Message 1 of 34 (664582) 06-01-2012 3:08 PM

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.

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:

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.

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.

Message 4 of 34 (664587) 06-02-2012 11:13 AM

Reply to: Message 1 by Jazzns 06-01-2012 3:08 PM

He makes a good case. Nonetheless:

... 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.

Message 6 of 34 (664605) 06-02-2012 5:34 PM

Reply to: Message 5 by Dr Jack 06-02-2012 2:23 PM

Supporting geerd wilders though.. I'm Dutch, I'm tormented with his antics in the news every few days or so. Supporting populism isn't exactly rational in his own logic(as far as I know his position on it), so it just seems he let's his dislike of Islam cloud proper detached judgement.

Message 7 of 34 (664617) 06-03-2012 5:07 AM

Reply to: Message 5 by Dr Jack 06-02-2012 2:23 PM

Some (hopefully) salient quotes:

And as Kairyu said, Harris advocating nuclear first strikes on islamic countries is just a quote mine.
(You can read the relevant passage in the link above.)

Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

Message 8 of 34 (664619) 06-03-2012 6:23 AM

http://www.ted.com/...ris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html

I think it's all jolly interesting - particularly the harder neuroscience stuff.

Message 9 of 34 (664623) 06-03-2012 10:28 AM

Reply to: Message 4 by Dr Adequate 06-02-2012 11:13 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.

Harris does discuss this in the book but for life of me I can't remember it. It must not have left that big of an impression on me.

I don't think there is one single metric of morality similar to how there is not one metric of health.

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.

The main point I think is that while my feelings on this seem rational, justified, and moral; science cannot currently tell me why because we currently have no science of morality. In many cases Harris does in fact seem to punt. He is advocating for a science of morality in recognition of its current absence.

I think I will also have to read it again to remember some of these finer points that you brought up. But its due back at the library and I'll probably just go buy it once I can get around to it.

Message 10 of 34 (664624) 06-03-2012 10:36 AM

Reply to: Message 5 by Dr Jack 06-02-2012 2:23 PM

For the purposes of this discussion, those things do not address the idea at all. Harris could be a notorious drug lord and that wouldn't change the value of the ideas.

I don't revere Sam Harris because I have made a change in my life that doesn't put anyone on a pedestal for their own sake. The only reason he needs to be mentioned at all in this discussion is because he seems to be the originator of the idea.

So if you have something to say about the idea, please join us. If you are only interested in attacking the person with claims of his own personal failings (which others seem to have questioned) then please do that in a different place.

Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

Message 11 of 34 (664630) 06-03-2012 1:45 PM

Reply to: Message 9 by Jazzns 06-03-2012 10:28 AM

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?

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.

Message 12 of 34 (664631) 06-03-2012 2:21 PM

Reply to: Message 11 by Dr Adequate 06-03-2012 1:45 PM

Right. I think he even says as much although I can't seem to find the exact quote. The search for "definite truth" is a distraction. There are many important moral truths (in the real scientific meaning of the word "truth") that are sufficient to help us ascend peaks on the moral landscape in a practical manner. We don't need to know the definitive answer to the moral question of these various population paradoxes to know that throwing acid in the face of Afgan girls for the "crime" of getting an education is in fact immoral from the perspective of the moral landscape. Just like in science, some questions will be answered to sufficient degrees while others may remain intractable forever.

I don't know when you read it but I think you may be mischaracterizing his argument. I think I even recall him saying that it is clear that a science of morality may discover "moral truths" that are not popularly accepted in the exact same way that some other scientific truths (evolution, global warming, etc) are not popularly accepted.

I don't think he mentioned it but I can imagine the topic of euthanasia fits that category just fine. It seems to me that forcing people to live through horrifying and painful terminal illness against their will is not promoting well-being and yet the popular opinion is that it should be illegal.

Sure. But I think there is something to be said about being confronted with those situations WITH complete knowledge of the facts rather than without. The science of morality, like other science, is a toolkit not a prescription. THAT to me is what is profound about this idea.

This is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to issues that contain ambiguity. Our strategies for dealing with complicated, ambiguous, or nuanced situations are really bad. Often times we don't even go with what is popular! All you have to do is take a look at the wretched state of the worlds financial systems to see evidence of that. Science is well equipped to deal with ambiguity or at the very least, it is the best of our intellectual tools we have created thus far.

Message 13 of 34 (664632) 06-03-2012 3:44 PM

Reply to: Message 10 by Jazzns 06-03-2012 10:36 AM

He's not the originator - this kind of thinking has been going on since Darwin's time, even before Darwin's time. It has only....evolved. It was 1959 (I think) when Julian Huxley wrote these words;

quote:

---

The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields. Inorganic subjects such as the life-history of stars and the formation of the chemical elements on the one hand, and on the other hand subjects like linguistics, social anthropology, and comparative law and religion, began to be studied from an evolutionary angle, until today we are enabled to see evolution as a universal and all-pervading process.

---

Today it's called "Sociobiology".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology

Or, it can be called "New Atheism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism

As it says, Sam Harris is one of the "four horsemen". Little doubt he would like sociobiology/new atheism to be taught as fact in science classes in the U.S. He'll probably have a long wait for that.

Message 14 of 34 (664634) 06-03-2012 4:08 PM

Reply to: Message 13 by marc9000 06-03-2012 3:44 PM

In fact, Harris' specifically notes that proper scientifically discovered "moral truth" may or even should transcend our evolved tendencies.

The example he uses in the book is the well studied notion that people's moral outrage does not scale when it logically should. People tend to react equivalently to various disasters that causing human suffering regardless of the scale of the suffering. Charities know this and appeal to our in-group tendencies which focus on personal stories/faces/anecdotes.

If we were to stick to sociobiology as a framework for morality, we might identify this behavior as "good" while according to the moral landscape, the inability of our altruism to scale is in fact "bad".

So-call "New atheism" is also not a moral framework. It is also neither new nor do all the people who are put in that category happy with the term "atheist".

(harris starts 4 mins in)

I appreciate your engagement but please understand the concept of the moral landscape before dismissing it as things that it is not.

Edited by Jazzns, : fixing youtube link