Sam Harris' surprisingly modest proposal

"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.

I don't know if the book is any less bad, but this article is pure Dark Arts, and not even a competent attempt at those. I hardly see a single valid argument made in it. It is a mere collection of emotional appeals, invalid analogies, and ridiculous attempts to sell as "scientific" naive utilitarian ideas that anyone unbiased and moderately competent in critical thinking should be able to rip to shreds without any serious effort.

Like any other ideologue, Harris has a vision of what the social order should be like and how people should live their lives, and he wishes to push it onto those he disagrees with. This is nothing unusual by itself, but the real trouble is that in a way similar to an orthodox Marxist, Harris insists that his ideology has the force of "science" and therefore there can be no tolerance for those pathological elements who refuse to submit to his vision.

Traditional religious people, except for the greatest extremists, at least accept the fact that there will be other people around them who don't share their religion, so that it's desirable to find a way to agree to disagree. People like Harris, however, with their faith that their ideology is a product of "science" and thus infallible and necessarily accepted by anyone honest and sane, have no such concerns. Ultimately, if you have different ideas on how you would like to live your life and what kind of society you would like to live in, they are far more dangerous than all but the most extreme religious zealots.

I think he's way overconfident in assuming that everyone is or has to be concerned with the "well-being of conscious creatures." Some people do not think that the suffering of all conscious creatures counts, morally. Some people think that suffering ennobles. Some people think that there is such a thing as just punishment (not to prevent further suffering, but purely as retribution.) You're not going to prove those people wrong with science!

On the other hand, there are areas of broad agreement, especially within a society. Usually it's enough to say "But that will cause thousands of deaths!" or "But that leads to lifelong psychological trauma!" or "But that will destroy the economy!" It's so common to assume that death and poverty are bad, that objective facts can usually advance moral discussions. But those assumptions are not universal. Sam Harris can't persuade the Taliban that women are worth caring about. All he can do is to persuade the rest of us not to tolerate the Taliban.

There's a certain unity -- not universal unity, but broad unity -- in what people value. Sociopaths do not have empathy, but most people do. There's even more unity in the common values of modern industrialized democracies. But there are correspondingly more dissenters -- people who could not be persuaded to be concerned for women or children or the families of murderers. Science can tell us a lot about the consequences of actions; it doesn't tell us if we should care about the consequences.

I think that Sam Harris is actually advocating for more confidence on the part of those of us who care about the "well-being of conscious creatures." He's broadly a humanist; he doesn't like unnecessary suffering, and he thinks that the suffering or joy of any conscious creature counts. I have the same views. But you can't prove those views are worth having. At best you can say, empirically, that they're pretty common. You can say that the direction of history moves towards recognizing those views more and more fully.

Sam Harris makes me extremely nervous when he says in the FAQ(5):

[The Taliban] believe that they will enjoy an eternity of happiness after death by following the strictest interpretation of Islamic law here on earth.

He has a long history of asserting that people believe their dogma. While he has managed to say interesting things about religion despite this terrible handicap, I think one must be careful when reading him.

Similar is sketerpot's example of the burqa in France. I don't know what was meant by the example, but it's not a disagreement of individual preferences or belief about preferences. All sides are in tacit agreement that (most of) the purpose of the burqa is to show allegiance.

Harris says in his Q and A that people who think stopping gay marriage is a major issue are "not worth listening to."

That kind of gets to the heart of his argument. He's conceding that his argument has limits. If you're going to say that science can give us answers about morality, you have to declare that some people are not worth listening to. In his case, this means non-humanists. Harris, and I, believe that what matters morally is the well-being of conscious creatures. The people who don't -- the people who think some races are vermin to be exterminated, for example -- are completely incompatible with our moral system. We can't listen to them, and we can't persuade them; we can only stop them from doing harm.

You can talk to humanists by discussing consequences: such and such a plan would save lives or end them, cause happiness or misery, wealth or poverty, health or sickness, flourishing or limitation. You can't really talk to a non-humanist. You can't prove him wrong, by science or philosophy or anything else. If he doesn't care about people, you can't make him care. All you can do is say "I'm a humanist, and this makes you my enemy."

Here's a longer (1h 16m) version of his TED talk he gave at Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrA-8rTxXf0

The more polished TED version is kind of a summary of this talk.

I think you are overgenerous on his philosophical sophistication! AFAICT he just repeatedly asserts that we know what's right and it's promoting human wellbeing. He pushes straightforward moral realism with no stronger argument than repeated heated assertion.

My reaction is that moral philosophy just isn't science. Sure, if you're a utilitarian you can use empirical evidence to figure out what maximizes aggregate welfare, relative to your account of well-being, but you can't use science to discover that utilitarianism is true. This is because utilitarianism, like any other first-order normative theory and many meta-ethical theories, doesn't lead you to expect any experiences over any other experiences.

When people form an orderly line at the grocery store, nobody notices how neatly our goals and behavior have aligned.

It hasn't even made the Onion!

I still think Ayer's chapter on ethics sums up morality pretty well, at least as most peole use the term. Is Harris referencing something other than an objective set of values? It seems he may be committing one great naturalistic fallacy if not, and if he is I wish he would ditch the term.

Just reading his frequently asked questions was probably enough for me to say I agree with him. His proposal is idealistic, though. Bioethics is an area where we know exactly what would increase humanity's well-being, but Sam Harris's modest proposal isn't going to sway anyone.

Basically, it's cool that someone's being sane about morality. For anyone who disagreed with or didn't understand Eliezer's sequence on the subject, this seems like the next best thing, if you supplement it with knowledge of evolutionary/cognitive psychology, rationality, signaling theory, et cetera.

Sam Harris's books are wonderfully written, weaving together Eastern and Western modes of thought. Looking down the comments list, I think far too many people have just read the first link and judged from there. Don't extrapolate from small amounts of evidence when there's much more evidence to consider.

I have read all of Harris's works, and find them incredibly useful and informative. I now follow his blog, and I assure you that he covers all of the problems discussed below. He argues that all moral decisions are decisions about the best possible future state of affairs.

As has been discussed on other posts, most human hardware (brains, that is) are similar. He argues that human flourishing is what we should really value, if we actually understand what we value. He doesn't say that morality concerns the kinds of rules we find in physics, but that it is far more normative.

He supposes a person who doesn't share our values, but this time takes the normative values of logic. If a person is a genesis-creationist-chemist, who believes that water isn't H20 because it would be biblically inelegant for God to make special hydrogen before making the sun, then we can't disprove them by appeal to logic. What logical argument, he asks, will you use to persuade someone to value logic? We can't use these normative laws to tell people what to believe if they don't share our values. Harris then takes our value of human flourishing. He attempts to show how almost all people value this, and how a science of morality therefore shouldn't be as controversial as, for instance, a science of physical health - nobody is attacking the philosophical underpinnings of physical health by asking "What if a person wants to throw up all of the time and then die?". And nobody also says "Health changes over time, and we can't have a science surrounding such a vague idea". Just because people used to only live to 25 and now live to 70 doesn't mean we can't be scientific about health. He argues that we can have a science of such normative values with a perfectly well grounded philosophy, just as science can be built around other normative things, like logic.

That may not be the best presentation of his argument... It's not my personal choice, and I'm not him. He writes clearly, but he's one of the best speakers I've ever come across. Perhaps listen to his full-length talks on Morality, Free Will and Religion/Dogmatism. I think he's really much better than the comments are giving him credit for.

To hear his view on Free Will: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g&feature=player_embedded

Sam argues for moral realism - a pretty unpopular idea around here.

The case he makes for it is an awful one, IMO.

When people form an orderly line at the grocery store, nobody notices how neatly our goals and behavior have aligned.

Lots of people notice this! A few years ago, there was a popular book ("Watching the English") one of whose major topics was how much English people like to queue, and it's widely known that the same does not hold for many sorts of continental Europeans.

I wonder what kinds of depraved and obviously insane moral standards we, and Sam Harris, hold right now that will cause our mid-third-millennium descendants to shake their heads during History class, and Sam Harris' distant spiritual heir to label us as "not worth listening to" while providing no argument more structured than 'because it's depraved and obviously insane, duh'. (Murdering animals seems the foremost candidate. All sorts of now-disgusting sexual mores also sound plausible.)

If your theory for a universal morality behaves for all intents and purposes like "Let's all care about the exact same things I care about, and anybody who disagrees is very evil or very stupid!", you may want to tone down your claims.