Last year we talked a bit about Sam Harris’s attempts to ground morality on science:
See especially the third one there, where I try to be relatively careful about what I am saying. (Wouldn’t impress a philosopher by a long shot, but by scientist/blogger standards I was careful.) Upshot: concepts relevant to morality aren’t empirical ones, and can’t be tested by doing experiments. Morality depends on science (you can make moral mistakes if you don’t understand the real world), but it isn’t a subset of it. Science describes what happens, while morality passes judgments on what should and should not happen, which is simply different.
By now Harris’s book The Moral Landscape has appeared, so you can read for yourself his explanations in full. In a different world — one where I had access to a dozen or so clones of myself with fully updated mental states, willing to tackle all the projects my birth-body didn’t have time to fit in — I would read the book carefully and report back. This is not that world.
Happily, Russell Blackford has written a longish and very good review, in the Journal of Evolution and Technology. He also blogged about it, and Jerry Coyne blogged about Russell’s review. As far as I can tell, Russell and I basically agree on all the substantive points, and he’s more trained in philosophy than I am, so you’re actually doing a lot better than something one of my clones would have been able to provide. It’s an extremely generous review, always saying “I liked the book but…” where I would have said “Despite the flaws, there are some good aspects…” So you’ll find in the review plenty of lines like “Unfortunately, Harris sees it as necessary to defend a naïve metaethical position…”
Any lingering urge I may have had to jump into the debate again in a substantive way has been dissipated by Harris’s response to Blackford’s review, which appears in the form of a letter to Jerry Coyne reprinted on his blog. It seems that very little communication is taking place at this point. Coyne paraphrases Blackford as asking “How do we actually measure well being?; for that is what we must do to make moral judgments.” Seems reasonable enough to me, and echoes very closely my first point here. Harris’s response is:
This is simply not a problem for my thesis (recall my “answers in practice vs. answers in principle” argument). There is a difference between how we verify the truth of a proposition and what makes a proposition true. How many breaths did I take last Tuesday? I don’t know, and there is no way to find out. But there is a correct, numerical answer to this question (and you can bet the farm that it falls between 5 and 5 million).
This misses the point, to say the least. The problem of measuring well-being is not simply one of practice, it’s very much one of principle. I know what a breath is; I don’t know what a “unit of well-being is.” The point of these critiques is that there is no such thing as a unit of well-being that we can look inside the brain and measure. I’m pretty sure that’s a problem of principle. Of course, Russell and Jerry and I (and David Hume, and a large number of professional moral philosophers) may be wrong about this. The way to provide a counter-argument would be to say “Here is a precise and unambiguous definition of how to measure well-being, at least in principle.” That doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.
Latter Harris says this:
The case I make in the book is that morality entirely depends on the existence of conscious minds; minds are natural phenomena; and, therefore, moral truths exist (and can be determined by science in principle, if not always in practice).
Taken at face value, this implies that truths about the best TV shows or most delicious flavors of ice cream also exist. My opinion that The Wire is the best TV show of all time is a natural phenomenon — it reflects the state of certain neurons in my brain. That doesn’t imply, in any meaningful sense, that the state of my brain provides evidence that The Wire “really is” the best TV show of all time. Nor, more programmatically and importantly, does it provide unambiguous guidance concerning which new programs should be green-lit by studio executives. The real problem — how do you balance the interests of different people against each other? — is completely ignored.
At heart I think the problem is that Sam and some other atheists are really concerned about the idea that, without objective moral truths based on science, the field of morality becomes either the exclusive domain of religion, or simply collapses into nihilism. Happily for reality, that’s an extremely false dichotomy. Morality isn’t out there to be measured like some empirical property of the physical world, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be moral or to speak about morality in a rational, thoughtful way. Pretending that morality is a subset of science is, in its own way, just as much an example of wishful thinking as pretending that morality is handed down by God. We have to face up to that temptation and accept the world as it is.
@Kaleberg
I like me some Haidt as much as the next man. That said, I think you’ve somewhat overstated his conclusions regarding liberal morality.
First of all. Utilitarianism is at least as old as Epicurus. Even Hammurabi’s code talks about bringing well-being to the oppressed. I see no reason to think liberalism is any less natural and antique than conservatism. Indeed I’ve seen it suggested that Liberalism is older, stemming from the values of hunter-gatherers as opposed to conservatism, which started with agriculture.
Second of all, Haidt’s work shows that even conservatives rate utility and fairness at least as heavily as the other factors in making moral judgments. We are not as different as you make it out to be.
That said, Haidt’s work is definitely important, and it’s a good starting point for figuring out what we mean by moral terms in practice. So, I applaud you for bringing it up.
Oh. For a cite on the hunter-gatherer vs farmer thing, here are a couple of relevant posts from another hive-overminder.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/10/farmers-foragers-and-us/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/men-at-work-hoes-ploughs-and-steel/
@Mike
You said “But I’d be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that it was still an unprovable axiom”.
You seem to think this is actually a meaningful statement, meant to undermine Harris. But I think Harris makes an important point that you are ignoring – namely, your quote is true about EVERYTHING. The most basic foundations of physics and math and biology and, well, everything, are ultimately unprovable axiom.
Why should anyone care about logical consistency? Why should anyone care about the principle of identity?
The fact that we can’t justify A = A on any deeper level doesn’t somehow disprove the objectivity of math. So why does it disprove the objectivity of morality?
You’re taking a burden of proof on morality that you don’t take anywhere else. If someone says “for me, being healthy means vomiting blood all the time”, we don’t take that person seriously as an arbiter of what we mean by “health” and then try to come up with a new theory of medicine. Rather, we nod politely and back away slowly. I’m not sure how that’s any different than morality. Anyone who claims that being “moral” involves increasing the amount of unhappiness experienced can be written off as a nut.
A rhetorician and blogger I am fond of, Dale Carrico often writes about his delineation of five separate domains of rationality or belief, of which ethics and instrumentality/science are two. The schema are set up here, in a piece titled “Techchnoethical Pluralism. In a nutshell the five are:
Instrumental: concerning objective facts about the world
Ethical: concerning how people should act in society, closest to what’s meant by “moral” in this post
Moral: concerning group identification and intention
aesthetic: concerning individual and idiosyncratic values
political: concerning the reconciliation of diverse beliefs and ends
The key point is, and this is something you touched on Sean, is that each of the five depends on the others for proper functioning, but none of them actually derive from the rest, and attempts to make them do so usually end in badness. The link goes into much more detail, and I’d recommend reading it to anyone interested. I find the framework pretty useful in thinking about the world.
@Kaleberg
Harris is postulating that through scientific research we have the possibility of finding pathways and/or traits in the human mind that might function as a yardstick to measure how we as self aware being determine the basis of our moral value judgments. He does NOT say that there is a morality with a capitol “M” like a Platonic truth that science will discover. What he does say is that through scientific method and the study of human consciousness we have the possibility to render that data statistically into a plot of the “landscape” of all the various states of being that maximize those values that enrich human existence beyond the genetic heritage a self aware hunter gatherer species. And maybe we can start evolving a higher state of co0nciousness and become more than just the best hunter gather resulting from evolutionary pressures and find a basis for moral behavior that maximizes human potential and happiness in an uncaring universe. It’s our self aware nature that makes us able to rise above “nature, tooth and claw” .; Humans can value compassion and happiness, so why can’t we use our intelligence and scientific method to find measures to maximize those values and stop this circular Aristotelian philosophical mumbo-jumbo that I heard so many antagonists spout at the “Great Debate” Sam Harris was a part of at ASU a few months ago (and is repeated ad nauseam here)
Just because most of human history shows that authoritarianism and priority of one’s own group may have, in your opinion, been held as a high point on some subjective moral landscape doesn’t mean that the “enlightenment” values you criticize as a “Western European” invention is based on false reasoning. I’ll take Thomas Paine’s, “”The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion” over the selfish nationalistic rationalization’s of Cheney and his ilk any time. Social Darwinism is not necessarily a reality but merely a justification or excuse for the self interest of the powerful.
Liberalism isn’t new, but it may be the ultimate result of a the evolution of a truly enlightened consciousness in a self aware being that has examined his own existence.
DamnYankees–
You write “You seem to think this is actually a meaningful statement, meant to undermine Harris. But I think Harris makes an important point that you are ignoring – namely, your quote is true about EVERYTHING. The most basic foundations of physics and math and biology and, well, everything, are ultimately unprovable axiom.
Why should anyone care about logical consistency? Why should anyone care about the principle of identity?
The fact that we can’t justify A = A on any deeper level doesn’t somehow disprove the objectivity of math. So why does it disprove the objectivity of morality?
You’re taking a burden of proof on morality that you don’t take anywhere else.”
Have you actually read my comments here? Go back and read what I said about the necessity of axioms in physics and mathematics, as well as in making sense of the evolution of dinosaurs. I’m not asserting that morality is special in depending fundamentally on a set of starting axioms; just the opposite, in fact: I’ve explained that morality is just as dependent on its own personal set of axioms. That’s my whole point.
The claim made by Harris is that morality doesn’t need its own axioms, that it can somehow be “derived” from science, whether you believe that science itself needs axioms or not. My point is that morality is axiomatically independent of science; each discipline needs is own starting axioms. You need axioms to define “is,” and you need additional axioms to define “ought.” The axioms for morality can be inspired by science, but they cannot be derived from it.
And given how much messier ethics is than science, it’s difficult to imagine that we’re all going to agree on a specific set of moral axioms. We don’t even all agree on the axioms for science! Consider the debate over whether the multiverse and anthropic reasoning are scientific, just for starters! Even pure, Platonic, rigorous mathematics has witnessed disputes over axioms, from the axiom of choice to the continuum hypothesis, even putting aside Godel’s proof that no axiomatic system for mathematics containing arithmetic could ever be complete.
It’s humbling—and a bit scary—to realize that so many things about the universe we take for granted as being tautological depend fundamentally on unprovable axioms. People who come to this realization react in different ways; my own reaction is to eschew the kind of epistemological and moral hubris that Harris oozes when he speaks.
The best we can do is find the simplest, most parsimonious, most generalizable, most agreed-upon, most mutually-consistent axioms possible as our starting point. And even then, it’s never going to be a complete or perfect set, and we’re unlikely all to agree. This doesn’t mean there are no truths out there, or that we can’t improve our understanding of the world with effort, but just that we should approach the pursuit of truth with a dose of humility and fallibility and perspective about just how limited we human beings really are and how much we can ever really know.
Nobody ever promised that existence would be a rose-garden.
I didn’t even mention other disturbing things about his lecture, like the staggering number of people in the audience who treated him like an evangelical pastor and fawned all over him like congregants. It smelled cultish, and that’s not a direction I like very much.
I’m sympathetic to both sides of the debate here: On the one hand, it seems unlikely that the universe has any real objective morality, not in the same sense as there exists an electron mass-to-charge ratio or the Chandrasekhar limit or the tensile strength of aluminum. On the other hand, we are compelled daily to make choices in our life as if ultimately something *matters*.
Maybe we should all just admit that it’s just unemotional atoms all the way down, the universe doesn’t give a damn about humanity in any meaningful sense, and so be it. But I for one would find that an utterly unsatisfying way to live. Why study the cosmos at all in that case? Why plan for the future, why laugh and love? I suspect that there is no purely rational answer to Mitchell Heisman’s existential dilemma. Why is existence better than non-existence? Why is well-being preferable to a lack thereof? As other commenters here have said, we need some axioms, and those have to come from someplace.
I for one am happy to admit that in my own case, the answer is probably in the hardware. As a result of gigayears of evolution, my brain is wired to think existence is preferable to the alternative, to find socialization with others pleasurable, to find my kid amazingly cute and worthy of protection and nurturing. And in that sense I think Harris is on exactly the right track: science *can* tell us something about how we ought to derive moral axioms from the biology and neurophysiology of homo sapiens. If by “morality” we mean ‘objective truths about the value of states of the universe’, then I think we’re in trouble, but if we take morality instead to mean “truths about the optimal actions of humans, as perceived by humans”, then I think we’re talking about a far more tractable (though still very hard!) problem.
Just because science is incapable of purely rational answers to all possible moral questions, does not mean that it is incapable of answering a great many such questions of very practical and relevant application to humanity. To say otherwise, to neglect the fact that science really can do much better than just abandoning the field entirely to religion and philosophers, feels akin to refusing the gifts of modern medicine because we don’t yet have a universal cure. Choosing how to live right is a hard, hard problem and I’ll take all the help I can get.
SteveN wrote:
“Sean, you say “you can make moral mistakes if you don’t understand the real world”. But isn’t that precisely what Harris is arguing?”
Actually I think this is the central point, because this is not what Harris is arguing.
It is true, that you can make moral mistakes if you don’t understand the real world – that is why religious people are wrong, if they reject science.
But it is also true, that understanding the world doesn’t guarantee, that you cannot make moral mistakes. And this is what Harris is saying, I think.
Understanding the world (science) is not enough to judge what is moral. Science is about what is, but that doesn’t contradict the fact, that human life is also about what ought to be – and that there is a social necessity in reaching some level of common agreement about moral. We can have different opinions about a moral question, but you cannot have a society where moral is generally a private matter.
To say that moral can be based exclusively on science is just as wrong as saying it can be based exclusively on ancient religious dogma!
Sean: “you can make moral mistakes if you don’t understand the real world”.
A lot of truth here when applied to the current debate on global warming.
Reference: “Collapse” by Jarred Diamond.
I think plutoniannights is on the right track. “Morality” is a strawman, because morality does not actually exist. The argument ought to be about something else, maybe something like the way adaptive behavior translates into concepts we call morality. For example, there have been studies of the evolutionary basis for altruism, and altruism is often considered an aspect of moral behavior. Once we recognize that “morality” is simply giving a name to natural behaviors, we can start studying those behaviors without the baggage of religious expectations.
plutoniannights writes “If we define morality as the answer to the question of how to best behave within the kind of social setting that we humans evolved, in order to better our chances of survival, then I suppose it becomes less vague.”
Marshall writes “If by “morality” we mean ‘objective truths about the value of states of the universe’, then I think we’re in trouble, but if we take morality instead to mean “truths about the optimal actions of humans, as perceived by humans”, then I think we’re talking about a far more tractable (though still very hard!) problem.”
Mark P writes “Once we recognize that “morality” is simply giving a name to natural behaviors, we can start studying those behaviors without the baggage of religious expectations.”
These are all reasonable statements, but notice that they all illustrate my basic idea: At some point, you have to define your moral axioms; you have to say what you define morality to be. There’s just no avoiding it, and all I ask is that people acknowledge what they’re doing and not try to sweep this crucial and unavoidable step under the rug, as Harris dishonestly does, and that they recognize that these axioms may never achieve universal agreement or achieve the status of empirical facts.
Once you’ve stated your axioms of course, or at the very least acknowledge their existence and ultimately subjective nature, then I think it’s fair game to use science to build a case for the best practical approach to achieving your moral vision.
A scientific outlook may influence your moral views, but certainly morality is not a subset of Science.
Harris has already addressed your concern about the lack of a precise measurement of “well-being” in the book. The analogy with human health holds.
Would you find the following, a re-statement of your argument as an argument against the possibility of being able to measure human health in principle, at all convincing?
“The problem of measuring health is not simply one of practice, it’s very much one of principle. I know what a sand grain is; I don’t know what a “unit of health is.” The point of these critiques is that there is no such thing as a unit of health that we can look inside the body and measure. I’m pretty sure that’s a problem of principle. Of course, Russell and Jerry and I may be wrong about this. The way to provide a counter-argument would be to say “Here is a precise and unambiguous definition of how to measure health, at least in principle.” That doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.”
Everyone seems to be mis-reading Harris as saying that “well-being is a scalar value with a simple measurement”. He’s very much not; he’s saying “well-being must in principle map to states of conscious brains”.
You say “I know what a breath is; I don’t know what a ‘unit of well-being is.'” as though this negates Harris’ entire argument.
Descartes may well have said “I know what light is; I don’t know what a unit of light is.” He was on the right track though, and hundreds of years later we all know that the unit of light is a photon.
Is it so hard to accept that while Harris cannot at this very moment provide us with the full criteria for measuring well-being, that it is in principle possible to develop these criteria? I don’t think he’s ever claimed that he’s doing anything other than laying some groundwork for further investigation.
You seem to think Harris is missing the point. He is not. You are.
Surely a particular state of well being has to be identified with an algorithm that is executed by the brain? We simply need to take serious the idea that there exists such a thing like a perspective from the point of view of an algorithm.
See also this old blogposting by me.
How does Harris’ morality dictate how we should treat animals? If it’s based on optimising total human well-being, how do non-human creatures fit in? Do we include their well-being and if so, is it on an equal footing to our own?
If we can not solve it logically then the next best thing is to admit that the school of hard knocks is a fact of life, and go by how things work out and what stands the test of time. Should we endlessly go back and forth about Good Kings and Bad Kings, or just get rid of Monarchy ? That is the real world. There are too many variables to be “scientific” about it. Why should I care about maximizing the happiness of Monarchists ?
While I don’t want to enter the debate, I just thought I’d point out that the book has also been reviewed in this week’s Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7330/full/469297a.html
I’d just like to second what Simon (comment 39) said.
I’m no philosopher, but seems to me that a unit of “well-being” can not rest on whether someone is happy or sad. Is it immoral to be sad, depressed, etc? I don’t think so. The argument I’ve heard from non-philosophers refuting Biblically produced morality is that morality is the action or behavior that results in the least harm, and preventing harm as well, to fellow creatures. If that is the case, then how would having a favorite TV show or ice cream flavor have any moral standing at all? What harm could it cause someone else?
In my opinion, in order to justify morality from an atheist background, the first requirement is to understand the human species and to base observations on how the whole species operates and survives rather than trying to separate morality into something independent of humans and abstract.
When you look at it correctly, I don’t think it’s that hard to understand and really shouldn’t be so difficult for most people to wrap their minds around.
Morality stems from the simple realization that almost no single human possesses all the skills necessary to survive. Each and every human relies upon other humans in order to live and, in our age, no one human possesses every skill necessary to support the current quality of life. As such, every human depends upon other humans in order to have access to the skills necessary to live. Morality is simply a logical manner of behavior where barter of skill can become possible– obviously, one probably shouldn’t sleep with the plumber’s wife if one wants the plumber to be willing fix one’s bathroom sink. Don’t eat the banker’s children if you want your money out of your checking account… otherwise, the banker would probably either hate you, or be too repulsed by you to ever be willing to do you any favors.
I think it’s incredibly straight forward and rapidly dying in a world where every service can be obtained without looking someone in the face you don’t personally know.
A jolly good theory might be completely wrong. — Francis Crick
Does our morality come from God? I have recently posted a physical interpretation of M-theory, in my attempt to prove that God is dead in terms of cosmological physics. (Quantitative results for the Pioneer anomaly and Milgrom’s Law empirically confirm M-theory.) However, I believe that God is alive in terms of placebo power. Some people in Japan worship “god trees” — giant cedars that supposedly have souls. By means of self-hypnosis, brainwashing, and perhaps scientifically-induced hallucinations, people might derive great benefits from placebo power.
“Why should I be moral?” is not an intelligible question in some cultures. So either those cultures embody some deep mistakes or else “why should I be moral?” is not a question of universal significance.
If the moral axioms are correct, then statements logically derived from them are also correct. This is the kind of morality it seems you’re discussing. Unfortunately we don’t know if the axioms are correct. Additionally, for any collection of axioms, there are always true statements (statements consistent with the axioms) that cannot be proven from those axioms. Consequently, the only moral stance is: I can’t really know what is right. I must make the best choice I can, consistent with my beliefs and logic, and go forward fearfully.
“[T]here are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”
Alfred North Whitehead
Marshall wrote: “Maybe we should all just admit that it’s just unemotional atoms all the way down, the universe doesn’t give a damn about humanity in any meaningful sense, and so be it.”
If I take, say, a red cloth, and keep subdividing it, at some point the quality “red” vanishes from all the tiny pieces I have created. Yet “red” does correspond to an objective quality in the universe (at least in the universe where you speak of unemotional atoms), namely reflectivity or absorption of various wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Humans have emotions, atoms do not; humans are composed of atoms, and I suppose therefrom comes the “unemotional atoms all the way down”. But it doesn’t follow. This agglomeration of atoms writing this post knows emotion though none of the individual atoms does. It is an amazing universe that allows this, and that alone makes it worth study (to this agglomeration of atoms).
I suspect trying to find universal values is a hangover from God. E.g., one poses the question as though it is intelligible: “what is the meaning of life?” To whom? “What is the meaning of life to me?” is intelligible, and I may answer it. If you claim “what is the meaning of life?” with no entity attached is intelligible, I say that you are presupposing a universal mind who has the universal answer for everyone. That is you are asking “what is the meaning of (human) life to God?”