{"id":1415,"date":"2010-05-19T18:04:49","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T23:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2010-05-19T20:02:06","modified_gmt":"2010-05-20T01:02:06","slug":"sam-harris-and-his-butterfly-net-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/05\/19\/worldview\/sam-harris-and-his-butterfly-net-continued\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Harris and his Butterfly Net Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an earlier post<\/a>, I commented on fellow atheist Sam Harris’ chase after that gaudy butterfly, the good-in-itself. Well, the chase continues. In an article that appeared on no less virtuous a site than Huffpo, he describes his recent progress “Toward a Science of Morality<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

His latest on the subject was inspired by feedback on a talk he gave at this year’s Ted Conference<\/a> from, as he puts it,\u00a0“literally thousands” of people. It would seem that many of them are no more impressed by Sam’s quest for the holy grail of scientific goodness than I am. In his words,<\/p>\n

If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like “well-being” and “misery” are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them. Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, I’d like to think that not all of those thousands of commenters were caricatures of\u00a0over-educated, atheistic nihilists.\u00a0 As Sam describes them, they don’t make a lot of sense.\u00a0 For example, it is logically impossible to “combat human evil while knowing that our notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are unwarranted” because the statement itself is an admission that the speaker doesn’t know what “human evil” is.\u00a0 Similarly, one can’t be committed to “making the world a better place”\u00a0unless\u00a0he actually knows what\u00a0he’s\u00a0talking about when he uses the term “better.”\u00a0 However, Sam is no more logical than the opposition.\u00a0 In the same paragraph he implies that good and evil must have a real existence by virtue of the fact that\u00a0human beings are capable of\u00a0strong negative\u00a0emotional responses to practices such as\u00a0forcing women to wear burqas, or female genital excision.\u00a0 By that logic, God must exist, too, because otherwise there would have been no one around to create the world.\u00a0 For that matter, I\u00a0also have a strongly negative\u00a0subjective emotional response to liberal “progressives” striking ostentatious poses of public piety.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean that such people are “really evil.”\u00a0 It merely means that my subjective identification of “out-groups” is different from Sam’s, a difference that human moral behavior is entirely flexible enough to accommodate.\u00a0 Sorry, Sam, but human emotional responses are adequately explained as the expression of evolved behavioral traits.\u00a0 They do not require the existence of real good and real evil.<\/p>\n

Sam continues,<\/p>\n

First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “anti-realism,” “emotivism,” and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here I can only agree wholeheartedly.\u00a0 My own thoughts on morality are based on the fundamental hypotheses that<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 The human behavioral traits associated with morality exist because they have evolved.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 They evolved at a time when the nature of human relationships and human societies were much different in many respects from what they are in the modern world.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Good and evil exist only as subjective mental constructs of the mind associated with these behavioral traits.\u00a0 They have no objective existence independent of their manifestation in the minds of individuals.<\/p>\n

Acceptance of these hypotheses requires, at a minimum, knowledge and acceptance of the theory that human beings have evolved as a result of a process of natural selection.\u00a0 No pre-Darwinian moral philosopher could have understood or appreciated the significance of these fundamental assumptions.\u00a0 Therefore, until someone can demonstrate that my hypotheses are wrong, it makes no more sense for me to learn everything they had to say about the real existence of good and evil that it would have made for Copernicus and Galileo to learn everything that had ever been written based on the assumption of a geo-centric universe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for the modern effusions of the “experts on ethics,” they have a remarkable aversion to, as E. O. Wilson<\/a> put it,” laying their cards on the table.”\u00a0 In other words, they tend to wander off in obscure reasonings about good and evil without bothering to first explain to the rest of us why they believe such categories even exist, and, if they do exist, what the nature of their existence might be.\u00a0 I have” laid my cards on the table” by setting forth the fundamental assumptions noted above.\u00a0 They make it possible for others to agree or disagree with me by simply demonstrating that my hypotheses are right or wrong.\u00a0 To the extent that the “experts” fail to lay their cards on the table in similar fashion, I consider what they have to say on the subject of morality irrelevant, regardless of how many articles they have published on the subject in scholarly journals.<\/p>\n

Sam continues with the assertion that one can have a science of morality.\u00a0 That is certainly true in the sense that one can seek to discover truths about its nature and the reasons for its existence.\u00a0 One can also use science to examine the legitimacy of moral claims.\u00a0 Hume realized long ago<\/a> that good and evil are not objective things, and that one cannot, therefore, demonstrate their existence using reason.\u00a0 That certainly doesn\u2019t mean one can\u2019t subject the phenomena associated with morality to scientific study.\u00a0 One cannot, however, use science to create something that doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 If objective good and evil don\u2019t exist to begin with, then they will not magically spring into existence, even if one invokes science until one is blue in the face, any more than God will spring into existence by virtue of the fact that he is subjected to scientific study.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, we soon discover that Sam does not refer to a \u201cscience of morality\u201d in this limited sense.\u00a0 In the following paragraphs he claims that the real, objective good consists in maximizing human well-being.\u00a0 He does so rather subtly, as if embarrassed to make such a claim, but still, he makes the claim.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n

I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive\/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one’s basement, waiting to be sacrificed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice that, though their definitions of \u201cwell-being\u201d differ, both Sam and the worshipper of Aztec gods in the paragraph above are made to implicitly accept the claim that well-being can be equated with real moral good.\u00a0 In later paragraphs, Sam confirms the surmise that he equates well-being with the objective good.\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n

Even if there were ten thousand different ways for groups of human beings to maximally thrive (all trade-offs and personal idiosyncrasies considered), there will be many ways for them not<\/em> to thrive — and the difference between luxuriating on a peak of the moral landscape and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For instance, I think that Kant’s Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal well-being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What we have then, is a version of Mill\u2019s Utilitarianism with \u201cwell-being\u201d substituted for \u201cutility,\u201d but with the added claim that well-being and objective good are actually the same, a claim that Mill, who explicitly rejected claims of \u201ctranscendental good\u201d would never have made.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve pointed out elsewhere, I suspect Mill would have rejected even his own qualified version of Utilitarianism<\/a> if he\u2019d been able to sit on the shoulders of Darwin, but, unfortunately, he was born a bit too early.\u00a0 He died some years after publication of \u201cOn the Origin of Species,\u201d but before the implications of Darwin\u2019s theory concerning morality <\/a>had a chance to sink in.<\/p>\n

In what follows, Harris addresses the objections to his \u201cscientific morality\u201d from a number of individuals, who all, oddly enough, agree with the notion, at least implicitly, that real objective good exists, and that it can be equated to well-being.\u00a0 Far from denying that well-being and objective good are the same, they merely quibble about whether one can find adequate metrics to determine scientifically what \u201cwell-being\u201d is.\u00a0 For example, prominent among them is physicist Sean Carroll<\/a>, whom Harris quotes as saying,<\/p>\n

Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae. Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More importantly, it’s equally obvious that even right-thinking people don’t really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And from biologist P. Z Myers<\/a>, again, implicitly accepting the criterion of well-being, but rejecting the possibility of scientifically measuring it.<\/p>\n

I don’t think Harris’s criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can’t… Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the elephant in the room that all these comments and counter-comments studiously avoid is the validity of the claims that a) objective good actually exists, and b) objective good can be equated with well being.\u00a0 In fact, Harris seems to be aware of this, as he belatedly gets around to moving from \u201cis\u201d to \u201cought\u201d at the end of the article:<\/p>\n

So, while it is possible to say that one can’t move from “is” to “ought,” we should be honest about how we get to “is” in the first place. Scientific “is” statements rest on implicit “oughts” all the way down. When I say, “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen,” I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn’t share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This paragraph makes no sense for a variety of reasons.\u00a0 To begin, the nature of water \u201cis\u201d what it is regardless of the value one assigns to the means of discovering its nature.\u00a0 That nature does not depend on mental processes going on in the minds of those trying to find out what it is, and it would not change a bit if those minds were living, dead, or never existed to begin with.\u00a0 Furthermore, the \u201cought\u201d Harris refers to has nothing to do with a moral \u201cought.\u201d\u00a0 It refers to the effectiveness of methods of acquiring knowledge of the nature of water.\u00a0 In other words, it assumes a goal, and assigns value to the different means of achieving the goal depending on their relative effectiveness.\u00a0 If someone preferred an approach different from my own to determining the true nature of water, I might conclude they are wrong, but I would not conclude they are immoral.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The \u201coughts\u201d related to human morality, on the other hand, are associated with emotional responses in the form of innate predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain. \u00a0These \u201coughts\u201d can vary somewhat depending on education and culture, but display striking commonalities across widely varying societies.\u00a0 We experience them as absolutes, independent of their effectiveness in achieving one goal or another.\u00a0 The behavioral traits associated with morality evolved because they promoted our survival in times very different from the present.\u00a0 They are not relevant to any other purpose one might name, including the well-being of mankind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

False conclusions can be dangerous.\u00a0 For example, if we falsely conclude we can fly, and walk off a cliff, we will die.\u00a0 False conclusions about morality can be far more dangerous.\u00a0 When the Communists tried to associate morality with their version of the well-being of mankind, they did not succeed in creating a \u201cNew Soviet Man\u201d whose moral behavior was infinitely adaptable to suite the purpose they had in mind.\u00a0 Rather, they unleashed human emotions they did not understand, resulting in the greatest episodes of mass murder and brutality mankind has ever witnessed.\u00a0 One can rationally discuss whether the \u201cwell-being of mankind\u201d is a desirable goal.\u00a0 Attempting to achieve that goal by tinkering with innate behavioral traits that are as yet poorly understood is to invite disaster once again.<\/p>\n

Continuing with Harris\u2019 remarks:<\/p>\n

But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science’s failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science, but we cannot cause the well-being of conscious creatures to be identical with the real, objective good, because the real, objective good doesn\u2019t exist, and one can\u2019t call it into existence by an act of will.\u00a0 Have the consequences of moral relativism been disastrous?\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 Objective good either exists or it doesn\u2019t, and that reality will not be changed one iota by our conclusions regarding the consequences of moral relativism, or our dissatisfaction with the perception that science hasn\u2019t achieved some noble end or other.\u00a0 One wonders why Harris ever became an atheist.\u00a0 After all, one can as easily claim that the decline in religious belief has been disastrous because it has deprived many people of a purpose in life.\u00a0 Should we not, therefore, magically call God back into existence and make him \u201ctrue,\u201d out of concern for the suffering of these people?\u00a0 If we conclude that seeing the color red has been disastrous, will it suddenly turn to green to spare our sensitivities?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Harris doesn\u2019t realize it, but his claim that faith-based religion is a great engine of ignorance and bigotry is itself a manifestation of human moral behavior; namely, out-group identification.\u00a0 The statement is both untrue and morally loaded on the face of it.\u00a0 I myself am an atheist, and would be the first to agree that religion is potentially harmful by virtue of the fact that it is not true, but \u201ca great engine of ignorance and bigotry?\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 On a general level it is simply untrue that religion has never resulted in anything good, and on the individual level, I know a host of firm religious believers who are neither ignorant nor bigots.\u00a0 Harris’ identification of religious believers as an out-group in this fashion is a manifestation of moral behavior that is entirely similar to the identification of \u201cthe bourgeoisie\u201d as an out-group by the Communists, or the Jews as an out-group by the Nazis.\u00a0 It seems to me the results in those experiments in the creative application of morality did not contribute to the \u201cwell-being of mankind.\u201d\u00a0 Out-group identification is an aspect of human moral behavior that continues to be ignored as an inconvenient truth, but it exists, nevertheless.\u00a0 To demonstrate that fact to himself, Harris need merely glance around him at Huffpo and take note of the furious ongoing demonization of political opponents.\u00a0 If he really believes in the fantasy of a \u201creal good\u201d that is identical with human well-being, he might want to consider the fact that the \u201creal evil\u201d must inevitably accompany it.\u00a0 It always has in the past.\u00a0 Under the circumstances, Harris would do well to rethink his conclusion that well-being and moral good are identical. \u00a0As for the notion of \u201cmoral relativism,\u201d I doubt that it even exists, except as a chimera of moral philosophers.\u00a0 Most, if not all, human beings perceive the moral good as an absolute, because that\u2019s the way in which it has most effectively promoted our survival.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Continuing with Harris,<\/p>\n

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, it is anything but exactly the same.\u00a0 Is it really so difficult see that “the good” in the sense of a real, objective thing having an independent existence of its own\u00a0is\u00a0not the same as\u00a0“the good” in the sense of a useful method of finding the truth?\u00a0 There is no similarity between good defined in terms of usefulness for achieving some preconceived goal, such as discovering truth, and good defined as real objective moral good, having an existence of its own independent of subjective human emotions, yet corresponding to the subjective feeling of Sam Harris and a subset of human beings who think like him.\u00a0 Are all the recent revelations about the\u00a0hard-wired origins and emotional nature of human moral behavior really meaningless and irrelevant?\u00a0 I can understand the reluctance of some people to give up the only objective justification they have for the great joy they derive from virtuous indignation.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that justification simply doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 There is no such thing as real, objective good, nor is there any such thing as real, objective evil, any more than there is a real, objective God.\u00a0 By attempting to force them into existence Harris isn\u2019t inaugurating a new science of morality.\u00a0 He\u2019s inaugurating a new secular religion, complete with an imaginary God of its own.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an earlier post, I commented on fellow atheist Sam Harris’ chase after that gaudy butterfly, the good-in-itself. Well, the chase continues. In an article that appeared on no less virtuous a site than Huffpo, he describes his recent progress “Toward a Science of Morality.” His latest on the subject was inspired by feedback on … Continue reading “Sam Harris and his Butterfly Net Revisited”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46,24,48,6,28,67,5,29,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amity-enmity-complex","category-demonization","category-evolution","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-ideology","category-morality","category-philosophy","category-religion","category-worldview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-mP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1415"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1426,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions\/1426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}