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Author Topic:   Scientific Morality? - (The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris)
Jazzns
Member (Idle past 3902 days)
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From: A Better America
Joined: 07-23-2004


Message 1 of 2 (664515)
06-01-2012 3:08 PM


I just finished reading Sam Harris' book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.
I consider Harris to be the most progressive (not in the political sense) of the so-called New Atheists and this book has reinforced my opinion on that matter. In it, Harris dismantles the framework that seems to be the cause of so many absolute versus relative morality debates. There is another way to think about morality that is distinct from the former dichotomy and has the potential to give us a common language for talking about morality. Harris presents a notion of a moral landscape, a conceptual space that has peaks and valleys that correspond to higher and lower states of well-being for people. Morality consists of the actions and behaviors we take that allow us to move away from valleys and toward peaks. Moreover, because well-being relies upon facts about the universe, science can be used as a tool to help us navigate inside this landscape.
I transcribed a few sections of the book because I think Harris describes it well. Emphasis is mine.
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). Once we conceive of "the worst possible misery for everyone," then we can talk about taking incremental steps toward this abyss: What could it mean for life on earth to get worse for all human beings simultaneously? ... All we need imagine is a scenario in which everyone loses a little, or a lot, without there being compensatory gains (i.e. no one learns any important lessons, no one profits from others' losses, etc). It seems uncontroversial to say that a change that leaves everyone worse off, by any rational standard, can be reasonably called "bad," if this word is to have any meaning at all.
We simply must stand somewhere. I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone. I am not claiming that most of us personally care about the experience of all conscious beings; I am saying that a universe in which all conscious beings suffer the worst possible misery is worse than a universe in which they experience well-being. This is all we need to speak about the "moral truth" in the context of science. Once we admit that the extremes of absolute misery and absolute flourishing are different and dependent on facts about the universe, then we have admitted that there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.
The concept that Harris refactored in my mind was the notion that morality must be independently prescriptive and/or founded on some kind of deep philosophical principles, standards that we do not hold to other useful pursuits. He makes a compelling analogy to physical health that prompted me to read the book in the first place after hearing him make the same argument in a video I saw.
The video is well worth watching:
Here is also a debate between Harris and William Lane Craig on this very topic. What is very interesting is how Harris fields challenges. Very well worth watching in full.
But if you don't have the time, some relevant quotations from the book are here:
Sam Harris writes:
However, many people will continue to insist that we cannot speak about moral truth, or anchor morality to a deeper concern for well-being, because concepts like "morality" and "well-being" must be defined with reference to specific goals and other criteria -- and nothing that prevents people from disagreeing about these definitions.
...
The definition of "life" remains, to this day, difficult to pin down. Does this mean we can't study life scientifically? No. The science of biology thrives despite such ambiguities. Again, the concept of "health" is looser still: it, too, must be defined with reference to specific goals -- not suffering chronic pain, not always vomiting, etc. -- and these goals are continually changing. Our notion of "health" may one day be defined by goals that we cannot currently entertain with a straight face (like the goal of spontaneously regenerating a lost limb). Does this mean that we can't study health scientifically?
I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: "What about all the people who don't share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is 'healthy'? What makes you think that you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that he is not as healthy as you are?" And yet these are precisely the kinds of objections I face when I speak about morality in terms of human and animal well-being.
Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science. Medicine can resolve specific questions about human health -- and it can do this even while the very definition of "health" continues to change. Indeed, the science of medicine can make marvelous progress without knowing how much its own progress will alter our conception of health in the future.
I think our concern for well-being is even less in need of justification than our concern for health is -- as health is merely one of its many facets. And once we begin thinking seriously about human well-being, we will find that science can resolve specific questions about morality and human values, even while our conception of "well-being" evolves.
It is essential to see that the demand for radical justification leveled by the moral skeptic could not be met by any branch of science. Science is defined with reference to the goal of understanding the processes at work in the universe. Can we justify this goal scientifically? Of course not. Does this make science itself unscientific? If so, we appear to have pulled ourselves down by our bootstraps.
That last part is particularly important to me because I always struggled with some of those thought problems that people pose. Harris' mentions some of them such as, if you could switch a track so a runaway train to save or kill certain people in certain circumstances. The notion that we don't NEED to have a morality that answers ALL of these questions in order to have it properly grounded in reality is my big takeaway from Harris.
Harris also talks about how we might justify an active morality in this way.
Sam Harris writes:
The moment we admit that consciousness is the context in which any discussion of values makes sense, we must admit that there are facts to be known about how the experience of conscious creatures can change. Human and animal well-being are natural phenomena. As such, they can be studied, in principle, with the tools of science and spoken about with greater or lesser precision.
...
The fact that it could be difficult or impossible to know exactly how to maximize human well-being does not mean that there are no right or wrong ways to do this -- nor does it mean that we cannot exclude certain answers as obviously bad.
...
The difficulty of getting precise answers to certain moral questions does not mean that we must hesitate to condemn the morality of the Taliban -- not just personally, but from the point of view of science. The moment we admit that we know anything about human well-being scientifically, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures can be absolutely wrong about it.
I would go further than I think he does to say that I believe this is what we already do. Even people who believe in a divine absolute morality will respond in ways that suggest they unintentionally respect this principle in areas not clouded by their religion. For example, I know many Christians who would likely reject Harris' accounting of their moral frame of reference while also fiercely advocating for the rights of a child to an education on the basis that it improves the well-being of society as a whole.

So what do you all think? Has anyone else come across this idea before? Can we have a science infused morality?
I think the appropriate place for this would be in the Is it Science? forum.

BUT if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born --a world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun; that pour down the rain; and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to, us? Can our gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator? --Thomas Paine

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Message 2 of 2 (664583)
06-02-2012 9:15 AM


Thread Copied to The Book Nook Forum
Thread copied to the Scientific Morality? - (The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris) thread in the The Book Nook forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

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