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Author Topic:   Scientific Morality? - (The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris)
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 274 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 4 of 34 (664587)
06-02-2012 11:13 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Jazzns
06-01-2012 3:08 PM


I read the book. Unfortunately I got it from the library, so I don't have a copy to hand.
He makes a good case. Nonetheless:
Sam Harris writes:
Even if each conscious being has a unique nadir on the moral landscape, we can still conceive of a state of the universe in which everyone suffers as much as he or she (or it) possibly can. If you think we cannot say this would be "bad," then I don't know what you could mean by the word "bad" (and I don't think you know what you mean by it either).
... if we found someone somewhere who would not admit that such a state of affairs would be bad, we would not be able to convince him otherwise with objective evidence as we might convince someone who denied that the sun is hot.
Also, if it is a fact that everyone concurs in this moral judgement, then this holds out little hope that they're going to concur in other moral judgements, because in fact they will not.
Now, to some extent Sam Harris deals with this diversity of opinion: he points out that many of our varying moral judgements are equally utilitarian in spirit, and are based on differences of opinion about fact. If someone will burn in hell for having the sort of sex they enjoy, then they shouldn't --- which is a consideration of well-being just like the proposition that if there isn't a hell he should get on with it and good luck to him. Science, by telling us that there is no afterlife of any sort, helps us to find out which advice to follow.
But there are other problems. What is well-being? Is it to be measured only in endorphins? Most people would stipulate other conditions as desirable, such as liberty, dignity, sanity, and so forth. Doubtless a heroin addict with a lifetime's supply of heroin would be happier than me on a continuous basis, but I wouldn't trade places with him, nor with a madman whose delusions made him happy. These are extreme cases, but then there are the gray areas. If a social system took away liberty in order to promote prosperity and happiness, would that be OK? How about depriving people of truth in order to promote contentment, as Plato would have done in his ideal Republic, deliberately inculcating a myth into his citizens for the sake of social stability?
Now, how do we make these sorts of value judgements, when the sorts of things that people want, and that we want for people, cannot be represented on a single scale?
Then again, there's the old problem of summing utilities. Would it be worth sacrificing one human life to cure a million people of a mild headache? No? How about dropping a brick on his foot? Or suppose that you could make everyone in the world but one as happy as they could possibly be --- at the cost of consigning that one person to the nadir of misery? OK then, what if it was a different person each day, selected by lot?
Now our ability to reach consensus on whether it would be bad if everyone was as miserable as possible doesn't mean that we have, or even that we might in principle develop, some way of answering more subtle and difficult moral questions.
Well, those are just some disjointed thoughts at random. I should really take another look at the book.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Jazzns, posted 06-01-2012 3:08 PM Jazzns has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 9 by Jazzns, posted 06-03-2012 10:28 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 274 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 11 of 34 (664630)
06-03-2012 1:45 PM
Reply to: Message 9 by Jazzns
06-03-2012 10:28 AM


I think the important point that I took away was that the existence of the gray areas doesn't change that there many things we can know. Harris also took certain pains to make sure the reader understood that even if there are questions we cannot currently answer, that does not mean no answer exists similar to paradoxes in science/math.
Well, but it may well mean that. If his demonstration that for some questions there is a definite moral truth is based on the fact that we can all agree on the answers, then given that we cannot agree on other answers to other questions it looks like there is no definite truth.
If he had some other reason for asserting the existence of such truths, that would be a different matter. But when his basis for doing so is that we all agree, then aren't we obliged to conclude that where there is no such agreement there are no such truths?
In some senses though, don't we already accept some real situations like this? I am personally a staunch advocate of vaccination policy when simply by bad luck will cause certain children misery who are allergic to them.
For some values of "we", yes.
My point is not that utilitarianism is wrong because some people will make such decisions; it is that utilitarianism is indefinite because other utilitarians would make other decisions. Once we have decided that suffering is bad, there remain a lot of open questions, among which the ones I have raised are the most problematic. Would it be better to increase the total of suffering if by doing so one could share it out more fairly, reducing the number of people at the extremes of suffering and of well-being, or would it be better to do the exact opposite? And when we start thinking about particular cases, we find that we are looking at a big gray area. I guess we can all agree with Sam Harris that it would be good to increase the well-being of everyone, but in more complicated cases we have to start making value judgements --- judgements such that even complete knowledge of the facts, and a quantified linear scale of suffering thrown into the bargain, would not allow us to resolve with an easy conscience that we had made the right decision.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 9 by Jazzns, posted 06-03-2012 10:28 AM Jazzns has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 12 by Jazzns, posted 06-03-2012 2:21 PM Dr Adequate has not replied

  
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