The Moral Landscape (complete)

My four posts on Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, compiled--

10/6/10  Are Liberals Relativists?

Why do we need this foray into the nature of moral truth?  Harris's explanation isn't quite what I'd been expecting. He says religious conservatives believe in big "T" moral truth, grounded in God's commands. That invigorates their pursuit of conservative policies, like George Bush's ban on new stem cell research. Liberals and academics are relativists who don't take moral truth seriously, Harris thinks. As a result, they're more wimpy champions of their own (more often correct) policy preferences.  Harris wants to "start a conversation" about moral truth, and how it's really no different from scientific truth, and it's independent of religion. Thus, he hopes to bolster the liberal side of our society's moral debates.

Good and Evil (The Moral Landscape)

More on The Moral Landscape--

Message of chapter 2:  don't think morality comes from religion, and don't think morality is relative, but rather think there are moral truths. Most philosophers will find this a respectable but unexciting message, since it's what they already think.  The same arguments, with less neuroscience and "style," are made in standard ethics 101 textbooks--e.g. James Rachels and Russ Shafer-Landau (who are both excellent).

Right and wrong are real, says Harris, because they are really all about maximizing well-being. All about?  Most philosophers will find the story here far too simple. I'll grant that every problem for consequentialism, and all the alternatives, don't have to be dealt with in a book of this sort, but Harris overlooks even some very basic problems.  There are other things that might matter besides happiness--for example fairness and equality.  No problem, Harris says.  The perception that something is fair makes people happy, and seeing something as unfair is upsetting.  So fairness has indirect importance.

But wait: if morality is all about maximizing well-being, then people who think in terms of fairness are not thinking right.  When we're done teaching everyone the true theory of morality ("Johnny, right actions maximize well-being"), they won't have those reactions any more.  So then fairness will stop being important in any sense?

Don't think this is fanciful either.  In reality, people aren't as worried about matters of justice as you might think.  Research about well-being makes this clear, as I discussed here back in March.  For example, Carol Graham shows (in the fascinating book Happiness around the World) that wealthy liberals are the only group in the US who are bothered by economic inequality.  Other Americans aren't bothered by the existence of rich people, and believe one day they'll join their ranks.

Even the science in Chapter 2 strikes me as being sloppy.  In a section about the nature of evil, Harris treats us to the first person testimony of a child-rapist.  Neuroscience, he says, can tell us what's wrong with such people. Maybe so, but the bit of neuroscience he presents doesn't explain the testimony. The neuroscience says psychopaths are bad at detecting the fear and anxiety of their victims. But the rapist plainly says he's a sadist--he positive enjoys his victim's suffering. He therefore must be able to detect it.

So...moving right along to chapter 3... I'm still hoping to find something interesting in here.

Previously on The Moral Landscape-- Are Liberals Relativists? and Morality Denialism

Are Liberals Relativists? (The Moral Landscape)

I'm going to post about Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape as I read it, so here goes--first reactions.

Why do we need this foray into the nature of moral truth?  Harris's explanation isn't quite what I'd been expecting. He says religious conservatives believe in big "T" moral truth, grounded in God's commands. That invigorates their pursuit of conservative policies, like George Bush's ban on new stem cell research. Liberals and academics are relativists who don't take moral truth seriously, Harris thinks. As a result, they're more wimpy champions of their own (more often correct) policy preferences.  Harris wants to "start a conversation" about moral truth, and how it's really no different from scientific truth, and it's independent of religion. Thus, he hopes to bolster the liberal side of our society's moral debates.

If a shot of moral realism would bolster liberals, I'd get behind Harris 100%, but here's the thing--I think most liberals are already moral realists.  Just read the op-ed page of the New York Times. Columnists like Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, and Frank Rich make moral pronouncements without hesitation, and with just as much fervor as Ross Douthat and David Brooks.  They say it's right for there to be universal health care, right to prevent global warming, wrong to start a war by lying about WMD, etc. etc.   Academics take stands on myriad moral issues, too, and emphatically. Like the vast majority of people, liberals and academics are "naive moral realists"--they're moral realists even though they never think about the nature of moral truth. 

Harris might be confusing moral relativism with liberalism (in the philosophical sense). A relativist thinks there is no moral truth independent of...and now the view varies. The extreme relativist thinks there's no moral truth independent of each decision-maker. We each "make" a morality for ourselves.  A cultural relativist thinks that moral truths exist for whole cultural groups, but don't transcend cultural boundaries.  So for people in Saudi Arabia, it really is wrong for women to leave the house unescorted by a male relative, but for us it isn't.

Liberal political thought sometimes sounds a bit like relativism.  Justice, on a liberal conception, requires (among other things) that everyone must have the liberty to pursue their own vision of the good, their own "plan of life."   Laws and institutions have to leave it to citizens to make certain judgments for themselves.  That's "to each his own"-ish, so sounds a little like relativism, but no:  if you say "justice requires this...period" you're no relativist.  In fact, you could think there are truths about the good life, and truths about the rightness of many actions and choices.  As a liberal, there will simply be areas of life in which you think the individual ought to be sovereign.

Here's the interesting thing. Liberals are typically at their most confident when they say superficially relativistic sounding things, like that each woman should think and choose for herself about abortion, and people should have freedom of speech, and gays should decide about their own lifestyles and relationships.  Are they less passionate in defense of individual liberties than religious conservatives are in defense of what they think God wants?  Well, that's an interesting claim, but let's not just say it. I'll believe it when I see the empirical evidence.

Is Harris all wrong then? Are liberals in no way real relativists, whether cultural or extreme?  Here's where I think Harris has a point:  when liberals think about other cultures, they sometimes want to extend to them the same "personal autonomy" they think each individual is entitled to--effectively equating groups and persons (which is problematic).  So some will accept Saudi Arabia's policies on women, in much the way they might accept an individual American having an abortion or a gay relationship.

But even here, it's simplifying too much to say this hands-offishness must come from relativism. Apart from card-carrying anthropologists, most of us (us liberals, that is), do make judgments (and should--I'm all for it), but try to make them cautiously, and open-mindedly, and without knee-jerk "we know best" ethnocentrism.  They also think that interference, as opposed to mere judgment, is usually unwise.  We should step in when the worst human rights abuses are involved, and when we can do so non-violently, and after forming the proper alliances. In other words, it's OK for Greg Mortensen to build schools for girls in Afghanistan, because he builds local support for the schools, and does the work non-violently.  But it wouldn't be OK for us to invade Saudi Arabia to liberate the women.

So I think Harris is wrong to think liberals need to be saved from their own disempowering relativism, which is for the most part really their belief in personal autonomy--which they believe in passionately; and their reluctance to impose American ideals on the rest of the world mindlessly, and with force.  But that doesn't mean we don't need Harris's book.  It's useful to to think about what right and wrong are based upon--that's got to help us avoid moral error and get our hands on more moral truth.  So...on with the book.

(Jesus, it's #3 at Amazon!)

Sam Harris on the Daily Show

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Sam Harris
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Y'know, I don't think this went very well.  Sam was refuted by the very presence of Jon Stewart, even without Jon doing much to challenge him.  Sam seemed caught up in a Manichean universe, with the bible on one side, giving terrible moral advice, and science on the other, peering into people's brains and quantifying well-being.  Jon's very presence attested to a vast space between these poles, where moral conversation really takes place, for reasonable folk today. Stewart makes lots and lots of good moral claims and arguments--in fact he'd just made one (about Rich Sanchez) before Harris came on--with neither religion nor science in sight.

I think Sam and his publicist should have thought about this more before he went on.  Harris seems to be addressing a moral skeptic--someone who is very, very worried about whether there's any truth about morality.  He (she) thinks if there are any moral truths, they must rest on a super-strength foundation.  Either "torturing babies for fun is wrong" because God condemns it, or because science tells us so.  These kinds of questions interests philosophers a lot, but the vast majority of people aren't really moral skeptics.  So what does the book offer them?

Perhaps it could explain who to ask, when we're facing a moral quandary.  But if that's one of its goals, then it narrows our options way too much.  We shouldn't ask religious fundamentalists, but should we ask scientists? Surely not.  Science can assist with moral reasoning, but the good moral reasoners are still people like...well, like Jon Stewart.  How is that? What's going on there?  We'll see if the book steps away from the "science vs. religion" battle long enough to shed some light.

Appiah on The Moral Landscape

Kwame Anthony Appiah reviews The Moral Landscape in today's NYT book review.  If we don't need religion to explain right and wrong, good and bad, how to live, how not to live, what do we need?  Science, says Harris.  What about ethics--what ethicists have been doing for a couple of thousand years--and science?  No, apparently the answer is only science.  

Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That’s because truths about morality and meaning must “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone — especially neuroscience, his field — can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life? ...

But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?

It’s not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.

That’s the case even with something as basic as what’s meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an important value. So does it count against your well-being if your happiness is based on an illusion — say, the false belief that your wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come down. But if he thinks that well-being has an objective component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact.

I think Appiah hits the nail on the head, or at least this was exactly the problem I saw in Harris's Spring TED talk.  If the book really does say only science is needed to grasp right and wrong, good and bad etc, my guess is that Harris is simplifying because he's writing a polemic. His purpose it to combat the belief that religion is authoritative about moral matters and he writes for a public that respects religion first, science second, and philosophy not much.  So "only science" might be a strategic answer.

Then again, Harris could be just plain confused.  If you think moral facts supervene on physical facts, you might erroneously conclude that they can best be investigated by experts on the relevant physical facts.  But which physical facts are relevant?  Sadly, you just aren't going to know before "doing" a lot of ethics to find out the precise contours of the moral facts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  More on Harris after I've read the book.

The Moral Landscape

I'm awfully looking forward (is that English?) to Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape, which is coming out next week. It's already #247 at Amazon and #1 in both ethics and philosophy. 

Harris has an excellent sense of timing.  The End of Faith (2005) was a necessary book, after 9/11--and a good book, I might add! If there's one thing that makes people think religion is indispensable, and atheists untrustworthy, it's the idea that morality depends on religion.  You can't just reject that--you need to say what morality does depend on, if not on religion, and that's what Harris is trying to do in the new book.

As a prelude to discussing the book in the next week or two, here's something I wrote about Harris a while after his TED talk in the spring. (On a more skeptical note, there was also this.)

Torturing Babies Just for Fun is Wrong

Sam Harris has started an interesting discussion about the nature of morality.  It's puzzling how many of his usual allies have lined up against him.  

Let us review.  Harris is really a religion critic, not an ethicist.  His foray into ethics is meant to defuse what seems to be the leading attack on atheism.  Religious moralists say there are facts about morality.  Torturing babies just for fun is wrong.  Stuff like that.  They then say there's no accounting for these facts being facts without supposing there's a supreme being. We've got to believe that God disapproves of torturing babies just for fun.

Harris's move is to attempt to do what the religious moralists think cannot be done:  account for moral facts without supposing there's a supreme being. 

It surprises me that Harris's co-non-religionists are taking him to task for this.  In terms of addressing the religious moralist, what would they have him say?  That there really aren't any facts about morality? That torturing babies for fun isn't really wrong?  What a public relations disaster!

Strategically speaking, Harris is entirely right to embrace moral realism, and attempt an explanation in non-religious terms.  Furthermore, it shouldn't be though that he's embracing something naive or preposterous. In a recent survey of the opinions of philosophers--folks who know the arguments for and against moral realism well--the majority count themselves realists! In other words, they agree with Harris that it's a fact that torturing babies just for fun is wrong.

So: Harris is taking the right position on realism vs. anti-realism, strategically speaking; and there's nothing naive or outrageous about his position.  Now let's consider the arguments for a moment.

One thing folks are throwing at him is the sheer fact of moral disagreement. Does that undermine the case for moral realism?  Surely not.  Moral disagreements involve arguments. One side may be giving terrible arguments and the other good arguments.  So reason may be on one side, not on the other.  In light of that, it would be silly to throw up your hands and say "no fact of the matter!" simply in virtue of there being disagreement.

Another worry is that moral facts wouldn't be motivating, if they did exist.  Bad guys can encounter the "fact" that it's wrong to torture babies just for fun, and start torturing babies.  To which the right answer is: so what?  The complete story about morality is not about the facts alone. It's also about moral psychology. It deals with how we come to know the facts, how they do or don't motivate us, the virtues and vices, etc. 

Harris is strategically right in adopting realism, not at all naive, and quite capable of responding to basic criticism.  Must I then be on board with everything he says?  Not necessarily.  The rest of what he says is about the exact nature of moral facts. He says they are "scientific facts."  At the very minimum, that means they are natural.  The fact that torturing babies just for fun is wrong is the fact that doing this causes...something or other. (Details to come in Harris's book.) 

Beyond that, he might be saying that moral facts are discoverable using scientific methods, but I hope he's not saying that, because it's implausible.  Some of the discovery of these facts is in the hands of ethicists and other reflective people. 

My mind is not made up about the idea that moral facts are scientific facts, but I lean toward moral realism.  It's strategically the right thing for Harris to defend, not at all a naive or outrageous position, and holds up at least under the sorts of attacks I've been reading lately.

Metaethics Too Dull for Words

Sam Harris responds to criticism at the Huffington Post.  One criticism in particular caught my eye--

Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy.

Part of his explanation:

I am convinced that every appearance of terms like "metaethics," "deontology," "noncognitivism," "anti-realism," "emotivism," and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.

Fair enough.  He goes on to say...

My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy is unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible.

He's right that we need a discussion of the nature of ethics in the public square, and it can't sound like a philosophy seminar room debate.  However, it's possible for a very accessible discussion to have lots of underlying sophistication.  Philosophy needs its Richard Dawkins's and Jerry Coynes--people who are masters of the subject and good at talking about it to the public.

Where metathics is concerned, is Sam Harris that master of the subject and its communcation?  We'll see when his book comes out.  As to the rest of the Huff Po editorial, more later.

Wanted: Metaethicist

I'm following the debate about Sam Harris's forthcoming book (which I will certainly read) with genuine interest, but also with bewilderment.  We now have the hardest issues of metaethics being hashed out by a neuroscientist/writer, a physicist, a biologist...and various and sundry.  I keep thinking:  might it actually be helpful to call in some full-time, card-carrying metaethicists?  It's not because you have to be certified by the US Board of Metaethics to "do" metaethics, but it's kind of a complicated business, and experts actually do know a thing or two. 

Here's Sean Carroll trying to show that Sam Harris is wrong to think we can "derive ought from is." All that strikes me as a red herring.  What really matters (or should matter!) to Harris is to show that.

1. There are objective moral truths (just like religious moralists think), and...
2. They are "tied" to the natural world sufficiently closely that...
3. Science, instead of religion, can illuminate what the moral truths consist of.

The question is: what's the "tie? This is a heavy duty question in metaethics.  It's heavy duty because there are so many possibilities.  Another reason why it's heavy duty is because there are parallel worries about other domains. For example, much as we want to know how morality is tethered to the natural world that science studies, we want to know the same thing about consciousness, and mentality more generally.  It pays to think about all these problems together.  Consciousness is mysterious, and ill-defined, and people disagree about it (as Carroll says about morality), and we can't logically derive psychological claims from physical claims, yet claims analogous to 1-3  are true:

1. There are objective psychological facts (just like soul-ologists think), and...
2. They are "tied" to the natural world sufficiently closely that...
3. Science, instead of soul-ology, can illuminate what the psychological facts consist of.

What's the "tie" in the morality case? Maybe it's the tie we already need in the psychology case.  To make up your mind,  you would need to read and  think about a whole bunch of complicated stuff, and it's probably all going to get technical.  You might even want to call in the experts. Not me, I hasten to add.  I read only enough in this area to feel humbled by it.

Choosing to Limit Our Choices

From a review of the book The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar, in today's New York Times:

Iyengar began her scholarly exploration of choice with an undergraduate research project. She suspected that religiously observant people who obey lots of behavioral restrictions would feel unable to control their own lives and thus pessimistic. To test this hypothesis, she interviewed more than 600 people from nine different religions, ranging from fundamentalists to liberals. She surveyed their religious beliefs and practices, asked questions to test optimism and had them fill out a mental health questionnaire. What she found surprised her.

“Members of more fundamentalist ­­faiths experienced greater hope, were more optimistic when faced with adversity and were less likely to be depressed than their counterparts,” she writes. “Indeed, the people most susceptible to pessimism and depression were the Unitarians, especially those who were atheists. The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead, it seemed to empower them. Many of their choices were taken away, and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives.”

In retrospect, the result seems obvious. Even many atheists would agree that believing that God cares about you or that your life is part of a cosmic plan can be a powerful source of hope (or, to put it pejoratively, a crutch). Meaning is as important as choice. Besides, Iyengar conducted her survey in the United States, where people are free to switch religions and often do. If keeping kosher or refraining from alcohol makes you feel constrained and helpless, you can abandon those strictures. The only people left in the restrictive groups are those who value the rules. In a modern, liberal society, religious observance does not “take away” choice. It is a choice.

Question for Sam Harris:  if ethics is all about promoting well-being (as he's arguing in a forthcoming book), can it be ethical to try to turn theists into atheists?   Would people really be better off if they were "freed" from religion?  There's a fine line here. I wouldn't hesitate to take a skeptical position in a philosophical debate. I am a skeptic!  It's proselytizing that bothers me--really working to convert the masses. It's not at all clear to me this would be for the good, and Iyengar's book seems to bolster that hunch.

Unlike “provocative” books designed to stir controversy, “The Art of Choosing” is refreshingly thought-provoking. Contemplating Iyengar’s wide-ranging exploration of choice leads to new questions: When is following custom a choice? How costly must a decision be to no longer qualify as a choice? Did Calvinism spur worldly achievement because its doctrine of predestination removed all choice about the hereafter? Do con­temporary Americans adopt food taboos like veganism because they crave limits on an overabundance of choices?

Well, veganism is not just a taboo--if the paradigm of a taboo is the rule certain south sea islanders have against women eating in public. It's an ethical proscription.  However, it's fascinating to consider whether vegan and vegetarian diets also satisfy a craving for choice-reduction.

Human beings, Iyengar suggests, are born to choose. But human beings are also born to create meaning. Choice and meaning are intertwined. We use choice to define our identities, and our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, from advertising-driven associations to personal relationships and philosophical commitments. Some meanings we can articulate, while others remain beyond words. “Science can assist us in becoming more skillful choosers,” Iyengar cautions, “but at its core, choice remains an art.”

This goes on my list of books I need to read.

Sam Harris Derives "Ought" from "Is"

Here.   Basically it goes like this (cutting to the chase):

(1) x IS an action or practice that will produce the worst possible misery for everyone.

So (SURELY!!!!  COME ON!!!)

(2) x OUGHT not to be done.

Why, you might wonder, should we want to derive an ought from an is? We could just recognize rock bottom normative facts, like--

(3) We ought not engage in actions and practices that will produce the worst possible misery for everyone.

Harris paints himself into this corner by being so determined to extract ethics from science.  He wants it to be the case that scientists come up with facts like (1) and thereby get their hands on ethical conclusions like (2).  If we just started by knowing things like (3), we wouldn't know them as a matter of science.  You don't find normative claims like (3) in science books.

Why's it so important to him to get ethics out of science?  Because he's trying to woo the public away from the belief that ethics is derived from religion.  Science is an impressive alternative source for ethics.  It would be harder to convince the public that we can do away with religion as a foundation for ethics if Harris simply said we all know things like (3).

But maybe we do just know things like (3). And maybe saying so is less problematic than saying (1) entails (2). Logically, it just doesn't.  Even if we do know things like (3), without relying on science, that doesn't mean science has no role to play.  Armed with the knowledge of (3), we need to figure out what does and doesn't produce the worse possible misery for everyone.  Science could certainly help us with that question.

"Science Can Determine Moral Values"

More about Sam Harris, who argues (here and in a forthcoming book) that "science can determine moral values"--

Harris's real goal is to face down critics of his anti-religious stance in The End of Faith.  If you don't have God, the argument goes, you can't have morality.  That concerns Harris a lot, because he very much wants to have morality.  What drives his first book is a horror at appalling things done in the name of religion--the 9/11 mass-murder, honor killings, the slaughter of innocents prescribed by God in the bible, etc.  "But if God does not exist, everything is permitted!"  Harris wants to answer that sort of critic.

So:  morality is objective, he thinks. In other words, honor killings are really wrong, and not just wrong to us, while permissible for others, elsewhere.  There are robust, non-negotiable truths about morality.  And they're not based on anything up there in the sky. Those are his intuitions, and they're mine too.  But now how does science enter into morality?

Let's have a vivid example, and not one of the overworn ones. In the February issue of National Geographic I read an amazing story that mentioned (among many other things) a practice called "mingi killing."  The Kara people of Ethiopia have a belief that babies have to be killed under certain conditions, including when their top teeth erupt before their bottom teeth.  Otherwise the mingi might spread, causing bad luck.  The author tells of a woman who bore and killed 12 children. How?  "Sometimes the child is abandoned in the bush, its mouth filled with earth; sometimes it is hurled into the river."  You'll be glad to know the Kara king recently decided to ban this practice, at the urging of the Ethiopian government and NGOs.

OK--so mingi killing is morally wrong, and was wrong even before it was abolished by the king.  That's what Harris would probably say, and I agree.  The religious moralist wonders how we can be entitled to that view, if we don't countenance a supreme being who objects to mingi killing. I'm just guessing what will be in Harris's book, but I'll bet he's going to say it's pretty weird to look skyward for a reason why mingi killing is wrong.  The wrongness doesn't proceed from some supernatural realm.  It's right here in our world--in the Kara tribe, to be exact. You can see the wrongness by looking closely at the facts themselves--babies, killing, parents, what it's like to have dirt in your mouth, etc.

So how is science supposed to help?  More guessing.  What would the NGOs have said to discourage mingi killing?  They might have gone into the science of tooth development, making clear that it's equally normal when top teeth erupt first.  They might have collected some data to show that tooth eruption patterns make no difference at all to future events.  If the Kara thought babies don't suffer when abandoned or drowned, they could have given them evidence that they do.  Surely they knew that parents didn't like exposing their kids (they don't) but I suppose they could have gathered data that showed the trauma lasted for years, or that relatives were affected as well. It's possible that the impact on the tribe wasn't fully understood.

So--for the Kara to see the wrongness, they don't need religion, they need science.  So, perhaps, the argument goes.  But here's what bothers me.  All that science could be persuasive, but it will have leverage only if the Kara already believe something like this basic principle--

(P) It's morally wrong to kill a baby if you have no good reason to do so.

The science relates to whether they have a good reason to kill these babies, and whether they have good reasons not to.  But the science doesn't tell them whether or not to accept this principle.  To decide, you need to delve into some difficult issues.    Do babies really count, just like adults?  There are reasons to say they do, reasons to say they don't.  If they do count, just what is it that makes killing wrong?  There are reasons to say this, reasons to say that.   I think reasonable people, after a long careful discussion, will converge on agreeing to P.  It's the most reasonable thing to think. But science isn't going to prove it.

So--yes to the idea of objective wrongness.  Yes to the idea that it doesn't rain down from the heavens. Yes to the idea that science can be enormously helpful in revealing what's right and wrong.  But no, science does not, all on its own, determines moral values.  There's also such a thing as rational reflection on right and wrong, which can be fruitful, progressive, and gradually generate consensus. That's what secularists have to proffer as the alternative to religion-based ethics.  Sadly, "rational reflection" doesn't have quite the stellar image of "science," but the truth is, we can't discover what's right and wrong without it.

Sam Harris on Morality

You have to simplify in a 20-minute public lecture, but Sam Harris really does oversimplify...and even mislead.

The thesis of the talk is that (S) science can answer moral questions. Does he support it? Not really.  He actually blurs that thesis with another-- that (M) moral questions have factual answers.  For example he makes an impassioned case that it's in fact wrong for men to respond to a daughter being raped by killing the daughter.  I'll buy that, but that's support for (M), not (S).  In a brief Q&A period, Harris imagines we could somehow learn the moral fact about the wrongness of honor killings by doing brain scans on fathers and daughters. But what would we be looking for?  What scientific fact would prove (or disprove) the moral fact? 

I think he's imagining that we might find out that honor-killing men are very miserable after they kill their raped daughters, and that (of course) the daughters suffer horribly, and lots of other people suffer in a society where rape is taken care of by killing rape victims.  But surely those facts would not suffice to show that honor killings are wrong.

How can that be?  The book about happiness I just read helps make the point.  Carol Graham has collected massive amounts of data about what makes people happy and unhappy around the world.   Graham found that people living in very bad conditions are surprisingly happy.  The poorest of the poor in Africa turned out to be exceptionally optimistic, and optimism correlates with happiness.   The people of Afghanistan also turned out to be comparatively happy, despite all the problems that beset them (war, terrorism, poverty, very high infant and child mortality rates, inequality, etc).

When people's standard of living goes up, their expectations go up, and that's when they start getting very grumpy.  In times of fast economic growth, people are particularly unhappy.  People who have access to good health care are not quite as satisfied with their health care as people with no access.  And on and on.  There are all sorts of odd findings in Graham's book. 

If this is the science that "answers moral questions," then the answers we would get are awfully strange.  One lesson learned:   we should be very careful before helping the poor.  We don't want to raise their expectations, thereby probably making people less happy.  But there are other things we could consider important, besides happiness.  The very poor have many factually false beliefs. Their optimism is based on erronenous ideas about the future.  Does ill-founded happiness count for less?  This is something science simply isn't going to tell us.  The question might have an answer (if you accept M, you'll think so), but I don't see how it could possibly have a scientific answer.

Another interesting finding from Graham's book: in the US, inequality doesn't bother any sub-group besides wealthy liberals!  The people in the lowest income brackets aren't troubled by their comparative poverty. In fact, they are buoyed by the fact that others are so rich.  The majority of people in the US think one day they will be in the upper income bracket themselves. They can't all be right, and some of them are downright unrealistic in their optimism.  But thinking this way makes them happy.  Again: does their happiness count for less because it's ill-founded? This is a moral question, not a scientific question.

Getting back to honor killings. If happiness is all that matters, and they cause unhappiness, then they're wrong.  But there are lots of other things that could matter.  We're not going to settle that by doing brain scans.

I think it's great for Sam Harris to spread the word that moral questions have factual answers (M), and that science is an input to morality.  We are in a much better position to make sound moral decisions if we know the facts about happiness, and many other facts as well.  It's just not true, though, that (S) science will answer our moral questions.