Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

[AlBell]

You guys can't even get to an ought, let alone use Science to evaluate it.

 

[JJM 777]

Glad to see that you evidently can.

 

[AlBell]

I just work with what's already there courtesy of thousands of years of geniuses arguing about the topic.

So far Harris doesn't make the cut into that elite group.

 

[fls]

I just work with what's already there courtesy of thousands of years of geniuses arguing about the topic.

Geniuses arguing for thousands of years and they only figured out slavery was a bad idea 150 years ago? I suspect "geniuses" means something a bit different to you.

So far Harris doesn't make the cut into that elite group.

I would hope not.

Linda

 

[Paulhoff]

I just work with what's already there courtesy of thousands of years of geniuses arguing about the topic.

So far Harris doesn't make the cut into that elite group.

That is anything but a loss for Sam Harris.

Paul

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Geniuses arguing for thousands of years and they only figured out slavery was a bad idea 150 years ago? I suspect "geniuses" means something a bit different to you.

Kant (1724-1804) and Bentham (1748-1832), to name two of those geniuses, were against slavery. They were well in advance of their time, in a way which Harris simply isn't. So if moral prescience about future attitudes is evidence of having something to contribute to the topic, Kant and Bentham have it in spades and Harris has bupkis.

Just saying.

I would hope not.

Hopefully armed with these new facts you will amend your view.

That is anything but a loss for Sam Harris.

Paul

I suggest that it is not mere coincidence that Harris' supporters are those unfamiliar with moral philosophy and its history, while those who possess such familiarity think that what he is saying is a combination of old news and simple error.

 

[fls]

Kant (1724-1804) and Bentham (1748-1832), to name two of those geniuses, were against slavery. They were well in advance of their time, in a way which Harris simply isn't. So if moral prescience about future attitudes is evidence of having something to contribute to the topic, Kant and Bentham have it in spades and Harris has bupkis.

Just saying.

Hopefully armed with these new facts you will amend your view.

Hmmm...that two 'geniuses' managed to happen upon an idea that the merest schoolchild knows today is an example of the value of their arguments?

I suggest that it is not mere coincidence that Harris' supporters are those unfamiliar with moral philosophy and its history, while those who possess such familiarity think that what he is saying is a combination of old news and simple error.

I'm not unfamiliar with moral philosophy and it's history if undergraduate and graduate courses plus some bloody thick books are what you mean, or various bibles if that's what AlBell means.

Linda

 

[AlBell]

You ought to quit worrying about bibles. It'll be a plus when you show us the Scientific Analyses that enabled you to make that choice.

Also, perhaps you ought to reread those Philosophy books.

ps. Is the laughter at you, or with you.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Hmmm...that two 'geniuses' managed to happen upon an idea that the merest schoolchild knows today is an example of the value of their arguments?

Whoa there, come back with those goal posts.

What on Earth could possibly count as a goal for you, if being decades or centuries ahead of their time and giving rigorous reasons for doing so doesn't get the ball into your goalposts? What must a moral philosopher do to impress fls?

By your own standards Harris cannot possibly be doing anything very useful, can he? I mean, all he's doing is putting forward ideas which are commonplace in the First World, like "suffering is bad" and "being happy and healthy are good". Yet you seem to think he's making some kind of contribution to human knowledge.

I'm not unfamiliar with moral philosophy and it's history if undergraduate and graduate courses plus some bloody thick books are what you mean, or various bibles if that's what AlBell means.

Then how is it you are so totally unfamiliar with figures like Bentham and Kant? How is it you do not appear to know utilitarianism or the is/ought distinction from holes in the ground? Forgive my skepticism but this is like someone claiming to be a physics postgraduate who doesn't know who Newton or Einstein were and has no clue about their work.

 

[fls]

Whoa there, come back with those goal posts.

What on Earth could possibly count as a goal for you, if being decades or centuries ahead of their time and giving rigorous reasons for doing so doesn't get the ball into your goalposts? What must a moral philosopher do to impress fls?

Yeah, it's not really fair.

Then how is it you are so totally unfamiliar with figures like Bentham and Kant?

That's an odd thing to presume.

How is it you do not appear to know utilitarianism or the is/ought distinction from holes in the ground? Forgive my skepticism but this is like someone claiming to be a physics postgraduate who doesn't know who Newton or Einstein were and has no clue about their work.

That would be unexpected.

Linda

 

[JoelKatz]

So, if I understand you well, you would take this statement to be correct:

A specific action has one single correct interpretation. If there is a difference in opinion regarding the morality of an action, someone is wrong.

I sort of agree and sort of disagree. Provided the action is sufficiently specific, then yes. Just as the sky does not always look blue, and does not look blue to a colorblind person. But under particular conditions, the sky does in fact emit a particular color spectrum. In this same sense, there is only one correct moral value, but not necessarily only one correct interpretation. A colorblind person sees things differently, but does not see 'incorrectly'.

This seems to flow logically from what you are saying. If multiple people can have different correct opinions, say half thinks it is good and half thinks it is bad, then morality would not be subjective but objective by definition.

Do you disagree with this?

If multiple people can have irreconcilably different *correct* opinions over precisely the same thing, then yes. But I'm not sure what it would even mean for an opinion to be 'correct' about something that's subjective as you are using that term.

A person with normal vision will say the sky looks blue and the grass looks green. A person who is color blind will see no such difference. This doesn't make color subjective.

The sky looks blue in the day time. It looks black at night. This doesn't make color subjective.

A person's opinion of the morality of an action is somewhat like what color they see something is. It tells us something about them, something about the circumstances under which they perceive the object, and something about objective properties of the object itself. It is the job of scientific inquiry to separate these things for morality, just as it did for color.

 

[INRM]

Since Sam Harris' views are based on utilitarianism, the best strategy would simply to be focusing on defeating his argument using the arguments that would be used to defeat the argument for utilitarianism.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Since Sam Harris' views are based on utilitarianism, the best strategy would simply to be focusing on defeating his argument using the arguments that would be used to defeat the argument for utilitarianism.

I think you might have the wrong end of the stick. This isn't simply a thread about "Harris boo!" versus "Harris yay!".

My point isn't that Harris' conclusions are wrong or bad. I've got no problem with them as conclusions. His conclusions aren't new or original, but that's not at all the same as them being wrong or bad.

It's just that he makes the bald-faced claim that he has solved the is/ought problem in the first minute of his talk, and he hasn't.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

That's an odd thing to presume.

Not really. Most people don't know about them so it's a reasonable presumption any given person does not.

However I didn't presume it, I concluded it based on your posts thus far. To me they seem inconsistent with you having any meaningful degree of familiarity with Kant, Bentham or the is/ought division.

Whereas the academic philosophers who have reviewed Harris' work all seem to be saying exactly what I have been saying: that it's rehashed utilitarianism and that his claims to solve the is/ought problem fail to do so.

That would be unexpected.

On the contrary, we get people pretending to possess expertise in fields they have no functional competence in all the time around here.

 

[Sophronius]

I sort of agree and sort of disagree. Provided the action is sufficiently specific, then yes. Just as the sky does not always look blue, and does not look blue to a colorblind person. But under particular conditions, the sky does in fact emit a particular color spectrum. In this same sense, there is only one correct moral value, but not necessarily only one correct interpretation. A colorblind person sees things differently, but does not see 'incorrectly'.

You are making this needlessly complicated. But I think I understand what you are saying now. You claim that actions "emit" certain moral responses, rather than that the actions are neutral and it's humanity that interprets them. This is clearly wrong. Killing a person is not "good" or "Bad" or whatever in and of itself. There's just different people with different opinions about it.

If multiple people can have irreconcilably different *correct* opinions over precisely the same thing, then yes. But I'm not sure what it would even mean for an opinion to be 'correct' about something that's subjective as you are using that term.

Just "not wrong". What I was trying to say was that if different people can have different opinions about an action, without a logical error being made anywhere, then clearly it is shown that morality is not objective but subjective. So you will have to show how morality is objective. However, every time I ask this of you, you simply say "well, colour is objective, therefore morality is too" which just doesn't follow.

A person with normal vision will say the sky looks blue and the grass looks green. A person who is color blind will see no such difference. This doesn't make color subjective.

The sky looks blue in the day time. It looks black at night. This doesn't make color subjective.

I am not talking about colour, I am talking about morality. If morality really is objective, you should be able to argue this instead of arguing that colour is objective.

Anyway, the answer to your claims here is once again that you are conflating colour with the perception of colour. The perception part is subjective, the colour itself is not. The action is objective, the morality of it is not. If you want to complete the analogy, you should argue that our perception of colour is objective.

A person's opinion of the morality of an action is somewhat like what color they see something is. It tells us something about them, something about the circumstances under which they perceive the object, and something about objective properties of the object itself. It is the job of scientific inquiry to separate these things for morality, just as it did for color.

No, because there is 0 evidence that morality is like colour in this regard. You can't just say "Well it's up to science to find evidence for what I know to be true!" That's a woo argument, if it can even be called that.

 

[fls]

Not really. Most people don't know about them so it's a reasonable presumption any given person does not.

We're not talking about an unselected population, though. Joe Blow isn't posting in a Philosophy thread on the JREF forum.

However I didn't presume it, I concluded it based on your posts thus far. To me they seem inconsistent with you having any meaningful degree of familiarity with Kant, Bentham or the is/ought division.

Whereas the academic philosophers who have reviewed Harris' work all seem to be saying exactly what I have been saying: that it's rehashed utilitarianism and that his claims to solve the is/ought problem fail to do so.

Can you link to some of these reviews? I am interested in seeing how someone with expertise addresses what Harris says in his book. That is why I was looking forward to Puglicci's review and I was disappointed when he didn't.

On the contrary, we get people pretending to possess expertise in fields they have no functional competence in all the time around here.

I said it would be unexpected for a physics postgraduate to have not heard about Newton and Einstein. I was agreeing with you, even though I don't know what it has to do with anything I said. After all, you can't be suggesting that only physics postgraduates have heard of Newton and Einstein.

Linda

 

[fls]

Since Sam Harris' views are based on utilitarianism, the best strategy would simply to be focusing on defeating his argument using the arguments that would be used to defeat the argument for utilitarianism.

Oh goody, just what we needed. Another critic who hasn't read the book.

Linda

 

[fls]

A person's opinion of the morality of an action is somewhat like what color they see something is. It tells us something about them, something about the circumstances under which they perceive the object, and something about objective properties of the object itself. It is the job of scientific inquiry to separate these things for morality, just as it did for color.

This seems to correspond with something i was thinking about earlier. The property of the act which allows people to distinguish it as moral or immoral, such as whether a child suffers or an animal dies, is not changed by having an opinion about that act.

Linda

 

[Sophronius]

This seems to correspond with something i was thinking about earlier. The property of the act which allows people to distinguish it as moral or immoral, such as whether a child suffers or an animal dies, is not changed by having an opinion about that act.

Linda

Of course. But this does not make the act good or bad in and of itself, as Joel claims. For example, if there's something about a specific act which causes repulsion in most normal people (who would therefore likely label it as wrong) then it could be labelled as "wrong" by virtually everyone even though it is completely harmless. Joel mentioned as example torturing a kid to death, and claimed that the fact that 99% of people would consider it wrong that this proves that it is objectively wrong. However, not too long ago you could have asked the same question about homosexuality and gotten the same result. This proves that it really is a subjective matter, even if there is common consensus about some things.

 

[JJM 777]

Would be good to hear what each discusser expects the "colours" of morality be then? Please pick one of these:

a) Morality includes black and white, right or wrong, no shades of grey. Everything is either right or wrong. There are no other options than fully right or fully wrong.

b) Not exactly (a) and not exactly (c), but something between them.

c) Morality includes a gradual spectrum of shades between black and white (or whatever colours) = between right and wrong. An act can be 100% right, 100% wrong, or any ratio between them... 23.47% right and 76.53% wrong for example.

d) Morality includes more than the range between "right" vs. "wrong", there is classifiable morality above the minimum requirements of "right", such as self-sacrifice for example. An act can be "wrong", which is not as noble as "right", which is not as noble as "perfect or superior", or something like that.

e) None of the above.