(Update: further discussion here and here.)
Sam Harris gave a TED talk, in which he claims that science can tell us what to value, or how to be moral. Unfortunately I completely disagree with his major point. (Via Jerry Coyne and 3 Quarks Daily.)
He starts by admitting that most people are skeptical that science can lead us to certain values; science can tell us what is, but not what ought to be. There is a old saying, going back to David Hume, that you can’t derive ought from is. And Hume was right! You can’t derive ought from is. Yet people insist on trying.
Harris uses an ancient strategy to slip morality into what starts out as description. He says:
Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures… If we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they are exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. The crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim.
Let’s grant the factual nature of the claim that primates are exposed to a greater range of happiness and suffering than insects or rocks. So what? That doesn’t mean we should care about their suffering or happiness; it doesn’t imply anything at all about morality, how we ought to feel, or how to draw the line between right and wrong.
Morality and science operate in very different ways. In science, our judgments are ultimately grounded in data; when it comes to values we have no such recourse. If I believe in the Big Bang model and you believe in the Steady State cosmology, I can point to the successful predictions of the cosmic background radiation, light element nucleosynthesis, evolution of large-scale structure, and so on. Eventually you would either agree or be relegated to crackpot status. But what if I believe that the highest moral good is to be found in the autonomy of the individual, while you believe that the highest good is to maximize the utility of some societal group? What are the data we can point to in order to adjudicate this disagreement? We might use empirical means to measure whether one preference or the other leads to systems that give people more successful lives on some particular scale — but that’s presuming the answer, not deriving it. Who decides what is a successful life? It’s ultimately a personal choice, not an objective truth to be found simply by looking closely at the world. How are we to balance individual rights against the collective good? You can do all the experiments you like and never find an answer to that question.
Harris is doing exactly what Hume warned against, in a move that is at least as old as Plato: he’s noticing that most people are, as a matter of empirical fact, more concerned about the fate of primates than the fate of insects, and taking that as evidence that we ought to be more concerned about them; that it is morally correct to have those feelings. But that’s a non sequitur. After all, not everyone is all that concerned about the happiness and suffering of primates, or even of other human beings; some people take pleasure in torturing them. And even if they didn’t, again, so what? We are simply stating facts about how human beings feel, from which we have no warrant whatsoever to conclude things about how they should feel.
Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake. Or, to choose a different mathematical analogy, any particular judgment about right and wrong is like Euclid’s parallel postulate in geometry; there is not a unique choice that is compatible with the other axioms, and different choices could in principle give different interesting moral philosophies.
A big part of the temptation to insist that moral judgments are objectively true is that we would like to have justification for arguing against what we see as moral outrages when they occur. But there’s no reason why we can’t be judgmental and firm in our personal convictions, even if we are honest that those convictions don’t have the same status as objective laws of nature. In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected — and indeed, may even be hindered — by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true. In the end, we will always be appealing to their own moral senses, which may or may not coincide with ours.
The unfortunate part of this is that Harris says a lot of true and interesting things, and threatens to undermine the power of his argument by insisting on the objectivity of moral judgments. There are not objective moral truths (where “objective” means “existing independently of human invention”), but there are real human beings with complex sets of preferences. What we call “morality” is an outgrowth of the interplay of those preferences with the world around us, and in particular with other human beings. The project of moral philosophy is to make sense of our preferences, to try to make them logically consistent, to reconcile them with the preferences of others and the realities of our environments, and to discover how to fulfill them most efficiently. Science can be extremely helpful, even crucial, in that task. We live in a universe governed by natural laws, and it makes all the sense in the world to think that a clear understanding of those laws will be useful in helping us live our lives — for example, when it comes to abortion or gay marriage. When Harris talks about how people can reach different states of happiness, or how societies can become more successful, the relevance of science to these goals is absolutely real and worth stressing.
Which is why it’s a shame to get the whole thing off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts. When people share values, facts can be very helpful to them in advancing their goals. But when they don’t share values, there’s no way to show that one of the parties is “objectively wrong.” And when you start thinking that there is, a whole set of dangerous mistakes begins to threaten. It’s okay to admit that values can’t be derived from facts — science is great, but it’s not the only thing in the world.
Yeah DamnYankees, I got that your post was sarcastic. But your analogy struck me as a strawman of blueshifter’s point. Liking vanilla/chocolate was supposed to be analogous to liking or disliking torture. Making a jump from the preference to the nutritional value seemed to be a non sequitur in a way that blueshifter’s post wasn’t.
So what was your ‘nutritional value of vanilla’ analogous to? We can calculate the nutritional value of food in an objective fashion. What in ‘craving torture’ can we objectively evaluate? What are the objective, factual claims one can make about it?
“What in ‘craving torture’ can we objectively evaluate?”
The effects is has on our biology and brain state. That’s what Harris is saying. So we take a huge population of people and we test them all about their biological and neurological reaction to a moral situation. We can then detect patterns.
I’m not sure why this is less measurable than nutrition. We can take “ingestion of honey” and “ingestion of tar” and based on that make scientific claims about which is more suitable for human nutrition. Whether or not you can actually find individuals who prefer tar isn’t really relevant; we aren’t trying to come up with blanket rules that apply to every single human, but rather we are trying to detect patters in our biology which connect “the feeling of hunger and eating” to objective scientific facts about how humans work.
Same with morality. Whether a minority of people like a certain action (like torture) doesn’t mean much. Exceptions are allowed. Rather, we are trying to detect patterns in our biology which connect “the feeling of morality” to objective scientific facts about how humans work.
Harris makes the point that at the margins it will be hard to really detect which is more suitable to humans. So just like it’s hard to make any definitive statement about chocolate v. vanilla, we can still say a pretty firm statement about chocolate v. mercury. Same with morality: donating time v. donating money? Maybe too indistinct to really make a strong claim. Donating time v. mutilating children? We can probably find a pretty solid pattern of predictability for that one.
Point taken.
But how do you get to an evaluation of what is BETTER or worse, what is more moral, just from how our brains react to them? Again, it seems to be deriving an ought from an is. We can predict how people’s brains will react to viewing a child being tortured – what does this tell us about morality? A few hundred years ago a large number of people would have no negative neurological reaction to slavery, possibly even the majority.
“But how do you get to an evaluation of what is BETTER or worse”
By empirically testing what people actually prefer.
“Again, it seems to be deriving an ought from an is.”
I think it’s more than Harris is simply rejecting the distinction. What Harris is saying is that the content of “ought” is “that which avoids suffering”. For so long we have actually kept the two apart, that the idea of folding one into the other is seen as silly.
But this is Harris’ whoe point! That “ought” is just a certain kind of “is”. To say someone “ought” to do soemthing is to say that that person “is doing something which will avoid the awareness of suffering” (that’s a simplified way of saying it, of course).
I think a big part of this problem is that almost no one can actually define the word “ought”. It’s really hard. Harris is supplying a definition for the word which relates morality to consciousness. And thus, the better we get at objectively understanding concsiousness, the more we will understand the objective contents of morality.
Testing what people prefer doesn’t help the fact that a while back, lots of people preferred that they should be allowed to keep slaves. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain for decades, based on public preference. Does that make slavery and illegal homosexuality legal?
“What Harris is saying is that the content of “ought” is “that which avoids suffering””
And someone else might have a completely different idea of what ‘ought’ to be.
“Does that make slavery and illegal homosexuality legal?”
Well factually, they were. I’m not sure what you are asking. Morality and law are contextual, so of course.
“And someone else might have a completely different idea of what ‘ought’ to be.”
So? Let them go out and defend it. One of the best sentences Sean ever wrote was when the said “definitions are not right or wrong; definitions are useful or useless.”
Harris’ is putting forward a definition of “ought” which is open to testing, open to science, and can (in theory) produce predictable results. Anyone can propose any definition they want for any word, but the test of a good definition is how useful it is. The definition Harris puts forward is a useful one, to me. Many other definitions of “ought” seem to be intentionally useless, a talisman used to force an avoidance of actually discussing the issue.
Just to be pedantic:
Is existed before an ought, therefore ought must have come from an is.
There is also an interesting idea that torturing someone is wrong… unless you know that they have had their pain and pleasure receptors swapped round. Does this mean that it is always the result that determines if something is right or wrong? Does the end justify the means?
None of which changes the fact Sam Harris makes an assumption and then says science can prove that assumption… by making another assumption*.
It’s all judgement calls and the fear I have from Sam’s talk is that he believes the majority’s judgement should not just carry the day, but is objectively right!
* To paraphrase: It’s assumptions all the way down.
“Does that make slavery and illegal homosexuality legal?”
Sorry, meant to say “does that make them MORAL”.
“One of the best sentences Sean ever wrote was when the said “definitions are not right or wrong; definitions are useful or useless.””
Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. Ought is perhaps a word like ‘natural’ that can have so many meanings that it becomes useless. Is there anything one cannot argue is somehow ‘natural’, if one doesn’t define the word tightly enough?
I studied Harris’s presentation. He was very interesting to listen to, if somewhat rambling. I thought his jokes were funny. Apart from that, the idea of using science to establish the location of a kind of moral middle ground is interesting, but well, I’ll think about it…
I remember when I was a kid, asking my uncle if people were really animals; surely we were a “cut” above the beasts of the field? The idea that people were animals really upset me…and my uncle could sense my upsetment! He reassured me by telling me that people were indeed “something special”.
I still believe people are “something special” just as each species and kind of plant and animal is “special”. However, we like everything else organic are products of the universe.
The universe is a servomechanism kind of affair…it is self-correcting. 99% of all species of living things are currently extinct. There have been times in the history of mankind when our existence as a species hung on the fate of no more than 50,000 individuals.
The instinct to survive is very primal and is related to the individuals quest for power within a society. The elemental needs of humans could be counted on the fingers of two hands. However the way we go about satisfying those needs is determined in large measure by the way we are raised (our family values) and our cultural outlook.
Humans are tribal and territorial. We ARE animals and our politics and cultural response are only modified “Baboon troop psycho-sexual dynamics”…pushing and shoving- one way or another…and in the end establishing a social hierarchy with alpha individuals (not necessarily the most intelligent, but the most powerful and, for many reasons, attractive or threatening) dominating the masses.
My observation is that what is rational is not of primary importance in human society, so it is hard for me to understand why Harris seriously thinks being scientific and rational has any real potential in evaluating and modifying human societies.
We laughingly joke that people vote their pocketbooks, but of course they do. It is very hard to be humorous (Harris tried) about the exremes male humans go to to protect their women from the amorous eyes -and actions- of competitors.
It is much easier to see the problems of society from outside- from a distant vantage-point. Folks who are raised and live inside a society all their lives, may question, but must conform. More well traveled people, see the advantages of other outlooks, but must not make the mistake of believing that because things are different and subjectively better somewhere else, that changing a society is easier, or that education and science would affect social attitudes.
Human nature has a very nasty streak. Attempts to change the status quo in any society are (correctly) perceived as a threat to the well-being of established menbers of that society. Human societies tend to develop institutions, and whether those institutions are rationsl is not important-they are very difficult to change. When institutions do change, the change is usually glacial.
Finally, people in one society are often blind to the abuses of their own society, but are very critical of the abuses they find in other countries. For example, Americans practice infanticide, but are incensed by women wearing burka’s elsewhere. While Hitler was exterminating Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, American’s in the name of “science” practiced eugenics. In hind-sight, we now know that eugenics was a deplorable practice…what Hitler did was just a horrible, and insanely logical extension of what we practiced in this country for years.
The most important thing to remember, I beleive, is that the sudden abrupt change of any human society usually causes more problems than are solved…the society is less stable and “safe”, at least for a while. For that reason, playing “Dudley do right” and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and social groups is seldom really in the best interests of any nation. However, sometimes societies are so brutal, a case CAN be made for a just war of liberation.
The current involvement of the USA in south Asia, however is basically retaliation. Had 9/11 not happened, Iraq and Afganistan would not have happened either. Still, by intervening in the affairs of those countries, the US has created some serious and persistant problems for those countries, the region and of course ourselves.
Emotion and instinct, which with environmental adaption, drive human cultural response, have a kind of reason or logic “all their own” but the connection is difficult to scientifically unravel. I liked Harris’s use of the word “fact”. Yes, burkas are a fact of life in parts of the middle east, but personally the way Harris throws “facts” around makes me nervous!
“Sorry, meant to say “does that make them MORAL”.”
Ah. Well in that case, remember Harris’ idea of a moral landscape. When you ask if something is moral, it’s always in comparison to something else. The question is always can we find a better peak on the landscape to move to?
To ask if something is “moral” is to ask two different things: first, is it a net positive or a net negative, and secondly, how does it compare to the alternatives? There’s no blanket answer. Every moral question has it’s own unique answers.
Saying that no moral axioms can exist is, itself, an axiom. Saying that morality boils down to individual cravings, is equally an axiomatic assertion.
Axioms aren’t truths – they are consensually agreed upon definitions selected as a starting point for human created logics. What humans generally agree upon as “truths” are really just logical inferences entirely dependent upon a chosen brand of logic.
Axioms are inherently metaphysical – they are the products of essentially inductive reasoning that serve as a foundation for certain systems of deductive reasoning. And Godel et al. have shown that this inductive/deductive alternation is an infinite progression, regardless of vector.
One could argue that the existence of Hitler served as a positive force toward the rapid advancement of technology or as a motivation for a reunification of Judaism in the rec-creation of an Israeli State. But then one could argue that those advancements that seemed like great things at the time are responsible for a vast majority of today’s global problems.
So you see, moral judgement really boils down to a pattern not unlike the propogation of an electromagnetic wave. It alternates.
In that respect, perhaps science does have something worthwhile to say toward moral judgement. Science can verify the relativity of it all and demonstrates that value judgements are sufficiently and necessarily derived from that relativity.
Like the Talking Heads surmised, ” Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens “. So perhaps this thing we call reality is simply a vacation spot that necessarily emerged in order for consciousness to get away from the boring linear redundancy of “heaven”.
(please excuse the metaphors…I just couldn’t resist)
In fact I’ve had an argument many times with Christian apologists when they say ‘without God, how can you say that Hitler was objectively more evil than Mother Theresa?’.
Leaving aside the assumption that the latter was a paragon of virtue, my answer generally echoes Sean’s sentiment: the word evil describes a concept that is useful to humans, and can be understand easily without reference to a deity. I ask them if they think one could describe a person as being ‘objectively more dangerous’ than another person.
Then I ask whether they think it might be useful to have a word to differentiate a person who is intentionally dangerous to other people, from, say someone who carries and infectious disease. No-one has been able to argue a ‘no’ for either question.
That’s my explanation for why Hitler is more evil that Mother Theresa. Someone else is welcome to offer me a definition of evil that is such that Mother Theresa is judged more evil that Hitler. Just like someone is welcome to give me a definition of ‘best movie’ that allows for Porkys 3 to be superior to Citizen Kane. Perhaps by they judge a film’s quality purely on its nudity content. No problem in someone doing that. But it’s not a definition that will prove particularly useful to them when talking to many other people.
For homosexuality this is not as simple as some persons do think. Thus some things as the one of pheromones imply that there is normally in a natural way an attraction of a sex by the other in the species which are composed of two sexes. This way the instinctive identification of the opposite sex is justified, but as for the identification of tastes this can be more or less strong, even reversed ; what does imply different types of homosexuality, there is even those who have a normal instinct, but want to do an experiment as the one of tobacco or alcohol. And this is because homosexuality is not so simple, that it is hard to give some possibilities to homosexuals (like the marriage), because they are influencing some in the bad direction, when these have the choice ; and it is a trap because it is hard to leave homosexuality, because this is with two persons, and the pressure of the other on your life can stay and be very heavy, when you want the others to forget it. Finally do not imagine too much things : my instinct is working very well and my curiosity has some limits.
@DamnYankees
Even if Harris is right about the well-being of conscious creatures, there is still a massive judgement call to be made before moving to a higher peak, that being that is involves moving down from the one you are on and across the plateau before climbing another one.
Or have I taken his metaphor too far?
But he’s not right The well-being of conscious creatures can be superseded by principles that go above simple well-being. Things like knowledge, freedom, reality. I’d rather be knowledgeable and miserable than play along with ignorance is bliss.
“Even if Harris is right about the well-being of conscious creatures, there is still a massive judgement call to be made before moving to a higher peak, that being that is involves moving down from the one you are on and across the plateau before climbing another one.”
He doesn’t address this, but I actually think its right. There are transaction costs in moving from one peak to another. The deeper the valley, the more costly. You’d need to come up with a model for explaining under what circumstances we move from one peak to another.
“I’d rather be knowledgeable and miserable than play along with ignorance is bliss.”
There are 2 responses to this:
1) This is actually non-sensical. The fact that you would choose knowledge over ignorance is because you find knowledge to give you more satisfaction than ignorance. So your claim here is somewhat paradoxical.
2) You’re moral sense is broken. I don’t mean this in any offensive way, just in an evolutionary way. Remember we are biological machines, and evolution has built us imperfectly. This is just one of the cul-de-sacs we run into where we are fundamentally irrational. The issue at hand isn’t whether or not your desire here is good or bad, but whether it is predictably correlated to your biology and brain states, and thus open to objective scientific inquiry.
1) It’s not a paradox. If I was given the choice between knowing an asteroid was likely to hit earth tomorrow or not I would choose to know and that knowledge would give me little-to-know (*cough*) satisfaction.
2) You’re damn right my evolutionary moral sense is broken. Not to mention our evolutionary morality is self-contradictory, I highly recommend looking at The Trolley Problem to see that there are multiple regions of the brain that have differing moral preferences.
In fact, putting 1 and 2 together I think that we can see the rational(ish) modern brain does have a requirement for knowledge (not that knowledge gives it satisfaction!) that has been proven evolution to have an advantage. The modern part of the brain has most control over the acts and desires of the body, thus the older parts of the brain, the parts with most pleasure, are held in check, often to the detriment of our overall satisfaction.
Otherwise we’d all be crazy fat eating sweet things all the time, and some other base instincts that I decided to remove…
“It’s not a paradox. If I was given the choice between knowing an asteroid was likely to hit earth tomorrow or not I would choose to know and that knowledge would give me little to know satisfaction.”
Yes it would. Because knowledge is innately satisfactory to you, moreso than ignorance. This is the unfalsifiability of rational choice theory. I’m not saying I buy it, but it’s an argument.
Either way, all you can say is that it is my preference. You might be able to show, using brain scans, why that is my preference, or why I prefer green to blue, but unlike Mr Harris claims, you cannot say that I should prefer one over the other.
Harris may well be wrong on his argument (seems like he is), but I do think science has far more to do with morality then most people (even scientists) are willing to admit.
At the end of the day, relatively few real-world arguments are ones where all sides agree on the facts and there is only an argument about value judgments. Many disagreements over let’s say effect y (good or bad) are primarily about whether x action would really lead to y effect, or what the causes of y effect are, etc. I.e. there is broad agreement in the US that people should not be discriminated based upon race, gender, etc. But there is no broad agreement on whether affirmative action is necessary or unnecessary, whether the low proportion of women in science is due to discrimination or in some sense “natural”, etc.
It is true that science cannot tell us that discriminating against people is wrong. But it can tell us whether people are still being discriminated against, what actions lead to more or less discrimination, etc. It’s not easy to do of course, and it’s not nearly as clean cut as physics but it’s possible at least to some degree. And if you can show clearly what the effects of your actions are, morals become much easier to agree upon.
“but unlike Mr Harris claims, you cannot say that I should prefer one over the other.”
Actually you can. Because once you know one preference, you can very easily suggest another.
If you tell me “i like chocolate and not vanilla”, I can then tell you what flavor of ice cream you should prefer, and I will probably be extremely accurate in my prediction.
Similarly for morality, if we can dig deep to figure out, biologically, what moral choices are pleasing to you, we can then tell you what choices you should make morally. And there’s no philosophy there at all; it simply applying a scientifically tested model (your moral preferences) to specific situations. It’s a form of scientific prediction, no different than recommending a certain kind of medicine.
What Harris postulates, and what I agree with, is that as human being we are biologically programmed for certain kinds of moral preferences. The way Harris puts it is that we make moral choices in a manner consistent with the avoidance of conscious suffering and towards conscious pleasure. We don’t need to advocate for them, any more than you need to advocate “eat when you are hungry” – they are simply built into us. And the challenge is to build a thorough biological model of those preferences which we can then apply to specific situations.
Coriolis, try doing economics…
“At the end of the day, almost all real-world arguments are ones where all sides more or less agree on the facts* and there is only an argument about value judgments.”
Fixed by an economist.
*Facts are in the eye of the beholder in economics.
The issues at hand are very complex indeed, and I don’t think I’m qualified to make a substantial contribution. Nevertheless, there are some things that need mention.
For a start, Maximus should either offer a reasoned critique of Harris’s arguments or shut up. We are discussing issues, not academic qualifications or any such rot.
“You can’t derive an ought from an is” is, IMHO, bullshit. There are objective facts about our biology (and I include our psychological make-up here) that compel us to embrace certain attitudes and shun others. As Alonzo Fyfe has put it, “desires are the only reasons for action that exist” (atheistethicist.blogspot.com). I believe we can agree that any statement concerning ethics has to start from the recognition that human beings act in order to bring about a state in which their desires are satisfied.
So we have a multitude of agents, each motivated by his/her own desires, and a successful ethical theory would be one that minimizes the amount of desires that are thwarted.
Some of our desires are rigid, as in the case of hunger, thirst, sexual attraction, etc. There is nothing we can do to modify them. So any ethical theory has to make sure that those desires are not thwarted.
Soem desires can be modified, or superseded by a stronger desire. For example, my desire to smoke may be superseded by my desire to be healthy. Those are malleable desires, and can be influenced by society through rewards and punishments.
Why should I care whether other people’s desires are thwarted or satisfied? Because in a society that endeavours to avoid desires being thwarted, my own desires run less of a risk of being thwarted too. For example, is wanting to kill my mother-in-law a good desire? No, because it leads to a radical thwarting of my mother-in-law’s desires, and if that’s acceptable to society, who is going to guarantee that my desires are not similarly thwarted?
So I believe morality is a scientific issue. Genital mutilation is definitely wrong, homophobia is definitely wrong, greed is definitely wrong, and moral relativism is a sad excuse for spinelessness.
Sorry, I’ve just realized that Brendon and DamnYankees have already made more or less the same points.
I know of only one moral imperative that can be applied without running into the kind of logical contradictions (mainly reductio ad absurdum) that prove them to be purely subjective.
Here it is:
“All sapient conscious beings are free to do as they please, unless that freedom impinges upon the freedom of another sapient conscious being”
This could also be just a subjective opinion, but it’s ability to be applied without contradiction singles it out as a *possible* objective rule. To *actually* be an objective moral imperative, it would have to be tied to the workings of the universe in the same way as the laws of physics.
his, although seemingly unlikely, and certainly unevidenced in any way whatsoever… is not impossible. I just don’t have the time to go into it.
*chuckle*
Matt, I see one problem with your proposed imperative, namely the definition of “freedom”. For instance, ist it OK for Bill Gates to possess 50 billion dollars and for a single mother in New Orleans to earn 5000 a year? Is the extreme accumulation of wealth a sign of a free society, or is it the mark of economic dictatorship? We know that it is impossible for everybody to be wealthy simultaneously, so is the “freedom” you enjoy under capitalism really “freedom”?
I believe a desire-based approach is less prone to ambiguities of this kind.