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You miss the point entirely, and your "counterexample" is a non-sequitur.

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.

I think you're missing the point. As you say, there are better statements of utilitarianism, that more closely approximate how you feel. Other people feel otherwise. A fascist would reject your argument, and might well kill the children, because fascists think that the welfare of society trumps the suffering of individual humans.

The basic question of ethics is this: can we persuade reasonable fascists that they're wrong, or must we keep nuking them from orbit?

What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

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.

>What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

Ok, so now all he owes us is an explanation of how to do that.

>against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain

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.

>It's not wrong because we find it unsettling -- we find it unsettling because it's wrong

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?

>In that case you'd have to say that "it's wrong because it's wrong".

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.

I've noticed an interesting internet trend over the years.

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.

I don't think Sam Harris is your Joe. He has an undergrad in Philosophy and a PhD in neuroscience. He's also written several books, some of which are quite controversial. He's not as well known as Dawkins or Dennett, but he's not a quack from the internet either.

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.

No offense taken. The comment wasn't about Sam at all. It was responding to the feelings of the parent comment and making an observation. Heck I didn't even RTA.

(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)

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.

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.

If you feel like the material you are finding is too basic for you it probably means you are looking in the wrong places for your knowledge level. At some point there won't be many records available for the things you don't already know and you will have to dig into journals or follow the experts more directly for new material. You could also try to find conference recordings from events that the experts themselves like to attend. That and just avoid places like the Daily Mail like it has the plague.

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://media.ccc.de/

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

http://www.youtube.com/user/ignitesault

http://www.youtube.com/user/plan8ts

I don't think that's as big a problem as you find it, currently. Maybe you just chase down more topics than others.

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.

For someone who has spent the better part of his life studying ethics, I'd expect you to come up with a better example to refute someone who has also spent a great deal of time studying ethics and written books on the subject.

I think your condescension is misdirected.

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?

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.

>This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.

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.)

> Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin.

I don't think moral discussion should focus on unpleasant edge cases. More interesting and useful is how to handle more common situations.

people focus on edge cases because when you start with different common cases and extrapolate them, they contradict each other. the edges cases illustrate the contradictions, but they are firmly rooted in common situations - if they weren't, why bother with them?

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 only thing the contradictions show is that moral is relative and contextual.

If that's true, that would be a pretty strong and interesting conclusion -- I don't see why you'd qualify it with "only".

I never really thought that was a hard question. Of course I'd divert the train.

It's a hard question because there are other people who are equally sure that diverting the train would be the wrong thing to do.

The trouble with all of these questions is simply that they are designed to force a big contradiction - and whatever answer you give the questioner usually has an "aha but....." ready for you.

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.

Well, to do the least harm, you would probably send the kid to therapy, monitor them, or even lock them up, not kill them. The reason it seems so odd to lock up a kid for torturing a small animal is that it's really not that predictive. Not even close. So your example is just really, really terrible.

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.

Three problems with this:

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.

With these examples, you really have to learn to use your imagination and exercise some charity in interpretation. If you personally find the details implausible, it's not difficult to tweak them a bit until they're to your liking. It doesn't contribute anything to the discussion to pick apart incidental details of his example instead of addressing his point.

I am pretty Sure Sam Harris knows his history. I am also pretty sure that it wouldn't be debunked by a good Ethics class.

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.

if ethics is a historical, social construct, then it seems reasonable to me that exploring the current consensus would involve something very like an echo chamber.

current consensus being?

>His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering"

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.

If you asked most people to name 2 or 3 current Professors of Ethics you'd find Peter Singer at the top of your list. I wonder if he can also refute Bentham on day one of a good Ethics class as you can.

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.

I counter your example by proposing that we are headed for a world where my unborn children and grandchildren would be monitored and reevaluated until that confidence level is as small as society will demand, and that treatment responses will not be limited to a simple extinguishing of life. It then becomes acceptable loss.

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.