkins would never have had any truck with the less-than-rigorous thinking of one Sam Harris.
@ Egbert–
You write, “As for the slave thing, slaves could be perfectly happy being slaves. And so, if you had a society of masters and slaves, where both were happy, then that would indeed be a perfect society, if we only take well-being into consideration.”
I don’t see why we should trust the word of slaves and masters who say they’re happy if we can objectively prove that they’re wrong in defining happiness that way. If we can prove to them that they would both prosper and flourish more–especially those enslaved–in terms of achieving human well being, then why should their ignorance prevail? Isn’t this the argument you would advance to persons, let’s say, who argue they are not “enslaved” by their religion even when it prevents them from maximizing their well being? Their human rights or human potential? Would you trust their definition of “human happiness”? Aren’t they wrong?
Rosanna – I’m not arguing that it’s not obvious that slavery is wrong. I think it is obvious, in a sense; what I don’t think is that Harris has made the case that it is.
It doesn’t work to say that anything that reduces well-being at all for anyone is wrong.
Don’t get me wrong – I agree with Harris’s conclusions. I don’t agree with how he thinks he gets to them.
Yes but Rosanna that’s not the only issue. What if we couldn’t prove to slaveowners that their well-being is reduced by slavery? What if in fact they could prove to us that it’s increased? That would not make slavery ok.
Maybe men in general are better off if women are a subordinate class. I don’t give a shit. They don’t get to be better off by that route.
(That’s not an argument! It’s just an assertion.)
I would not be happy living in a society which tolerated slavery, regardless of whether or not I was a slave myself. Would you, Ophelia?
No – but that’s not a matter of well-being. That would stretch the concept to breaking point.
Why wouldn’t we be happy? Because it’s unjust, and we’ve learned to hate injustice. That’s not directly a matter of well-being. It’s not as easy to justify as that. Some people, perhaps many people, are willing to give up some or much well-being for the sake of justice or rights.
Yes, I see, Ophelia: We could prove to slave owners that they’re wrong, and they could still disbelieve us! And as you say, slave owners could “prove” to us their well being has “increased”–but remember, their definition of well being is still wrong if we can objectively show that being a slave master is bad and not a “peak on the landscape.” That’s how this works for me, anyway.
It doesn’t work though, Rossana; not if you’re committed to being against slavery even if it can be shown to be better for aggregate well-being. That’s really not very difficult. Just one slave shared between two households perhaps – think of all the extra leisure.
I’ve ordered Harris’ book, so can only go by what you posted. It’s looks like Harris is trying to defend his principle of well-being from arguments that have been used to criticize Utilitarianism.
The argument that he’s defending against seems like the one that says that the principle of well-being (as the only moral principle) could in theory allow for practices that most of us find morally abhorrent, so long as the overall balance of well-being outweighs the overall suffering.
His defense seems inadequate. There’s no reason to automatically rule out the possibility that some from of slavery (perhaps one not as vicious as the enslavement Africans, and one where there are far fewer slaves than there are beneficiaries of slavery) could satisfy the well-being principle.
How much suffering of a slave would be acceptable in relation to the amount of happiness, pleasure, or well-being the non-slaves would experience by being freed to doing society’s dirty work, and by gaining the benefits of the product of the slaves’ labor? There no reason for Harris to rule out some arrangement that could justify this practice based on the well-being principle.
Right. This is what I’m saying.
There was a fashion a few years ago for reality tv shows based on having people live as if in the past, limited to the technology they would have had. One was people pretending to be colonists settling on the Massachusetts coast in the 17th century, building everything from scratch. It was exhausting unrewarding work…and before long, they were thinking hard about slavery. There was one black guy in the project, and he found himself thinking so longingly of having a slave that he became acutely uncomfortable and left. It was extremely interesting and rather disturbing.
Found it, I think.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/colonialhouse/meet/meet_tisdale_danny.html
Ophelia, you write, “It doesn’t work though, Rossana; not if you’re committed to being against slavery even if it can be shown to be better for aggregate well-being. That’s really not very difficult. Just one slave shared between two households perhaps – think of all the extra leisure.”
I don’t follow. My point is and was that slavery can’t be shown to be better, period. In what instance could it be better–because it grants us leisure? I know you agree slavery is always wrong. So we can advance such a principle, even make it universal, and acknowledge that there are those who disagree. So? They’re wrong about slavery being conducive to well being–the sort of well being we would argue should be maximized or universalized a la Harris because it’s a “higher peak” of existence. Extra leisure doesn’t rise to that level. I don’t see what could. But I’m sure there’s a conundrum I’m unaware of here…Maybe our argument is one over the definition of terms?
I understood Dawkins to say that our moral outlook was a rebellion against the indifference of the Universe, that we, the conscious products of evolution were adding a wholly new element. Isn’t that what it means to rise up against the selfish replicators? I seriously doubt that Dawkins has fundamentally changed his view about that. Though there’s nothing inconsistent with an evolutionary view of altruism and the application of science derived knowledge when it arrives.
I don’t understand this post at all. Are you missing the assumption that people (including slave people) need to be counted as well? I guess that never even occurred to me. Perhaps Harris should write a prequel that explains these things for those who struggle to keep up.
Sam’s position has no more resources to deal with justice and individual rights than utilitarianism, because it simply IS a version of utilitarianism — perhaps not as well thought out as most versions advanced by professional ethical theorists, but utilitarianism nonetheless. I don’t know of a better exposure of the incapacity of utilitarian reasoning to adequately account for justice than Ursula K. LeGuin’s very short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which is well worth reading (and only 2800 words or so).
@Rossana
Simply posit, purely for the sake of argument, that in fact it HAS been shown that slavery increases aggregate well-being more than not having slavery. It doesn’t matter how it increases well-being. For the argument, simply imagine that it does. Now, with that in mind, is slavery still immoral, and something to be fought against? Ophelia clearly says “slavery is still immoral” (right Ophelia? I don’t want to put words in your mouth), while Harris appears to be saying that slavery then would be moral. The answer to that question could very well be at the crux of whether Harris is even close to being right.
Yes, G Felis, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (by Ursula K. Le Guin) is a good fictional example of a critique of the limits of Utilitarianism.
Your link was no good. Here’s a link to the short story (PDF):
http://iweb.tntech.edu/jcbaker/The%20Ones%20Who%20Walked%20Away%20from%20Omelas.pdf
I’ve only gotten halfway through The Moral Landscape. Unfortunately, nothing I’ve read in it or elsewhere gives me confidence that he’ll get out of this common dilemma: nothing in it that is new is interesting, and nothing that is interesting is new.
No, you don’t need religion to have morality. And yes, empiricism — and therefore science — can shed light on questions that have moral implications. But Harris seems to think — if not insist — that he’s saying more than just this, though I haven’t fathomed what yet.
I think much of the discussion here makes the same mistake that Pigliucci and Blackburn made in their reviews of TML, and that is to neglect to crucial notion of potential. I’ll just reproduce part of a comment I made on the Harris and Pigliucci thread:
Utilitarians have stressed this (related) point for ages that their notions of ‘flourishing’ and ‘well-being’ are considerations of potential. As Harris says on p. 34, “Just how fulfilled is it possible for us to be, personally and collectively?” This speaks to Pigliucci’s Brave New World-ish scenario of drug-induced supreme happiness. Apart from the above-mentioned mistake of equating happiness, let alone mindless happiness, with well-being, there is the question of whether some other attainable state of being would be more fulfilling for a human being endowed with consciousness. For that to be adjudged, however, the alternative state has to be experienced—at least by someone in a comparable situation. Just considering one single state a person just happens to find herself in, cannot do justice to our considerations of morality; there has to be at least some exploration of the question of what in a particular situation it is possible for a human being to achieve (in terms of ‘flourishing’ aka ‘well-being’).
I read the first few pages of TML and stopped. But I still assume that’s because I lack the stuff to be an intellect.
G. Felis. I presume you think little of Peter Singer’s version of utilitarianism? (Just out of interest, I’m not staking a claim with that question.)
Just having read the Omelas story, I can’t help but notice that it is the story of every western nations international policy. We tolerate capet or cluster bombing others because it’s for the good of out people. Or so we’re told. Rather poignant on April 25th in Australia which is the day we honour Soldiers who’ve died fighting in other countries. Australia has never been invaded, so all our soldiers have died in wars of foreign agression or at lest foreign countries.
Just in case anbody goes off at me. Both me grandfathers were soldiers. Paternal fought in WWI and maternal in WWII. I never met the paternal, but the maternal didn’t think much of war or excused for war (like it’s for the greater good) and just considered himself lucky to make it home in one piece.
@LucienBlack
If slavery really does increase aggregate wellbeing, I’m not sure if it is preferrable or not. I suppose it depends a little on what we mean by aggregate, and maybe how broadly we construe wellbeing.
As far as the specific argument here is concerned I think it is important to remember the nature of his argument is a possible worlds argument. In order to say one way or the other that this, slavery and all that, is the best possible world we need to compare it to all possible worlds. If we have more than one possible world at the same peak, defined basically as distance from the worst of all possible worlds, than so be it. His argument is we don’t get to decide the slave world is in fact better till we compare it to not only one where everyone is free, but also to the whole spectrum of possible worlds at which point we discover, as Ophelia rightly points out, that fairness really is important and that it matters to us.
I wonder if this is explicitly his goal, but the argument from what I can tell is a fairly famous one. More explicitly I’m reminded of this:
Just as an aside: I’m of the opinion that Mill’s Utilitarianism is a far stronger argument than his critics often give him credit for. It’s interesting though to see the parallels between his and Harris’s thinking. I wonder if it’s explicit or perhaps more fantastic.
A far more dangerous problem is this tendency to pass over places where he does have something new to say. Why are we not talking about the results of his PhD research? It’s true that most of the punchline is a bit buried in an endnote, a stylistic quibble that only really matters if you think discussion about brain regions are necessary for an attempt at popular philosophy, but doesn’t anyone else find it interesting that there is no observable difference between a brain reasoning morally and a brain reasoning scientifically or about common everyday beliefs?
# 22 (I haven’t read all the later comments yet) – Yes, that’s what I mean. Slavery is wrong, even if it can be shown that it’s good for well-being in the aggregate.
Today, my pleasure in reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was surpassed only by reading the essay by William James that inspired it: The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. James’s characteristically dense English and his interest in religious experience may turn a lot of you away, but this, to my mind, is a superlative example of the tone an ethical philosopher should adopt when proposing a change, subtle or severe, to existing ethics.
melior (# 20)
No. I’m pointing out that Harris forgets here (and in many many other places in the rest of the book) to point out that individual well-being is not the same as aggregate well-being. You say it never occurred to you; well it didn’t occur to Harris either, and since it’s central to the most basic understanding of metaethics, that’s a bit of a problem.
That Guy Montag,
” … but doesn’t anyone else find it interesting that there is no observable difference between a brain reasoning morally and a brain reasoning scientifically or about common everyday beliefs?”
No, because we would broadly expect that reasoning would use roughly the same brain structures, at least at the level that current neuroscience can measure. Damasio had demonstrated a while ago that general reasoning tends to include at least some emotional reaction, and so at what point would we expect the moral to be that much different? I might expect more emotional mechanisms involved because of the emotional associations with morality, but really there shouldn’t be that much difference when we’re doing reasoning, no matter what the SUBJECT of tha reasoning is.
I think it also gets ignored because it isn’t actually relevant to the underlying issues of morality, which is what the book is purportedly about. Yeah, the same mechanisms are used. So what? What does that tell us about morality specifically? After all, by this folk physics and physics should use similar mechanisms, but one is — broadly speaking — right and one is wrong.
Observation: Harris glides straight from well-being to happiness himself:
http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/
Svlad Cjelli,
“If slavery really does increase aggregate wellbeing, I’m not sure if it is preferrable or not. I suppose it depends a little on what we mean by aggregate, and maybe how broadly we construe wellbeing.”
I think this really sums up the problem with Harris’ book, as most of the arguments come down to those sorts of questions, and Harris is resolute in refusing to not tell anyone what he means by that or how he means to figure out what those terms mean. I suspect he doesn’t really know himself; for a lot of his examples, the strong position he takes is best explained by Prinz’s emotional view of morality than Harris’ view.
Caryn, he also sometimes says “flourishing,” also without remarking the shift.
Verbose – exactly. All these things that people are saying they hadn’t thought of, aren’t sure about, don’t know, aren’t clear on – they’re exactly the ones that Harris should have pinned down. You just can’t write a Big Book on metaethics without doing that; it’s absurd.
As Ophelia’s header post about slavery illustrates, there’s a good deal of “it seems obvious that X” in Harris’ book. By the way, you know who else uses that kind of rhetorical trick? William Lane Craig.
VS:
Except physics isn’t in the game of declaring itself fundamentally different from folk physics, only better. If in accepting Is-Ought all we were saying is that there are better ways of answering moral questions than you’d get people such as myself and Sam Harris agreeing but no that’s not what you get. What you get is a realm of human debate that despite not looking meaningfully different in terms of the language it uses, or apparently too terribly different at the level of the brain, somehow we’re told that this one area should be treated as different. Do you blame me for suspecting dogma?
As an aside do you think I’m wrong in thinking there seem to be strong parallels between the arguments of both Harris and Mill?
Ophelia:
It’s a fair point that Harris hasn’t dealt with the specific issue of aggregate versus individual welfare but that’s the kind of argument the emphasis on health is supposed to point towards. It’s pretty clear in the text, he repeats it more than once, that the argument is do you think that question renders decisions about health meaningless.
Montag…but it’s no good to “point toward” a “kind of argument” by means of an irrelevant non-argument. The non-argument about health doesn’t do the work he wants it to do.
Ophelia:
I don’t think Sam thinks it’s a non-argument (and neither apparently does Patricia Churchland). It’s very clearly signposted several times in the book and in his talks as being about problems of measurement so I’m not paraphrasing here or putting words in his mouth.
Actually what I’m curious about now is seeing whether or not we can do more about playing with the analogy between health and wellbeing. I don’t know enough to follow this thought right now, but I’ll try when I have more time. I have a suspicion for instance we might be able to draw some parallels to vaccination and maybe the earlier topic of slavery but again not the sort of thing I’m too familiar with.
It’s not a very good analogy because the health of X almost never diminishes the health of Y, except in pregnancy.
I think you underestimate the consequences to well-being of dealing with children after birth!!
Perhaps a more significant and relevant health connection is that of carers. Caring for a sick or elderly relative can be a major drain on health and well-being. The relevance to general well-being is interesting, because of the question of how much aid the state should give to carers, as they are taking away much of the burden that would otherwise have to be carried by the state (at least in countries like the UK, with a health service).
True, and as with well-being – if some people do dangerous unhealthy work then other people are better off, so just saying over and over “it’s about well-being!!!” doesn’t establish that science can determine morality.
It is not self-evident that slavery would increase suffering overall
Actually, it is. Any unbiased reading of pre-bellum Southern social history makes this clear. Anybody who understands how slavery worked in the South and what effect it had on society already knows this.
I suppose, however, that Sam could be taken to task for assuming that his readers already have that historical knowledge.
OB:
That’s not exactly right. Most treatments are as I understand it explicitly calculated in terms of risk reward: benefit versus complication such as side effects and risk of death. Even a massively successful treatment such as vaccination, which saves millions, does cause death. The individual risk and absolute numbers are so low though that all sane people think the benefits outweigh the risks. But that’s a dangerous analogy because it’s bringing in moral concepts already.
The point would be better put that there is an indeterminacy about questions of what passes for healthy: for one person healthy is being able to run a marathon; for me it might mean being able to walk to the nearest bakery and play with kittens. That doesn’t mean we don’t have answers to give about health more generally. The only other point is that this kind of a comment only makes sense with one eye to his “many peaks on the moral landscape” arguments.
Harris isn’t saying health is exactly like morality. He’s saying that we may make a “science” of morality in the same sense that we may do a “science” of health, with less than absolute and unchangeable definitions for those words — allowing for a rather fuzzy and evolving understanding of what we mean by them. Just as we do with everything else, actually.
Yahzi – you do realize that the pre-bellum South is not the only example of slavery there has ever been, yes? Or do you.
Montag – you’re comparing risks and benefits to the same person. Read my comment again. I’m talking about benefits to X and harms to Y. Benefits to one person versus harms to another.
I am still reading TML but I agree it is disappointing so far. I was expecting it to lay out a framework for a science of morality, but it seems in fact rather to be making a case that there can be a science of morality. An existence theorem, not a solution, based on well-being as a measurable consequence of moral choices. A rather less ambitious goal for the book but maybe a starting point for the odd new faculty.
So far, nothing I have read has addressed the prime requisite for a moral decision – inconveniencing oneself for someone else’s benefit that is – although there was a vague reference to game theory and games with no decidable strategy (the prisoner’s dilemma).
But still, if consequences of policy and doctrine were known and empirically measured, or even if it were commonly accepted that consequences should be known and empirically measured, there would be a solid basis on which to judge moral rules.
(By which I do not mean that consequences should determine moral choices, just that people who make moral choices should face up to their consequences as, for example, the Pope does not).
So maybe it is a step in the right direction.
OB:
I should have been clearer, but that’s precisely one of the hidden problems with vaccines. We expect some subset of people to have an adverse reaction, possibly leading to death. It’s an assumption that becomes more stark still when you realise that one of the goals is herd immunity. It’s a very subtle and discrete version of a kill some to save many more argument. One of the reasons I suspect it’s easy for it to get a pass on the normal human intuitions that tend to get uppity about these sorts of examples is that it’s very easy to rephrase it in terms of individual risks so that the system meets our intuitions about fairness: the person who dies was just the unlucky loser in a lottery. I was trying to point out though that this is still too much of a specifically moral dilemma to work well as an analogy. It’s possibly telling though that most people reading this blog will believe with me that it’s a pretty much resolved moral dilemma.
Montag – ah right. Actually you were clear…I should have read better. :- )
I think TML is a valiant effort to reopen a question that many have simply declared closed, without warrant, and have framed as a false choice. Whatever the flaws in Sam’s thinking or presentation, he obviously has struck a chord among many people for whom a complete denial of some basic connection between fact and value looks extreme and hasty, badly defended and stupidly self-destructive. I’m one of those.What I haven’t heard from the defenders of the old is-ought bifurcation, the advocates of academic philosophy as a guide to conduct over and above empirical inquiry, is exactly what their response would be to Harris’ over-educated interlocutor, who insisted we have no firm basis on which to condemn things like ritual genital mutilation, or even the hypothetical plucking out of the eyes of every third child in the name of cultural diversity. If your powerful impulse in the face of such technical ethical agnosticism isn’t to say “Are you out of your freaking mind, lady?” then I think something is broken in your brain, rationally as well as affectively. TML is a first attempt to describe just what is wrong in the thinking of these moral nihilists (who routinely engage in confident moral assertions in other contexts — a suggestive fact to consider!). If specific moral conclusions aren’t justified in facts about human nature and real world cause and effect relationships that might be “scientifically” teased out, then what are we grounding them in? Or is morality just a meaningless term, to be employed by anyone at any time as they wish? If so, we’re screwed. But I don’t think we are capable of having just any morality we like, any more than we can wear clothing of just any randomly chosen design and material. There are constraints in nature on our philosophy, as in every other thing about us, and science can help us uncover those.
Sam is attempting to put meat on some very solid intuitions we have, some common sense foundation in our psychological and rational nature that makes us want to insist that some things are beyond the pale for sentient creatures like us, regardless of custom. I support that attempt. This is a beginning.
Montag, vaccines are actually a really interesting example. First, we know that the risks to individuals who do not take the vaccine are greater than the risks to those who do take the vaccine in environments where herd immunity is not in play. So it isn’t a camouflaged kill; it’s a better set of odds than the alternative set, which is why its rational to choose vaccination. So choosing vaccination is in your best interest *even if* it also benefits others. Now, if you think that the second reason – that it benefits others – counts as an additional motivation, it seems like that claim would depend on some sort of consequentialist reasoning and would violate anything that insists on treating individuals solely as ends. But herd immunity also protects the individual who gets the vaccine, since no vaccine is perfect, and provides the individual with a herd to live in – which we have to have, since we’re a social species. Things that might seem at first like they benefit others at the expense of ourselves aren’t necessarily doing so.
In environments where herd immunity *is* in play, we call them “free riders” because we want to suggest that expecting other people to run a risk for you is wrong. But. We don’t require free riders to be vaccinated; we give them the choice to be vaccinated *or* be quarantined in the event of an outbreak. And that’s because they have a right to autonomy.
Autonomy is strangely absent from the discussion on this blog. The reason not to throw acid in the face of a girl isn’t entirely that it will decrease her well-being. The loss of autonomy also matters. It would matter even if she were only being doused with water and needed a shower and the water were arguably *improving* her well-being. And people choose autonomy even in cases where it doesn’t produce the best balance of well-being; it cannot be subsumed under well-being. (See the case where one patient could have his organs taken to save the lives of five people.)
Bruce, there are options beyond moral realism and moral relativism. An awful lot of philosophers would say they were some version of non-cognitivist, which basically amounts to some variation on the idea that although there’s nothing real in the world and no rule that makes it the case that death is bad we nonetheless have evolved intuitions that make us say “Boo death!” This was the stance of the logical positivists. The rest of the Gnu Atheist philosophical tendencies swing strongly positivist, so I’m somewhat surprised to see this possibility not even get a mention from the commenters here – especially as Dennett swings non-cognitivist last I checked. (It’s not like non-cognitivism is only accepted by logical positivists, of course.)
As a matter of fact, ethical philosophers, even moral skeptics, don’t hang back from engaging in applied ethics, and don’t hang back from saying what is right and what is wrong. They simply don’t accept that the meta-ethical problem has been solved. Like everyone else, they try to make common cause with other people and trust their moral instincts as a way of solving moral conflicts to the satisfaction of all parties, whether or not that’s according to some set of moral facts. There’s nothing to stop you from acting on your ethical theories even if you think there’s some sort of gap between is and ought. It would, for example, be entirely possible for a moral philosopher to take well-being as a goal and seek to maximise it without asserting that doing so was objectively morally good. He could just be satisfied that he and the others he was working with were agreed that other things being equal, human welfare is good.
Caryn – But I must say that this whole notion of deciding what your individual ethical criteria are flies in the face of what we are really talking about when we speak of ethics — which is certain implied agreements and limits that are binding on all individuals, as the natural consequence of being human beings functioning as social critters. I think in a sense what Sam is saying is that meta-ethics is a phony “problem.” Ethics is “applied” ethics, by definition. Theoretical ethics is like theoretical sex, of interest to no one, and in some sense nonsense.
Caryn:
I think there’s an interesting tension between our individual phrasing of the outcome. By describing the deaths as the outcome of a lottery I’m playing rather heavily on the idea that fairness is a goal we aim for in any outcomes: A lottery is fair because nobody gets singled out. But it’s the fairness that does the work in rendering buying into vaccine herd immunity reasonable, or at least it does for anyone who doesn’t start in a privileged position. Only then does the question of autonomy enter into it and I suspect muddle the issue a bit.
Bruce, I’m a bit confused about why you thought I was talking about my individual ethical criteria.
The project of moral realism is not to come up with our own personal ethics. Nor are the non-cognitivist and espressivist tacks designed simply to accomodate our own personal ethics. The people working on the problem are trying to come up with the rules that govern metaethics which presumably have to do a decent job of giving results that map our ethical intuitions. The objections to Harris don’t come from his attempt to tackle the problem, but to his blithe disregard of the well-known hurdles to solving it (not just the is-ought problem, but Moore’s open-question argument, Hume’s motivation argument, and also I suppose Harmon’s causal relevance argument.)
Montag, as I said fairness doesn’t do the work if you accept the empirical evidence that we’re social species who benefit from having a herd. :)
Bruce – Harris really isn’t the only alternative to moral relativism.
What’s moral relativism? Seriously. There are many theories that get labelled as “moral relativism”. If we’re talking about a sophisticated comrehensive theory of morality like that of, say, Jesse Prinz, it’s not obvious that moral relativism is a bad thing. Prinz’s view, considered in its entirety, seems to me to be one of the more plausible views out there. That’s not to say I endorse it, but you have to show what’s actually wrong with it rather than dismissing it without consideration because it’s a form of moral relativism. (This is actually a problem with TML: it discusses Prinz on specific points, but it never gives a real sense of the structure of a well-developed relativist theory like Prinz’s, which, of course, includes purported solutions to the problems that beset crude relativist theories.)
If we’re talking about the fairly vulgar and undeveloped ideas of cultural relativism that a first-year philosophy student may have brought from high school, it’s rather different. And then there’s the fact that religionists are likely to brand all sorts of utilitarian views and the like as “moral relativism”.
I’m not sure it’s all that useful as a term without specification of what is meant in a particular context.
Well, what is the relationship between beliefs and desires? Can a desire have cognitive content?
Well, a desire by itself can’t be true or false. A desire is not a proposition.
“Bruce – Harris really isn’t the only alternative to moral relativism.”
Now, now, Ophelia, who said that? You should weave straw men and sell them on Etsy, with such a gift. ;-)But seriously, what would you say to the woman who saw no basis for condemning religious eye-pluckers? What alternative is on offer? Is her view rationally unanswerable? I say it’s not just wrong — it’s crazy, and we need to get tough with it, and Sam is stepping up with a first attempt in the contemporary public sphere.
I believe Harris is tentatively and reasonably sketching out a popular (if not utterly original,or exclusive) framework that looks at scientific attitudes and methods, rather than academic, philosophical or religious ones, to address the moral debates we face. I also suggest that he is rejecting the whole amorphous notion of a “meta” ethics in favor of a practical, commonsense approach to grounding these moral reasonings — entirely consistent with a naturalistic account of the origins and significance of such human concerns. He is treating “morality” as a fundamentally natural phenomenon occurring in sentient, social species, as amenable — in principle — to empirical study as any other phenomenon in the natural universe. Shouldn’t this be our default assumption about everything we observe, until strong reasons for deferring to some other would-be magisterium are offered? I’ve never seen what I’d call strong reasons for isolating “morality” as a uniquely non-empirical area of inquiry. I do acknowledge that it has been successively, peremptorily claimed first by religion, then philosophy, while science was getting its boots on. I think that long habit of considering morality mysterious, abstract and/or sacrosanct has left the burden of proof in the wrong camp. I think not just Sam, but a large number of scientists, are building the database and tools that may enable us to explore this formerly taboo approach to a touchy topic in more concrete, accountable, useful ways. I’m content to wait and see, while calling out the nut-job relativists as best we can by any fair means available.
» Bruce (#64): “Bruce – Harris really isn’t the only alternative to moral relativism.” Now, now, Ophelia, who said that?
Somehow I seem to remember asking pretty much the same thing, so far without an answer…
Caryn:
That’s almost definitely true taking every possible moral dilemma into consideration. :)
Taken on its own though I think the question of herd immunity only counts as a reason for me *if* I have reason to believe I won’t be unfairly singled out. It’s completely reasonable for someone with a higher than average chance to have a fatal allergic reaction to refuse treatment; send the probability high enough and it becomes a virtual imperative.
“Who said that?” Are you kidding?! You just said it again!
No he’s not. It is not a first attempt! There’s a whole library on the subject. For that matter, there’s a large percentage of B&W – I’ve been “getting tough with it” right here for 8 1/2 years.
That Guy Montag,
I’m not sure what your comment to me is referring to. You asked if it was interesting that Harris’ work showed that moral reasoning used the same parts of the brain as scientific and everyday reasoning, and my reply was that it wasn’t since because it’s all reasoning we’d expect the same areas to light up. But that doesn’t make moral reasoning identical to scientific reasoning any more than it would make folk physics identical to physics; they do use different methods, are useful for different things, and get different answers.
As for whether is/ought is dogma, considering that it’s been challenged and discussed in philosophy for thousands of years I don’t think you can call it dogmatic. There are reasons for making that distinction. Harris doesn’t address any of them, and that’s a weakness in his argument.
As for there being comparisons between Harris and Mill, I totally agree. Unfortunately, Mill and other Utilitarians make their arguments a lot better than Harris does, and actually take the problems with their views seriously.
Here’s an empirical question for you: trolley cases. In one example, people are given a scenario where there is a trolley coming down the track, and it will strike and kill five people, but if the person moves a switch, it will be diverted to another track killing one person. The majority of people say that it would be at least morally permissable to move the switch and kill that one person to save the five. So far, morality looks Utilitarian.
Okay, so now we have the same situation, except that the person is required to push a much heavier person than themselves in front of the trolley to save those people. We’d expect, if we were all good little Utilitarians, that they would find that equally morally permissable. But they don’t; the majority call that morally impermissable. Why is this, and how does it fit into a Utilitarian or even Harris’ view?
Here’s another one: autistics and non-autistics tend to make similar moral judgements. However, overall autistics act more Kantian — duty and universal rules — than Humean — emotions and sympathy — and the opposite is true for non-autistics. This is tested by pointing out that when given a scenario where a woman steals bread to feed her children, autistics tend to say that it is wrong despite those mitigating circumstances, while non-autistics tend to say that it isn’t wrong. How would you use Harris’ method — or any empirical method — to decide which position is more moral?
The “blinding children” example is an interesting one, and one that I’ve addressed before by altering it slightly:
Imagine that there is this commandment from a god to do this, but also that in return for the blinding all of these people get the ability to see visions of the future, outlining dangers that will happen to people. This, then, allows them to warn others and prevent these deaths. Is it still, then, immoral to blind those children?
This would be a tough decision under a view that accepted a broadly Utilitarian view such as it seems Harris supports. Now, imagine how much harder it is to condemn this action when you’re dealing with a morality that says “Whatever God tells me to do is the right thing to do”. Harris can condemn him by his view, but not by theirs … unless he can prove theirs wrong. But he doesn’t seem even remotely close to that, and the prospects of his having such a method seem dim.
VS:
Cheers for the robust challenge. :)
On the question of the trolley problem Harris very clearly is willing to accept at least an amount of rule utilitarianism, but only as long as it moves us away from “The Greatest Misery for Everyone”. He clearly doesn’t think it’s a contradiction the we can value things like autonomy or fairness. In situations where autonomy contradicts say individual well being his point is that as long as we value it, it necessarily places us somewhere away from TGME and we can then compare the results of the weight we place on various values to the various other peaks on the moral landscape. All of the peaks he refers to should be seen as representing a different set of values and results and that we may well be unable to choose between them, but in a sense so what?
Largely the same point stands behind my challenge regarding folk physics versus physics. The only principle that distinction requires is that we have some method of deciding which view of physics is better. There is no need for them to represent fundamentally different objects of knowledge. On the other hand showing that the basis of reasoning in the brain is the same regardless of the subject narrows the field within which the distinction between facts and values as objects of knowledge can be grounded.
Finally, sorry about asking about Mill. It’s a hobby horse of mine that I think the argument in Utilitarianism is a lot stronger than it’s often made out to be, mostly because people seem to misunderstand his analogy with perception (the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy explicitly pays lip service to it in order to be “charitable”!) . There is a broader theory underneath my linking this argument to Harris but I’ve already hammered on enough about it elsewhere and don’t feel like revisiting it till I’ve got some more reading done.
Just a final clarification on the sole point that has Ophelia exercised. I am saying that Sam is taking a secular, empirical approach to ethics a) explicitly out of the realm of academic philosophy and b) to a wide public audience, not a narrow choir of blog readers and science geeks. That is the special contribution he is offering currently to the broad public conversation. Neither he, nor I, nor any serious person is suggesting that he is inventing naturalistic ethics, or is the only dog chewing this bone. But he is prominently forcing the question, offering his own vocabulary and writing style, and arguing for a particular framing of the question that has no current equivalent. His situation and rhetorical flair permit ready access to a non-specialist, non-choir congregation. (Hence no technical language, which so offends those who’ve spent a career learning the philosopy jargon.)
I am eager to hear your rebuttal to the lady who would calmly go touristing in the eye-plucking nations with her intellectually secure, multicultural dispassion. Sam has made his best offer of a rebuke. Do you see his bid, raise, or fold? Or are you calling a misdeal or stacked deck?
That Guy Montag,
The issue is that if you start allowing for values different from Harris’, it becomes difficult to see where you can stop. Harris’ view is radically different from the Stoics as a lot of the things that he thinks lead to happiness they consider indifferent. It also seems radically different from Russell Blackford’s, at least in how to determine values. And Blackford’s is a lot different from the Stoic view since he bases a lot of it on sympathy. The Kantian view is based on duty, and appeals to autistics; the Humean view is based on sympathy, and appeals to everyone else. How in the world can Sam Harris trace out a landscape that includes all of these disparate views while leaving out psychopaths? His answer that psychopaths don’t think they’re promoting an alternative morality doesn’t work because they clearly promote a different idea of well-being — similar to that of Egoists — and that’s enough to cause Harris problems. Thus, moving away from Utiitarianism to a more general approach doesn’t help him since he gives us no way to determine which value systems are or are not valid, because the term “happiness” means different things to different people. These things may be resolvable, but Harris does not do much TO resolve them, and I would have wanted to see that instead of his chapter on why religion isn’t moral, which he settles early on, it seemed to me.
So the real question is if we’ll be able to find real peaks at all that settle any of these questions.
As for the reasoning thing, again, that reasoning uses the same faculties no matter what you’re reasoning about is uncontroversial. But by the same token, that is not good evidence that they are tightly linked enough to be even remotely interchangeable; again, folk physical reasoning is not physics, and moral reasoning seems unlikely to be scientific reasoning. At least we’d need far more than that to make us think that we can figure out morality using scientific reasoning.
Bruce,
I’m not sure if you’re referring to me or Ophelia. I did somewhat answer that, mostly with a “It isn’t as obvious that someone should walk away as Harris says it is”. As for Ophelia, there are many tacks she can take to get around that issue, and the one that I’d think she’d be most likely to take is: yes, the blinding is obviously wrong, but it isn’t clear that at that point all one can do is walk away; one probably can prove to that lady that it is wrong and you can say an awful lot about the morality of it. Harris simply dismisses her as a moral expert and refuses to try to convince her of anything, while real objectivists would simply provide their evidence.
VS:
You are far too glib about dismissing the metaphysics of what it would mean to distinguish between is and ought statements. I am increasingly of the view that this relies on an equivocation in direction of fit. We need to be very careful here because both is statements and ought statements are outputs, their relationship is mind to world. In case you feel like doubting this, remember that meaningful content is often described as propositional content. That a statement makes assertions about the world allows us to do meaningful things like test it or declare it true. If you look at Mackie’s queerness argument for instance you’ll find that the intuition it instead plays with is that there is a difference between the world having an impact on the mind, and the mind having an impact on the world.
Now there is further analysis that needs to be done here. I can conceive of at least three ways in which the distinction can be modelled as long as we keep the direction of fit stable: the difference could be at the level of the brain, at the level of the input from the world or it can be a conceptual difference. The first two are off the table however, one because of the evidence from neuroscience and the other because it’s moral realism. That leaves us in the tricky position of asserting a conceptual difference without neurological underpinning. I think there are in fact plausible conceptual dualisms: it’s telling that both you and I are capable of understanding 2+2=4 even though we probably don’t use the exact same structure of brain to do it; another kind of conceptual dualism will be Dennett’s various stances. The problem is as I point out in my previous comment that this is very precarious. At the very least it should make you stop and reconsider that one of the intuitions you’re relying on is the same intuition that underpins substance dualism.
I’ve said everything I can on your other point about different moral theories. The point isn’t whether or not there are different moral theories on offer, but whether or not we have some common measure between them. Some may well come out equivalent but well, either we find a better yard stick or acknowledge that there is more than one way to skin the proverbial. We are very far away from being in a position to declare some problem as unresolvable by human reason.
It is not self-evident that slavery would increase suffering overall – it is self-evident only that it would increase suffering for the slaves. Harris doesn’t even manage to say that much – and if he can’t manage that, what can he manage?
You’re correct in that slavery doesn’t necessarily increase suffering overall. However, those societies practising it tend to become degraded, inefficient and backward.
During the Civil War The Union fought the Conferdates with one hand behind its back. The South was backward, far more illiterate, industrially stunted with its largest city counting only 70,000 people to New York’s 1.5 million.
So slavery may not increase the overall level of suffering, but it most certainly diminishes and degrades those societies who engage in it.
No, Sonia, not “certainly” – not from that one example. The slaveowning US South isn’t the only slave society there has ever been.
And then, you’re getting into language that departs from “well-being.” Worries about degradation are of a different kind from concerns for well-being. This is one of the problems with utilitarianism, and one of the things Harris neglected.
Bruce
No it isn’t. It still isn’t. He is not the first person to do that. He is far from the first. His contribution isn’t special in that way.
It is special in the contribution he can make via his research and training, but not in the attempt to write for a wide public audience.
Your last para is a little silly as addressed to me, frankly. I’ve been giving such replies here for years. They’re all over the place.
The phrase “direction of fit” is not a description of a mental state’s inputs and outputs. “Direction of fit” refers to a difference in the function of the state. Beliefs are mental representations that have the job of conforming to the world, so that the holder of the belief can successfully interact with it. Desires are mental representations that have the job of getting the world to conform to them (via the production of actions that remake the world so that it more closely resembles the way we desire it to be).
Caryn:
I know, I had a conversation elsewhere that confirmed I was getting things a bit mixed up. It’s also wrong in terms of its conception of Hume. Lordy me, the messes we get ourselves into. :) It does mean we’re back in my own private headache of are beliefs primitive though.
I’m still not entirely certain what you mean by “are beliefs primitive”… :)
It’s something that’s been bugging me for a while. It started with the traditional JTB, where with justification or truth even if you think there are puzzles to figure out, at least you have a sense what it means to be a justification or for you to be in a position to call something true. Belief doesn’t even reach that level and yet right there it’s considered the least contentious part of the traditional analysis of knowledge. It’s thinking like that that really leaves me sceptical about the status of belief and my suspicion is that it’s playing far too unanalysed a role in how we’re going about the debate. Sadly my attempt to analyse it kind of fell apart.
Just as a final point to clarify, I’ve said it before but I think it needs to be restated: I’m not committing myself to any particular view about belief and its relationship to cognitive content simply because that’s the stuff I’m sceptical about. I do suspect however that treating content as something more active like belief might in turn be the right kind of analysis; I’ve got Williamson pencilled in for a read when I’m a little more steady on my feet here.
I just finished listening to a debate over at Philosophy TV that gets a lot of my perspective on this issue right. Keith Frankish at one point mentions that scepticism about qualia can be similar to scepticism about beliefs and desires. My scepticism is founded more on questions of content than on physicalism, but all in all the point is the same: to hold that is and ought are irreconcilably different seems to me to commit one to something like qualia, the self, the soul, something that’s deeply doubtable.