{"id":3492,"date":"2013-01-05T09:14:05","date_gmt":"2013-01-05T14:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3492"},"modified":"2013-01-05T09:14:05","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T14:14:05","slug":"guns-and-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2013\/01\/05\/morality\/guns-and-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"Guns and Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Harris<\/a> has just posted an article on his blog supporting gun ownership<\/a>.\u00a0 While he does so with certain caveats (he supports “sensible” gun control, and is “outraged” over the political influence of the National Rifle Association) his position puts him squarely at odds with liberals in general and liberal atheists like himself in particular.\u00a0 This is interesting in view of the fact that Harris claims the ability to “scientifically” discern the difference between Good and Evil.\u00a0 After all, opposition to gun ownership is fundamentally a moral issue as far as most liberals are concerned.<\/p>\n

Consider, for example, the position of Jerry Coyne, proprietor of the “Why Evolution is True<\/a>” blog, and, like Harris, a liberal atheist.\u00a0 As I mentioned in an earlier post, unlike Harris, Coyne\u00a0claims that he does\u00a0not agree that there are “scientifically establishable truths about ethics<\/a>,” and asserts that moral judgments are subjective matters of opinion.\u00a0 In practice, however, that matters not a bit.\u00a0 He almost invariably writes as if there were.\u00a0 His position on gun control is a case in point.\u00a0 For example, a couple of posts later <\/a>he states that theologian William Lane Craig should “rot in hell” for differing with him on the Newtown massacre.\u00a0 He does not elaborate on whether, like Christian and Moslem fundamentalists, he believes that Mr. Craig should rot in hell for billions and trillions of years just for starters, or, as befits a more enlightened, liberal point of view, his term should only last for a few millennia, or even centuries.\u00a0 Regardless, it would seem that Coyne’s “mere opinion” has somehow jumped out of his skull, thrown off its subjective strings, and become a normative object, complete with plenary power to judge whether opinions are good or evil, and consign the bearers of the latter to the eternal fire.\u00a0 As anyone who consults his blog can see, he reacts with similarly furious virtuous indignation to anyone else who disagrees with him\u00a0concerning gun control.\u00a0 I suspect that most liberal atheists, who are just as cocksure\u00a0as\u00a0Coyne that\u00a0they are the bearers of moral truth, come down squarely in his corner\u00a0on the matter.<\/p>\n

In a word, gun control is a profoundly moral issue as far as\u00a0Harris’ fellow liberals are concerned.\u00a0 However, in spite of his assurances in The Moral Landscape<\/em> that “science” can decide which side is good and which evil, he hardly mentions morality in his post.\u00a0 There is good reason for that.\u00a0 Good and evil are judgments based on subjective moral emotions, not scientific facts.\u00a0 Those moral emotions exist in the first place\u00a0for reasons that are completely unrelated to the regulation of firearms.\u00a0 In other words, morality is irrelevant to the issue, other than to the extent that human behavioral traits must be taken into account in deciding matters of state policy.\u00a0 At some level, Harris is aware of the fact.\u00a0 He knows that Coyne and like-minded liberals, and not he, are standing on the “moral high ground” on the issue of gun control.\u00a0 In other words, it is far easier for them than for him to arouse moral emotions to support their point of view.\u00a0 That is why he has chosen to couch the issue in almost purely rationalistic terms.<\/p>\n

For example, most people would prefer that their family members not be murdered or become victims of violent attack.\u00a0 Harris presents reasoned arguments in support of his contention that the right to keep and bear arms is likely to minimize the probability of these contingencies.\u00a0 Most people would prefer that they and their family members not become victims of a massacre perpetrated by a psychopath with a firearm.\u00a0 Harris presents reasoned arguments in support of his contention that a blanket ban on firearms would be an ineffective way to minimize this contingency.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 I applaud him for this approach.\u00a0 It has always been my opinion that it is best to decide matters of public policy in this way, and, to the extent possible, minimize the pernicious influence of moral emotions\u00a0on those decisions.\u00a0 There is no reason to believe that\u00a0moral emotions\u00a0are likely to be helpful in deciding matters that have nothing to do with the ultimate reason for their existence.\u00a0 There is no better way to illustrate this point than to compare Harris’ reasoned arguments with the morally loaded ones of Coyne and his other liberal opponents.\u00a0 As Harris rightly observes, they are marked by an astounding level of ignorance, both of the arguments of their opponents, which are generally presented in a crudely bowdlerized form that demonstrates a lack of any serious attempt to study them in depth, and of firearms in general.\u00a0 As Harris puts it:<\/p>\n

I have read articles in which literally everything said about firearms and ballistics has been wrong. I have heard major newscasters mispronounce the names of every weapon and weapons manufacturer more challenging than \u201cColt.\u201d I can only imagine the mirth it has brought gun-rights zealots to see \u201cautomatic\u201d and \u201csemi-automatic\u201d routinely confused, or to hear a major news anchor ominously declare that the shooter had been armed with a \u201cSig Sauzer\u201d pistol. This has been more than embarrassing. It has offered a thousand points of proof that \u201cliberal elites\u201d don\u2019t know anything about what matters when bullets start flying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Detailed knowledge of a subject is superfluous to those whose goal is not to decide matters of fact, but to arouse moral emotions.<\/p>\n

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

Sam Harris has just posted an article on his blog supporting gun ownership.\u00a0 While he does so with certain caveats (he supports “sensible” gun control, and is “outraged” over the political influence of the National Rifle Association) his position puts him squarely at odds with liberals in general and liberal atheists like himself in particular.\u00a0 … Continue reading “Guns and Morality”<\/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":[110,6,170,5],"tags":[171,120],"class_list":["post-3492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-good-and-evil","category-gun-control","category-morality","tag-gun-control-2","tag-morality-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Uk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3492","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=3492"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3495,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3492\/revisions\/3495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}