Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions
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The logical slip is a subtle one. The ‘ought’-question to answer is not whether the rooms ought to be painted yellow, it’s whether students ought to be happy. Sure, if you know that what you want are happy students or a flourishing human society, morality becomes a problem that is easily accessible to the tools of empiricism or science. But that first step is a problem.
I don’t, however, think it’s a big problem. Humans are remarkably similar – most of us want the same things: flourishing societies and rather more happiness than suffering. And that’s pretty much all it takes to lay your foundation. After that it’s all smooth sailing with the tools of science. Sure, there are edge cases (abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so on) but to claim that religion has any kind of edge in answering those cases is completely ridiculous.
Unfortunately, the speaker misses the fact that science alone gives no basis for morality.
Only one way to find out!
Mirror neurons is what allow us to put ourselves in others place, thus feeling empathy with them. This and this alone is the basis for the possibility of some sort of social dynamics.
I have people in my life I love and don't want anything to happen to so I can recognize that there are other people who feel the same about some they care about.
I am therefore willing to make a deal with these other people that we don't hurt those who other people love and they don't hurt who we love.
It's really that simply but of course the emergent complexity of this is much bigger.
...and an emergent system that can encode ideas in persistent forms cannot be decoupled from its history. you are pretty much going to have some kind of activity close to religion. if you listen to the talk, where he's arguing for universal truths, and domain experts in morality, it's surprising just how close he is to arguing for a rather traditional religious approach...
From what I know of Harris having followed quite a few of his debates his point simply is that to the extent that you can talk about right or wrong moral systems, science actually allow you to back up your claims.
This is in grave contrast to the moral systems that base their logic on premises that have no merit at all.
I would much rather live in a society where moral claims can be accessed and debated than in one where it can't.
Not to because I believe that science leads us to a more correct version of morals but because it's accessible to everyone.
Religious moral systems aren't hindering bad moral behavior, people are. So studying people would in my mind give us a much better basis to discuss morals than consulting 2000+ year old books.
What we value is a matter of fact, it is complex and not directly clear to us, so it's exactly the kind of problem we need science to help with.
His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering” and his scientific twist on this is that technology such as neuroscience can objectively gauge suffering for us.
The problem with his theory is that it’s simplistic and is in fact the moral philosophy that’s usually debunked on day one of a good Ethics class. Generally the counter argument is something like this…
Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?
Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. Bottom line: Sam Harris treats secular morality as if it’s some kind of new concept and it just isn’t. People have been studying it since at least 400 B.C. (namely Aristotle) and anyone talking about a topic while ignoring 2,410 years of previous thought towards that topic is nothing more than a fool.
I don't think moral discussion should focus on unpleasant edge cases. More interesting and useful is how to handle more common situations.
for example, it's common to ask whether someone would divert a train onto another line, knowing it would kill someone, to save some larger number of people. that's interesting because two heuristics we use in common cases are (i) avoid doing something that would harm another and (ii) minimise the amount of suffering.
in that case it's not that anyone thinks it's particularly useful to discuss trains because trains are such fascinating things in themselves. instead, it's an interesting case precisely because it shows how starting from two common rules can give contradicting answers.
The issue is that these problems are never "real world" and so are irrelevant to any actual discussion. Contradictions are, clearly, problematic - but only if we are going to face them. Until then they are just interesting diversions (pretty much like all of capital-E Ethics)
I'm not sure there is a real world problem that is completely morally insoluble.
I believe this is the key message that Sam Harris wanted to deliver is that technology will significantly swing the power of scientific methods in relevant moral debates.
I also find it quite ironic that you speak of echo chambers. This is exactly how I see Ethics.
Ethics is interpretation of phenomena it's not something that exist "out there" it's not something you can study as anything but history IMHO.
It's not in a one to one relationship with what is "really" going on. Just as Love, Hate and so many other human constructs.
1) I spent several hundred hours chasing down some topic I like, such as ethics, philosophy of science, global warming, The Crusades, whatever
2) Joe Blow the famous internet guy gets a bug stuck in his butt about the same topic -- perhaps he saw it on Oprah or read it on a discarded cocktail napkin. Who knows.
3) Joe does a TED talk, writes a blog, or some other way tells us his deep thoughts, most of which sound like a spin-off of The Matrix. Very cool. Very shallow. And without any historical context.
Everybody oohs and ahs and talks about how cool Joe is.
I'm not saying that has happened here. I'm not saying that I have some kind of deep insight. God knows I'm Joe to some other schmuck. All I'm saying is that reading blogs or watching videos in which people say trivial things while others applaud is getting a bit tiring. I love everybody participating in a debate! But I wish there was some way to rank the content of the material so I wouldn't have to go over elementary material -- many times arguing with people who don't know better. Talk about a waste of time for everybody.
Some kind of difficulty-rating system for internet material would be really cool. Save us all a lot of time on mis-matched conversations.
But that's beside the point, because I don't think you have to have degrees or write books to have valid opinions on topics. Some of the most insightful people I know have no formal education at all and I gain a lot by listening to them. Some are overconfident and lacking in topical knowledge, but if that is the case, then I still don't attack that person (sometimes I do if they attack others -- or me, I'm still learning how to communicate effectively). I just talk to them and try to get their opinions. In a debate like this, opinion is, for now, just about the best we can expect to share no matter how educated you are or how many books you've read -- there are no clear answers -- only choices.
I know my opinions of morality really differ quite a lot from most -- that doesn't make me wrong and it doesn't make them wrong. Moral relativism is the first the we should accept before engaging in a debate about morals or ethics.
I wish really, we'd address the arguments rather than resort to ad hominem, which in this case definitely isn't valid. Many would consider him to be an expert on the topic of modern secular morality.
I highly doubt he hasn't read the famous philosophical discourse on the topic of morality. Your implication that you need to go over elementary material with someone as well versed in it as Sam Harris is quite funny really. IMO, you're Joe right now. No offense.
(Although I continue to make the observation that if by some miraculous means Sam were Joe to me, we would be having the same conversation. Hence the frustration in the GP)
I doubt that any average Joe Blow would be invited to give a TED talk, so it's weird to compare it with a blog post, which anybody can upload. If you look at the list of people invited to TED, they are usually fairly prominent people in their fields.
Examples I enjoy:
University material:
MIT: http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
Standford: http://www.youtube.com/user/StanfordUniversity
UCLA: http://www.youtube.com/user/UCLACourses
Techtalks:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleTechTalks
http://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives.html
General interest (beyond TED):
http://www.youtube.com/user/iGNiTe
http://www.youtube.com/user/igniteboulder
http://www.youtube.com/user/ignitenight
There is definitely an abundance of introductory material on the internet, but more importantly, there is an abundance of topics people have never encountered and ooh/aah over decent introductions to. Just assume everything you find accidentally is introductory.
However, as the niches get filled out, in-depth articles and commentaries may start emerging. At that point, a difficulty ranking system will have to emerge, and the associated conversation will fall naturally in the same difficulty category. A more relevant problem, imho, would be connecting the more demanding material to the introductory stuff without subjecting people to discouraging information deluge, draining directory shoveling, or a shallowing wikipedia scatter effect.
The purpose of Harris's speech is to argue, against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain, that there are ethical and moral truths to be found even if we cannot yet discern them. In response you mount a straw-man argument against a coarse implementation of utilitarian ethics, but this doesn't even relate to Harris's point.
To answer: yes, it would be a bad idea to kill all children found torturing small animals. Why? Because, as human beings, we would suffer greatly in such a society (to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling, and children don't flourish into healthy adults in a society where their murder is considered acceptable), even if a naive implementation of utilitarian ethics incorrectly indicates that such an approach leads to the greatest overall happiness. That this is a fact subject to evidence, rather than a simple matter of opinion, is Harris's point here.
The basic question of ethics is this: can we persuade reasonable fascists that they're wrong, or must we keep nuking them from orbit?
I should have been more clear about this. In my previous post, I'm supposing that killing the children would be the wrong thing to do, as I strongly believe our current understanding of human psychology and sociology indicates. But I could be wrong, and whether I'm right or wrong about this moral decision is not a matter of opinion, but is fundamentally a scientific question. This, as I understand it, is Harris's point.
Ok, so now all he owes us is an explanation of how to do that.
It's very odd to think of this as a "postmodern" point of view. Aristotle would be a postmodernist under this conception.
>to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling
It's not wrong because we find it unsettling -- we find it unsettling because it's wrong. This is the problem with Harris's program of research: it gets the cart before the horse. Facts about morality don't reduce to facts about how we feel or what we believe. (In the philosophical literature, this position goes by the name of "emotivism", and it's been pretty conclusively refuted over the centuries.)
Studying the psychology of moral judgments can't tell us what's really right and wrong, any more than studying the workings of the visual cortex can tell us what kind of objects really exist in the world. Human perceptual faculties are imperfect, and our moral perceptions and judgments are no exception.
You're wrong. In that case you'd have to say that "it's wrong because it's wrong". We perceive murdering a child as horrifying/immoral/wrong because caring for the young is something that was useful for human evolution. For other species of animals this is not a useful strategy an they wil eat/abandon their offspring for the benefit of the rest, in that case would you find it to be immoral behaviour?
No, that doesn't follow. I could say, for example, "it's wrong because the categorical imperative prohibits it."
It's true that you must eventually come down to some moral assumption or principle which isn't independently justified, but that is the same for everyone in any field of inquiry.
>We perceive murdering a child as horrifying/immoral/wrong because caring for the young is something that was useful for human evolution.
Similarly, you can say that I perceive a desk in front of me because perceiving mid-sized objects in the immediate vicinity confered an evolutionary advantage on my ancestors. But you can also say that I perceive a desk in front of me because there is a desk in front of me. That is the causal account that's relevant to epistemological concerns, and the same goes in the case of moral judgments.
>For other species of animals this is not a useful strategy an they wil eat/abandon their offspring for the benefit of the rest, in that case would you find it to be immoral behaviour?
Most animals don't have a sufficient capacity for reflective thought for questions of morality to arise at all. But for very intelligent animals (e.g. dolphins, elephants, chimps), I think questions about whether their behavior is moral or not genuinely do arise. Certainly, these questions would arise in quite a pointed fashion if e.g. a hyper-intelligent alien species enslaved us. It's clearly not enough to say "they evolved to behave like that so it must be moral." I don't know what to say about these cases, really, but the issue doesn't seem as straightforward as you make out.
So, great, you're the Ethics (capital E!) genius of Hacker News. I still thought it was a great talk though. But what do I know.
I think your condescension is misdirected.
This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
The problem with this scenario is that it vastly oversimplifies utilitarianism, presuming that only deaths matter and that a utilitarian model of ethics would demand the death of the child; an emotionally repugnant act.
In fact, the quantifiable harm from society intentionally killing a child due to its potential risk could be far greater than the eventual potential deaths from letting that child survive. It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
Eh? He was just bringing up one of the standard counterexamples to the kind of simplistic utilitarianism that Harris is advocating. I don't know what the "your idea kills children argument" is, but he certainly wasn't making any such argument.
>It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
That's the rub. It doesn't require any of those fancy methods to know that it would be wrong to kill the child. Hence the implausibility of full-on utilitarianism as a reasonable moral philosophy.
(Of course, one can reject full-on utilitarianism without denying that the consequences of our actions for human happiness play a very big role in determining whether they're right or wrong.)
You've got it flat-out wrong.
Suffering is one value where he's pretty sure he's got the right factual answer, and some good answers on achieving the value, so he used it as an example.
He DID say that all human values he's seen boil down to being about conscious experience, but that's also a factual claim. There could be values outside of that.
I would certainly not call Sam Sam Harris an amateur and I would place a large bet on his close familiarity with Aquinas, Kant as well as Bentham or Singer with whom he is in agreement from his degrees in philosophy, his constant debates on the subject and his professional life as a writer and lecturer on the subject.
He is a proponent of treating questions of a moral, religious or transcendental nature as scientific questions to be approached via reason. He is a neuroscientist.
* I'm think Thomas Aquinas was a saint, not a knight.
First, Harris has a degree in philosophy, so he has had your "Ethics class";
Second, you sound exactly like those religious nutjobs that attacked Dawkins for "The God Delusion" because he didn't know theology.
Third, "Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings." is almost certainly a bogus claim reasoning from that we know most psychos started by tormenting animals to the unjustified claim that most who torment animals go on to harm humans. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name on the fallacy right now.
How they work can perfectly well be explained by science if we are too look at it from a social dynamic point of view with mirror neurons at the center. Which also will explain why some people don't have empathy.
Science can obviously not explain WHY something is right or wrong but there is absolutely nothing that indicates that this can or should be answered. As long as the mechanics work.
Sam did a very good job of demonstrating that it would be really good if we could get morality from science. He did a good job of pointing out that science can validly inform our decision making. However he misses the fact that science is about problems that are tractable, not important. And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has.
In essence it is the same mistake the social sciences make. The case that something is important, and that data is a useful thing to have in studying it, does not suffice to make a compelling case that we are on the right line of research.
See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h... for a more detailed explanation of my opinions about what is and is not science.
That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.
It's immoral to live in a non-error-correcting way because doing so dooms you to repeat your mistakes (whatever they may be) indefinitely.
And you need to be of a certain culture to understand the "error-correcting" part.
is a constructive question that leads to things like the scientific method, and to the use of criticism in discussions.
Morality is difficult to explain. I think most people just know what is right and what is wrong. A lot of people look to a higher power (religion or science) to justify the wrong actions they want to take.
Now some people like to point out that evolutionary biology has a lot to say about why we develop the internal moral compasses we do. Morality really does seem to be bred into us. But the problem is that the same evolutionary incentives that breed moral behavior also breed negative characteristics like xenophobia and a willingness to selectively cheat. So evolution explains both what we like and dislike about human behavior, and provides no useful way for us to distinguish them.
On the other hand, with so much ignorance and BS in the world, even in wealthy societies, restating these ideas as often and fluently as possible is a worthwhile endeavor.
Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded.
He is, I think, fairly clear in saying that science does not tell us what specifically is morally "good" or "bad," but rather that science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness. I'm sure most everyone here will agree that this is not an outrageous claim. Since moral questions usually deal with issues of prosperity and happiness, he concludes that we shouldn't be afraid to bring up science in such discussions.
Harris sells us utilitarianism and utilitarianism alone. His views would be much more palatable if he distinguished between the moral theory he is espousing and his argument that science can help us interpret/apply the theory.
I don't think it is particularly well founded for a reason that hasn't been mentioned yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
I believe that deontological ethics - that is, coming to decide right and wrong actions - is superior to consequentialist ethics, which is to judge actions by their expected results.
Many people would disagree with me - a lot of people are consequentialists. But consequentialism usually fails, once you start saying "The ends justify the means" you get into bad places really fast.
Historically speaking, consequentialism has produced lots of problems and not much success.
It's also possible to be consequentialist and still refuse to due certain things on principle, even if it seems like the right thing to do, because you know you are prone to be wrong about that kind of thing.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...
This is a good point, but it appears like the process of attempting to apply consequentialist thinking almost always leads to bad places. Consider, for example, Prohibition or the War on Drugs. These were both really well-intentioned in some ways - they were about having a cleaner, more sober, more healthy society, with less poverty and more prosperity, and less addiction. But the end result is creating an underground drug/alcohol trade, giving rise to organized crime and gangs, and having people now consume less safe homebrewed versions of alcohol and drugs.
I think most if not all well-intentioned consequentialist thinking goes to similar places. There were will always be seductively alluring "Works in theory/destroys the world" type things (separate but equal segregation, communism, prohibition, price controls) - and many of those are in violation of basic deontological ethics of giving people choice, letting them live their lives, and so on. I think the vast majority of drastically bad ideas can be avoided with straightforward, rule based live and let live type ethics, which is what I personally favor after searching around.
"Ends justify the means" has historically always led to bad places - and I think it always will. "Ends justify the means" works in theory, but has consistently historically failed in the real world.
Edit: Just read the Less Wrong article - quite good and I more or less agree with Eliezer there.
ADDED: Thinking about it further, the only people who use deontological ethics any more that I can think of are religious people and Marxists, those who have a transcendental source for their required actions.
And don't even get me started on the Repugnant Conclusion problem...