Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

[ketten]

You could look at the impact of honor on societies and work out if it is beneficial or detrimental to those societies relative to others with out it.

Of course a truly valid experiment on this subject would be both impractical and immoral.

Actually, there is both psychological and anthropological research on this. For example, certain honor systems seem to arise in situations where there is no strong central government and a high risk that somebody might steal your cattle. In that situation it is highly beneficial to have the reputation that you will retaliate severely. However, this cultural trait can persist even when the situation (for example trough migration to the city) changes, and then become maladaptive.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

As I explained at least twice now, this argument doesn't make any sense. There is nothing magic about the space between our ears that somehow makes it a science-free zone. Ideas in our head are no different from leaves on a tree. They are existent entities that have definite properties that can be analyzed by science. There is nothing special about the "external universe" that somehow makes science work on it and not the "internal universe". This is a vitalism fallacy or regarding consciousness as supernatural magic.

It's nothing whatsoever to do with regarding consciousness as supernatural magic.

Nobody here thinks that people do not have opinions on moral matters. Nobody here thinks that these opinions are not just physical things going on in their brains - or if they do they are superstitious idiots and I discard their opinion. Everyone here is on exactly the same page as far as that goes.

The problem still remains that you can't get from any number of "is" statements about people's brains to a moral "ought" statement.

Okay, so people hold some moral opinions. What now? How do you get from there to a conclusion about morality?

What happens if we meet aliens whose brains are wired up so that they reach entirely different moral conclusions about the same states of affairs? Are we both right (moral relativism), or are you actually going to try and tell us that there is a True Universal Morality and as a matter of fact the aliens are wrong? Or that because there is True Universal Morality no such aliens could possibly exist as an article of faith?

 

[JoelKatz]

You can iron out those details with time and thought. You can, with some work, put together a workable moral philosophy out of hedonistic utilitarianism. However by the time you have done so it's clear that you've done a lot of philosophical work and made a lot of non-evidence-based value judgments to do it.

It would be akin to making a machine to tell you what color things are without the machine actually having color vision. You would simply program it with enough heuristics -- "the sky is blue, unless it's night, and unless it's cloudy, and ...".

The machine would get right every case you had rigged it for. And you could almost convince yourself that this is all there is to color vision. And when a person disagrees with the machine, maybe the person is wrong. Or maybe you just need one more rule. If you keep going, the machine will be right more and more often -- so aren't you scientifically understanding and replicating color vision? (Of course, no, you're not. Because you aren't replicating what people actually *do*, just the results they get.)

You can't scientifically start from "the sky looks blue to people" to get to "the sky really is blue (in a scientific/objective sense)" unless your first understand precisely why and how the sky looks blue to people. But once you understand what is actually going on when a person judges the sky to be blue, you can then build a machine to accurately judge colors. (And you can defend the machine's judgment as being free from 'error' caused by limitations of human vision when it disagrees with people.)

 

[JoelKatz]

It's nothing whatsoever to do with regarding consciousness as supernatural magic.

Then why does it matter whether it happens inside my head or somewhere else? Scientifically, what is the difference? Why does it matter whether it's inside my head or inside a thermometer?

Nobody here thinks that people do not have opinions on moral matters. Nobody here thinks that these opinions are not just physical things going on in their brains - or if they do they are superstitious idiots and I discard their opinion. Everyone here is on exactly the same page as far as that goes.

The problem still remains that you can't get from any number of "is" statements about people's brains to a moral "ought" statement.

Right, not without understanding what "ought" really means, which we don't.

Okay, so people hold some moral opinions. What now? How do you get from there to a conclusion about morality?

By understanding what "ought" really means. Right now, we only understand morality as things that "seem right to us", just as we once understood colors only as things that "seemed red to us". So we can't get from "the sky looks blue" to "the sky really has these properties that make it look blue to me" because we don't know what those properties are. But once we understand how humans actually make such judgments, we should be able to trace the input to the output. Then we should be able to separate the objective property from the subjective judgment of it.

What happens if we meet aliens whose brains are wired up so that they reach entirely different moral conclusions about the same states of affairs? Are we both right (moral relativism), or are you actually going to try and tell us that there is a True Universal Morality and as a matter of fact the aliens are wrong? Or that because there is True Universal Morality no such aliens could possibly exist as an article of faith?

We are both right, but this is not moral relativism.

Suppose two people look at an object. One says "this object is tall". The other says "this object is short". Is this height relativism? Does this prove that object's sizes are subjective? The height is an objective property, however judging it to be 'tall' or 'short' is contaminated by subjective biases -- as all measurements made by humans are. Science is very good at filtering these out given enough time to understand how the perception or judgment at hand works.

If the aliens had a more limited range of color vision than us, they may say two things "seem the same color" to them and a normal human will say the two things "seem different colors" to him. They are both right because the two things are objectively such that they seem different colors to people with normal vision and the same color to our aliens. We can very precisely say what objective properties make this happen because we understand very well how people make such judgments.

Again, all properties are relational in this sense. Saying that a ball is blue means that when white light hits it, the reflected light has a mix of frequencies that appears blue to normal human vision. How is what happens when light shines on a ball any more or less inherent in the ball than what happens when a human evaluates the morality of an action inherent in the action? It is an objective fact that what measurement you get depends on what and how you measure. It is the norm for two measurements of the same objective property made by different 'meters' to differ.

That something "seems right to me" is such a contaminated subjective judgment. We don't yet know enough to figure out what the corresponding objective properties are. The problem is, we don't yet know what "really ought" means just as we once didn't know what "really blue" meant -- which objective properties cause us to judge something to be blue.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Then why does it matter whether it happens inside my head or somewhere else? Scientifically, what is the difference? Why does it matter whether it's inside my head or inside a thermometer?

Because there is nothing external to the brain to measure.

You can find out if something is "really blue" by testing the light it emits.

You cannot ever, even in principle, find out if something is really moral by testing it in any possible way.

You can examine people's minds and find out if they really think it is moral, but that gets you nowhere. If a million people really think slavery is moral, that doesn't make it moral. If a million people really think women should not have the vote, that doesn't make it moral.

What people think is moral is a psychological fact about people. It's not a moral fact about the universe, because moral facts about the universe do not exist.

By that I do not mean that such truths exist and we are ignorant of them. I'm saying they do not exist. End of story.

Right, not without understanding what "ought" really means, which we don't.

In a way this is the lynchpin of your argument. You redefine "ought" to mean something mysterious, external and universal. It's not. It's a perfectly well-understood value judgment made by morally fallible humans.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

A few of things concern me about Harris’ idea of a science of morality.

Firstly, what’s it going to be used for and why is it inherently better than any of the other moral philosophies people use today?

Secondly, I don’t think analogies with colour vision are at all helpful. People’s perception of the colour of an object illuminated under white light* doesn’t radically change by them thinking about it for longer or their emotional state, whereas a people’s moral decisions often do change depending on their experiences, the amount of thought they’ve dedicated to an issue and their emotional state.

Thirdly, if a science of morality determines behaviour A is “better” than behaviour B, why are the people who disagree and think behaviour B is better going to change what they’re doing? Will they just suddenly see the light, or are the moral scientists going to send an army in to make them change their ways?








*This in itself is problematic. Even if we were to assume there is a morality circuit in the brain, what would be the moral equivalent of white light, which would provide an unbiased weighting to all the humanly perceptible factors involved in a moral decision?

 

[JJM 777]

Only if you had already made the philosophical decision to adopt as an axiom that suffering is bad and happiness is good.

No more than I need to make the decision that a certain millimetrage is bad or good. Science just defines what the units are and how the reality around us is measurable with them. In this case, science would define a creature´s emotional state as the thing to measure.

 

[JoelKatz]

Because there is nothing external to the brain to measure.

So what? If consciousness is not supernatural magic, why does it matter whether something is inside or outside the brain? It would be equally amenable to scientific inquiry. Scientific reasoning takes place entirely inside the brain.

You can find out if something is "really blue" by testing the light it emits.

Only because we now understand that "really blue" is different from "looking blue". This understanding came from knowing what goes on inside our head when we see colors.

You cannot ever, even in principle, find out if something is really moral by testing it in any possible way.

How can you say that given that we don't even know what "really moral" means yet? Can we, in principle, find out if something looks blue to humans with normal vision by testing it?

You can examine people's minds and find out if they really think it is moral, but that gets you nowhere. If a million people really think slavery is moral, that doesn't make it moral. If a million people really think women should not have the vote, that doesn't make it moral.

I agree. If a million people think something is "really green" it could still be a mix of yellow and blue that merely looks green to everyone because of how the human color vision sense works. That's because we now understand what "really green" is. We do not yet have a scientific understanding of what "really moral" even means.

What people think is moral is a psychological fact about people. It's not a moral fact about the universe, because moral facts about the universe do not exist.

Is what looks blue to people a physical fact about the universe?

By that I do not mean that such truths exist and we are ignorant of them. I'm saying they do not exist. End of story.

I understand that you are saying that. But all the evidence contradicts you. How then do you explain the fact that morally normal humans agree that torturing children for pleasure is wrong precisely the same way humans with normal color vision agree that the sky and the grass are different colors? Other than magic, what is the alternative explanation to there being a difference between what the sky is and what the grass is that accounts for the judgment/perception difference?

In a way this is the lynchpin of your argument. You redefine "ought" to mean something mysterious, external and universal. It's not. It's a perfectly well-understood value judgment made by morally fallible humans.

Sure, just as "looks red" is as simple and inexplicable as anything can be. It means that when I look at it, I have a particular type of experience of redness. "Looks different colors" is as simple as anything can be too. We understand what it is to experience seeing something as blue quite well even without any understanding of the physics of color vision.

The question is not what the end result is though -- the experience that something is blue or that something is morally right. The question is what is the process, in sufficient detail so we can figure out what input determines the output so we can figure out what properties of the input the output is really measuring.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

No more than I need to make the decision that a certain millimetrage is bad or good. Science just defines what the units are and how the reality around us is measurable with them. In this case, science would define a creature´s emotional state as the thing to measure.

Those are two totally different things.

Picking a scale is not remotely the same thing as adopting out of thin air a philosophical axiom. The first is part of science, the second most definitely is not.

It's also not an ideal axiom, in many ways. Most obviously if the best way to maximise human pleasure and minimise human suffering was to spend all of our non-working hours shooting up heroin and staring at a wall, that would be the most moral possible activity. John Stuart Mill modified Bentham's utilitarianism to try to get around this, and then other people modified it further, and so on.

So it's not science, and it's also a potentially problematic axiom anyway.

 

[fls]

Piggy played this game as well - he made multiple contradictory statements, and then when any of them were shown to be nonsensical he repeated a different one and got outraged because he'd been "misinterpreted" again.

"Multiple contradictory statements" is the natural consequence of deciding that someone means one thing when they mean something else.

If you are privy to some secret version of Harris where his real ideas are expounded, as opposed to the public version where he claims to have solved the is/ought problem but when cornered admits to just being a welfare utilitarian, then please link us to this source of wisdom.

He has expounded on these ideas in a book:
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

And in lectures (this is one):
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6913036#post6913036

There's a well-known aphorism about not being so open-minded that your brains fall out. "Thinking outside the box" makes it possible to find novel solutions, and also makes it possible to fall into errors that the box was originally constructed to exclude you from. The mere fact that you are outside the box does not make you right, or even make it likely that you are right.

I agree. I don't understand what that has to do with what I said.

One minute you're claiming that you have relevant postgraduate study under your belt, and the next you don't even understand what basis the fact/value distinction has been made on.

This was another example of a form of inquiry based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas, as I explained earlier with respect to The Man's question, not an appeal for you to satisfy a point of ignorance.

(Plus you had no idea at all about what Bentham contributed to the field, or for that matter Kant. How the heck can you have gotten up to the postgraduate level in moral philosophy and be clueless about Kant?).

The easiest and most obvious answer is that you have characterized the situation incorrectly.

Linda

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I don't think I'm going to be able to get through to you, sorry.

At the root of the matter you are making a philosophical mistake, not a scientific one.

Scientifically your position is not wrong, merely unfalsifiable and hence worthless, because you have built in the escape hatch of saying "We don't even know what morality really is, so no possible observation can falsify my pet theory".

Philosophically, you just don't seem able to grasp the all-important distinction between moral description and moral prescription. You seem to think that if we can just get a detailed enough descriptive picture of how the brain thinks about moral ideas then we will magically get to a prescriptive morality. The idea that this is so is called the naturalistic fallacy, and as the name suggests it's an intellectual error.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

"Multiple contradictory statements" is the natural consequence of deciding that someone means one thing when they mean something else.

Or of correctly understanding their meaning when they contradict themselves.

He has expounded on these ideas in a book:
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

And in lectures (this is one):
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6913036#post6913036

This isn't anything new. In that speech he specifically cops out of defending his claims about the is/ought distinction with some bluster about it being boring and him not needing to bother with it.

I agree. I don't understand what that has to do with what I said.

Oh well. In your copious free time read it again and you might get it.

This was another example of a form of inquiry based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas, as I explained earlier with respect to The Man's question, not an appeal for you to satisfy a point of ignorance.

Trying to position yourself as someone "stimulating critical thinking" at this stage is a bit optimistic, isn't it? Since your position's already been demolished by astute critical thinking and a modicum of actual knowledge of philosophy, I don't think lack of critical thinking on this end is anything you have to worry your head about.

I think at this stage rather than pretending to try to "stimulate critical thinking" you should be trying to stimulate yourself to post some better argument for your position, or to be a good rationalist and admit that you were just confused all along.

The easiest and most obvious answer is that you have characterized the situation incorrectly.

No. As I said before, posers are nothing new on the internet. The easiest and most obvious answer when someone claims postgraduate expertise but wouldn't know the first year content from a hole in the ground is that they are misrepresenting themselves. If they subsequently don't show any more knowledge than before, but retreat and start sniping, then the easy and obvious answer gets further confirmation.

 

[AlBell]

So what or who, pray tell, can make moral judgments.

Paul

You can. fls can. Kevin can. Harris can. repeat ad-finitum.

But you knew that.

 

[JoelKatz]

Scientifically your position is not wrong, merely unfalsifiable and hence worthless, because you have built in the escape hatch of saying "We don't even know what morality really is, so no possible observation can falsify my pet theory".

It is entirely falsifiable. For example, if moral judgments appeared completely random and people didn't ever agree on them to better than chance, that would falsify my theory.

Think about what it would take to prove, in the absence of an understanding of the physics of color vision, that people can perceive colors that are an objective property of the thing perceived. It's pretty simple. For example, demonstrating that people agree on which ball "looks a different color" at rates better than chance among balls otherwise the same would be sufficient. (And note that 'otherwise the same' would simply mean that we couldn't figure out any other difference. Whatever the difference actually was would be what color actually is.)

Philosophically, you just don't seem able to grasp the all-important distinction between moral description and moral prescription. You seem to think that if we can just get a detailed enough descriptive picture of how the brain thinks about moral ideas then we will magically get to a prescriptive morality. The idea that this is so is called the naturalistic fallacy, and as the name suggests it's an intellectual error.

Quite the reverse, I address this distinction head on. I fully accept that there can be a huge difference between something "seeming wrong to us" (descriptive morality) and "really being wrong" (prescriptive morality) just as something can "seem blue to us" (cause a particular subjective experience when we look at it) but really be yellow and blue (emit particular frequencies of light).

Do you think understanding color vision allowed us to "magically get" that "really being blue" was about emitting particular frequencies of light with specific energy levels per emitted particle?

If you think we fully understand prescriptive morality, then please explain it to me. What does it mean for something to "really be wrong"? What does it mean to say a person "ought to do" something?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

It is entirely falsifiable. For example, if moral judgments appeared completely random and people didn't ever agree on them to better than chance, that would falsify my theory.

We already know that people's moral ideas are non-random, and that most fellow members of your society broadly agree with your moral ideas.

However your thesis is that there is a true, objective morality and that people's moral ideas tap into that. What falsifiable predictions does this lead to? What allows us to decide whether your theory is true, or whether the more mainstream theory that moral ideas are just evolved heuristics for behaviour with absolutely no connection of any kind whatsoever to any true, objective morality is true?

Quite the reverse, I address this distinction head on. I fully accept that there can be a huge difference between something "seeming wrong to us" (descriptive morality) and "really being wrong" (prescriptive morality) just as something can "seem blue to us" (cause a particular subjective experience when we look at it) but really be yellow and blue (emit particular frequencies of light).

But your proposed method to get to "what's really moral" is just to do more descriptive morality until magically you get to the one true prescriptive morality. It can't work that way.

If you think we fully understand prescriptive morality, then please explain it to me.

I can tell you what prescriptive moral ideas are: they're claims to the effect that people should behave in certain ways. They are purely value judgments, and they have no truth value. Science cannot prove them to be correct or incorrect because they are just the wrong kind of thing for science to engage with.

You seem to think that there can be such a thing as a true prescriptive morality (there can't be) and that you can discover it by doing descriptive moral research (you can't).

 

[fls]

Or of correctly understanding their meaning when they contradict themselves.

Hence the need for some way to break symmetry. I hope that you don't mind that your failure to characterize my position does this for me.

This isn't anything new. In that speech he specifically cops out of defending his claims about the is/ought distinction with some bluster about it being boring and him not needing to bother with it.

That's not the part where he addresses whether the is/ought distinction is relevant.

Oh well. In your copious free time read it again and you might get it.

Well, it looks as though you are criticizing the idea that thinking outside the box is necessarily valuable. This would be relevant if you thought that I was making this claim. But since I did not, why bring it up?

Trying to position yourself as someone "stimulating critical thinking" at this stage is a bit optimistic, isn't it?

Most definitely.

I apologize. I realize that by making this query in a response to you, it gives the decided impression that I expected to stimulate this sort of inquiry in you. That was not my intention.

Since your position's already been demolished by astute critical thinking and a modicum of actual knowledge of philosophy, I don't think lack of critical thinking on this end is anything you have to worry your head about.

I think at this stage rather than pretending to try to "stimulate critical thinking" you should be trying to stimulate yourself to post some better argument for your position, or to be a good rationalist and admit that you were just confused all along.

No. As I said before, posers are nothing new on the internet. The easiest and most obvious answer when someone claims postgraduate expertise but wouldn't know the first year content from a hole in the ground is that they are misrepresenting themselves. If they subsequently don't show any more knowledge than before, but retreat and start sniping, then the easy and obvious answer gets further confirmation.

This would all be very much more useful to me had you been able to characterize what I said correctly (where the hell did you get "postgraduate expertise"?) and give the appearance of understanding points that have been made by myself and now by JoelKatz. I wanted to believe you.

Linda

 

[Dragoonster]

I'm also not sure where the idea of force is coming from. Discovering what is good or bad is separate from the idea of forcing people to engage in or refrain from specific behaviors. For example, we can identify that sustained activity for 30 or more minutes per day is good for your health, but this discovery doesn't also impel the suggestion that everyone be forced to exercise. So why bring it up when we are discussing related types of 'good' and 'bad' actions?

Linda

As I recall Sam Harris was in favor of introducing chemical "solutions" to wrong-headedness. This was WAY back in the thread and I can't find the reference quickly.

Since you read it, does he say in his book how his Scientific Morality should be introduced or forced upon people? Should it just be realized as Truth by any random person? He obviously wants to crush Islamic laws in particular. I just wonder how he plans to do so.

Is he advocating a Scientific Crusade? How likely is it that his utterly ridiculous and non-persuasive contentions will sway theists and fundamentalists and etc.? To date it doesn't even seem to sway real philosophers and atheists.

Sam Harris is on an island of his own illogical making, and in the island drawing/inducing normally intelligent and skeptical people to believing nonsense.

 

[fls]

As I recall Sam Harris was in favor of introducing chemical "solutions" to wrong-headedness. This was WAY back in the thread and I can't find the reference quickly.

Since you read it, does he say in his book how his Scientific Morality should be introduced or forced upon people? Should it just be realized as Truth by any random person? He obviously wants to crush Islamic laws in particular. I just wonder how he plans to do so.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Where are you getting the idea that understanding the properties of behaviors which are perceived as good or bad entails forcing people people to participate in said behaviors?

Linda

 

[Paulhoff]

You can. fls can. Kevin can. Harris can. repeat ad-finitum.

But you knew that.

Since you seem to know that science can't learn what will work and what can't work as morals for humans, but seems to learn how so many other things do, please tell me what does work. The only thing I have ever heard from most people is that morals come from their man in the sky who in the bible shows no morals at all and acts like a child.

Paul

 

[Dragoonster]

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Where are you getting the idea that understanding the properties of behaviors which are perceived as good or bad entails forcing people people to participate in said behaviors?

Linda

Obviously, as I said, from a memory of a reference to Sam Harris advocating a chemical solution to the problem of those who don't adhere to his morals.

Of course I could be wrong and my memory does suck.

Anyway, people already force moral behaviors upon others. Murderers and rapists are jailed, etc. This is the standard social/legal/anthropological punisment for "wrong" behavior. Child rapists are forced to not engage in child rape because they're put into confinement by the government.

Seems to me if Sam Harris is establishing a new scientific morality, he should establish legal punishments for those who oppose or flaunt it. After all, his new Scientific Morality is apparently objective and the Truth of the Universe. If so, it's certainly the very best way to legally judge those who don't abide by it. Much better than current wrong/rights per the Judicial System. Harris' moral quantification is perfect.

But in the real world, if he or you decide to make the Scientific Morality the law of the land, just what force/persuasion do you reckon you'll have?

This isn't a side issue: Current state morals and laws have been built on millenia of legal and philosophical thought, and attending to particular regions. If Sam Harris has a revolutionary new moral philosophy here, he needs to either a) easily convince everyone in the world, because it's so obviously true, or b) force his moral philosophy on others using whatever forces he has at command.