(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.
29: “Moral relativism is a empirical observable fact – if not different people, then different cultures have observably different morals.”
Hmmm… they also all have different creation myths. Cosmology is subjective! Reality is subjective! Physics is bunk!
Did you actually think about this before you wrote it?
I would recommend that you take a look at Michael Martin’s Atheism, Morality, and Meaning, Sean. I’m not sure I agree with him, but I’m not sure I agree with you either. Martin presents a reasonably compelling case for absolute moral constructivism, which is appealing because it relies on a wide reflective equilibrium that is much the same as the coherentist epistemology of science.
Matt: Ideas like: (…) are concerned with social constructs, not physical reality. Wealth is something that has no intrinsic meaning, so how can an objective rule of the universe act out if there is nothing to act out upon?
I stated 3 examples to show why your idea that “the right to life trumps the social rules regarding property” was invalid from moral point of view. Your objection that they are “concerned with social constructs, not physical reality” makes no sense, in all of them the final result was death in both cases, are you trying to say that death is a social construct and not physical reality?
@Matt
I’m sorry I cannot reply to you reply; I didn’t understand any of it.
You are the Ted Bundy of discover magazine. 🙂
(1) Isn’t one’s sense of well-being or happiness largely a function of how much dopamine is being produced by the hypophthalamus? We are going to ground all morality on achieving a brain state induced by a neurotransmitter? Will we be able to get “the Good” in pill form at Rite Aid?
(2) While it is a fact that conscious beings seek states of happiness and avoid suffering, I don’t see how we get to a moral system without at least an additional axiom of human individual autonomy or self-determination that I am not sure is objectively true in the same way. Are all individuals equally entitled to these states, or are some (say the most intelligent and creative) more entitled? One could argue that societies as a whole benefit when the most talented are given the most advantages, while the stupid folk don’t need the same privileges. Certainly the ancient Greeks whose innovations in science and philosophy and the arts were made possible by a slave state would have agreed with this point of view. Were they wrong? Do we thus condemn the culture that gave us Western Civilization? On what basis do we assume that women should be equally entitled to states of well-being as men? What if by depriving women of equal status in Muslim societies men experience states of well-being far beyond what we men in the West experience such that the mean happiness peak could be equal to that of an egalitarian society? Why don’t we harvest the organs of one healthy man if by doing so we end the suffering of several sick individuals, particularly if we are able to kill without causing the slightest pain or suffering?
Seems to me a huge donut hole in Sam Harris’s talk was discussion of this principal of human self-determination or autonomy that we seem to take for granted.
Some of the arguments here typify what is wrong (in my subective opinion) with the academic community’s approach to progress in science. So much game playing and point scoring….here Mr Harris gives a reasoned, and useful suggestion as to how morality and the human condition can be progessed to a higher plane than it currently sits at…
There is no objective proof in science of unconscious processing in the brain…we are only 99.95% sure that it exists…..but it is 100% certain that pain and suffering exist in this world and the cause can be reliably and consistently placed at the door of debatable moral values. Why should science not have a role in defining what 99.95% of people would agree is morally wrong? The exact same margin of doubt exists . Maybe the 0.05% of Ted Bundy’s could have their own scientific programme of moral research and set their own agenda for change…would you join them? I would certainly join Mr Harris’ programme for change and salute his stand wholeheartedly.
How can you object to scientifically quantifying human well-being? We can define ranges and scopes for superior diets, superior exercise routines, superior toys and tools yet morality is somehow outside of our intellectual scope? Harris is saying we should study the matter instead of leaving it up to the ineptitude that religious morons have been dickering with for far too long.
Just because Hume said it, doesn’t make it true. Certainly, the simple minded are unable to grasp what ought to be from what is – the rest of us, however, find the matter rather obvious.
There are quantifiable measures to human well-being. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t make it so – it makes us simply ignorant, hence why we should study the matter instead of rotting to death in stagnation.
Without being insulting, the author of this article either completely missed the point or lacks the intellectual capacity to grasp what Harris was conveying. As much as I’d like to try to explain it, it would be a complete waste of my time since if you can’t grasp the notion when elegantly laid out for you then there’s certainly nothing I can attempt that would educate you further. Aside from that, the shortcomings of others are not my problem.
Science is how to protect us from lying to ourselves. Religion is the pack of lies we ingest for comfort. What’s actually disappointing is that people like you – while not completely stupid, obviously – are in the way by virtue in lacking the ability to adapt or expand beyond your preconceived notions of reality.
Between the archaic world-view you are espousing and apparently seek to maintain or even the vaguest attempt at progress that Harris suggests, I’ll take camp with Harris hands down.
@P
Sorry, I didn’t address that directly.
“What if 100 people worked for months gathering rare herbs for this cure and they need the money to feed themselves and their families and will starve to death otherwise?”
What if the company who developed the cure will go broke as a result of the theft and no one else will be willing to produce the cure meaning hundreds of deaths a year from the disease?
What if some of the people who won’t get paid as a result of theft won’t be able to afford their medicines and die prematurely?”
Yes, I accept fully that the deaths in your examples are caused, indirectly, by the free-will decision of the protagonist.
Now, to judge whether they could be included in any logically possible objective moral framework, we have to ask what is the medium of the indirect causation?
Those deaths are the direct result of the workings (some would say failings) of the social and economic system in place. The indirect imposition of one free will consciousness on another free will consciousness takes place via the medium of the rules of that system.
This is not the same as an indirect imposition of will either directly (consciousness to consciousness) or indirectly via the physical (tool use, imprisonment etc). The reason it is not the same is that it is not possible for the universe to uphold objective laws pertaining to constructs, since it cannot have knowledge of such rules.
Now, I know that life is more complex than that. We live our lives as social beings engaged in a multitude of personal and social constructs, meaning that ethics and laws and rules all play vital roles in our lives and in ultimately in complex processes of causation; that’s why the subject’s a subjective minefield.
But once again, I stress that I’m not trying to decide upon every right and wrong in life here. I simply stated at the start that an objective morality (one that is somehow built into the workings of the universe) +may+ be possible in regards to some fundamental wrongs that are to do with the free will of conscious beings.
I went on, not to prove that objectively reality exists, explain it’s mechanism (although I have solid philosophical ideas and strong empirical pointers to how it might), or judge the complete formulation of the consequence aide of any laws (that would be total speculation). All I’ve done is to separate the logically possible from the logically impossible, in regards to what an objective morality would include, if such a thing existed.
its people like you who give Philosophy its bad reputation. its about time you left your David Hume-coocoon and start living in the real world, where people exist. should we expect another article on how the Taliban are miss-judged by the world and are actually great moralists. gimme a break, and give yourself a pause for a bit of thinking.
“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.”
Wonderful.
This is a terrible definition of facts: ‘We make up phrases like “relativity is right” and “Hitler was a scumbag”; since most agree, we call these phrases “facts”.’
By this definition, many facts (like Jews are out to steal your money if you are living in 1930s Germany) that we have _felt_ to be incorrect are defined as, by default of majority rules, true. By contrast, a sociologist who was doing their job properly might have been able to elicit plenty of statistics that could have proven that this was not at all the case. Of course, the problem is that the sociologist might think that Hitler is her master, not the truth. And this is where we run into trouble.
I think the best way to look back at the difference between facts and human opinions is to look at how freaking dangerous it is to conflate the two. To borrow Sam’s example: Hitler and all of the scientists who fed his racist ideas. Another example, and maybe these are both on my mind because Pesach begins tomorrow, is slavery. There was a lot of argument about the scientific validity of the institution. Head shapes/sizes etc. Racism is often couched in so-called scientific arguments. This is an example of what can happen when we conflate data with opinion or when we think majority opinion can rule, particularly on moral issues.
Of course, in reality, none of what I said here, however confident, is fact either. This is all my opinion. I can only hope that most people agree with me, so that it is still safe for me to set foot outside my door.
Sean wants to have his cake and eat it. So how to go about that sort of thing. Well, first he feels the need to explain to everyone that Sam Harris isn’t even a scientist, despite the fact that he’s got a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Harris also has the added benefit of living in a time where evolutionary theory. the discovery of DNA, physics and quantum theory as well as vastly increased neurological knowledge has been revealed.
What silver bullet to kill such a beastly, evil scientist? Oh, geez, let’s see. YES! We just have to invoke an old philosopher from the 18th century. Add a little cherry picking and we’re there, huh?
Hume was in fact critical of religion and had he lived today it is more likely that he would have agreed with Harris on a lot of things. Hume, while a brilliant philosopher, just happened to live in a pretty ignorant world.
Ironically, David Hume appears in Christopher Hitchen’s “The Portable Atheist”.
Besides … if science can’t answer anything in the realm of morality, are we really better off with the shrill and often outright cruel message from The Bible or Quran? Since when have farmers, cattle drivers and nomadic people, whose alleged “God” weren’t even smart enough to give us, say, the theory of bacteria, become moral lighthouses?
@ Maximus
Re: Bandwagon
San Harris. The end of faith : religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York : Norton, 2004. Print
Daniel C. Dennett. Breaking the spell : religion as a natural phenomenon. New York : Viking, 2006. Print.
Richard Dawkins. The God delusion. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006. Print.
Christopher Hitchens. God is not great : how religion poisons everything. New York : Twelve, 2007. Print.
Note the dates of print. He didn’t hop on a “New Atheist” bandwagon. It’s his bandwagon.
Carroll and Harris are both misleading here. Science can’t tell us what to value, but nor is it the case that values amount to add-ons which we choose in a rush of subjective and arbitrary abandon.
All human projects, including science, are saturated in the normative and all humans move thru a world that is full of meaning and significance. This significance is real, and although’ it isn’t something you can drop on your foot and it doesn’t have the watertight status of 2+2=4, is still objective. It is independent of your or my mind.
You can disagree about this or that aspect, about what the right thing to do is, but if you have moral dilemmas at all (and I bet Mr Carroll has them too) you don’t choose the fact that there IS a dilemma in the first place.
The choice isn’t between hard headed realism and relativism: that is a false choice. Facts aren’t discrete assemblages of ‘hard, real’ stuff, with values as squishy unreal subjective stuff; it isn’t like that. I don’t even think Hume thought that it was.
So why does Sean Carroll?
As my brilliant husband said “You can not ‘prove’ faith.. that’s what makes it faith and it is that which we are saved by..
Excellent piece. Kudos.
Sean — I’ve been thinking about this a little bit more, and I have to admit to being surprised by the responses that people are posting here. I expected everyone to say, “yes yes, it’s kind of complicated.” That seems like a “fact” in my brain, haHA! I don’t understand the compulsion to reduce complicated individual and cultural behavioral questions to algorithms. And it seems dangerous to try — what happens when we decide with our limited understanding of science that certain cultures are somehow less valid in our reasoning mechanism? How can we be sure that this is a “truth” and not just our ignorance?
We find out all the time that what we thought we knew, scientifically, we didn’t know at all. Pre-1905 physics is a classic example of a time when we thought we had almost everything figured out and it turned out that physicists actually knew very little.
Anyway, I guess I just wanted to express my surprise.
Yes, Deb, you can’t prove faith, but you can often disprove it. That is what makes it
stupid. Just why are you “saved” by something you can’t prove? If someone has faith that
fairies exist, that just shows they are deluded, not saved.
Sean–just why do you seem to be taking accomodationist stances these days towards atheism?
Is it your overdeveloped political correctness? (This applies more to a previous thread on “rude atheists”).
First, I just have to compliment everyone on this blog. This is the ONLY blog I have ever seen where pretty much everybody is engaged in an intellectual discussion, and nobody is being gratuitously mean-spirited, or leaving hyper text links to pornographic sites. Congrats!
I’m an attorney, not a scientist or philosopher. Nonetheless, Mr. Harris’ lecture resonated with me on some levels, good and bad. It’s hard to reject the somewhat ethnocentric notion that we know best how to maximize individual and collective happiness, that the United States of America represents a Darwinian end product. Aren’t we the strongest nation on earth? The most influential in many spheres? And I have a 17 year old daughter whom I love with every fiber of my being, so when Mr. Harris talks about cultures in which fathers murder their daughters who have been raped because of the “shame” that she brought to the family, I have a visceral response and agreement that no well-spun argument can ever overcome.
I agree that we need to reach a place where we can have real discussions about morality that are based on objective information and data. Perhaps there is a way for science and philosophy to work in tandem. There is a very interesting book by John Rawls called A Theory of Justice. His notion is that to derive common, objective principles of morality and rules for living within a society, all we need to do is imagine that we exist behind a “veil of ignorance,” not knowing what position in society we shall inhabit, what color our skin will be, what gender we shall be, what socioeconomic status we shall have. In that position, we may be able to agree on principles of morality and government. Behind the veil of ignorance, we should all be able to agree that maximizing human well-being, maximizing states of pleasure and minimizing states of pain are objective goods. So, this seems consistent with Mr. Harris’ initial premise.
Religion, however, seems to throw a wrench in the gears. And what if we measured the brain waves and states of women wearing burkas in Iran, and found that they are at least as happy as American women wearing thong bikinis at the beach? Do we just respond that ignorance is bliss? I WANT science to give us moral absolutes. And Mr. Harris is starting us down that road. I applaud him for that.
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It was Mr. Harris who started my questioning of my faith, however I’ve finally arrived at a moral nihilism after years of pain. Its going to be a long way back from the dissipated path he is creating.
“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.”
I completely agree with you, Sean. Science teaches us that a new human being forms at conception and, therefore, it would be wrong for us to end its life, as it is wrong for an adult human.
Sean is right to point out you cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. But it is a fact that most humans value human well-being/happiness. Evolution gives a good reason for this: values such as these are the basis for social collaboration. Society would collapse without it. And the more ppl value well-being, the more happiness there is in a society.
Science takes a neutral perspective on the universe, but morality takes a human perspective on the universe. Sean is right that ‘is’ cannot derive ‘ought’, but that’s not exactly what I get from Harris. Harris is (I think) arguing along these lines: Given that the overwhelming goal of human morality is human (and perhaps animal) well-being and happiness, and well-being or happiness can be measured (or one day will be possible to measure), then there are right and wrong answers within the framework of morality. (I agree, it’s unfortunate he likened morality to physics. It’s not that black and white. Maybe morality is more like biology instead.)
I didn’t see this in the thread but I only got part way through. Anyway, what bothered me about this talk was the bit near the end where the whole thing devolved somewhat into religion-bashing. Yes, women in certain parts of the world don’t have a choice in what they wear on their heads. Some people have a kneejerk reaction against religion, and islam in particular, and forget that cultural values often trump local human values, and many see that as a good thing.
For instance: many beaches in Europe allow you to sunbathe topless, many in the US don’t (I’ve been told, anyway). To go a step further: I am not allowed to go out on the street pantsless. Even though I’m not hurting anyone, even though there’s nothing particularly nasty to see when I go out not wearing any pants, I’ll still get arrested and fined, possibly have to spend the night in jail and/or register as a sexual predator. So “what is the chance that this is the pinnacle of human culture we’re looking at”?