It's a great talk. Harris brings a lot of horsepower to the topic in just 20 minutes.
Posted by: mrgoodbar | Mar 23, 2010 6:12:43 PM
mrgoodbar, you got the "horse" part right.
This was an astonishing naive lecture.
Mr. Harris, please find a blackboard and write 100 times:
You cannot derive an ought from an is. - David Hume
After that, try to understand why Mr. Hume would say something like that.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 23, 2010 9:51:01 PM
Hopefully, a more helpful comment then what M73 has so generously volunteered.
It seems that Harris spends most of his time arguing against absolute moral relativism, and not for his stated topic of how one could draw a moral system from out of scientific precepts.
The closest he seems to get is saying that we should be looking for a mean, or average, between two poles. That there might be, like food, more than one healthy thing to eat. If this is the case, I fail to see in what way this is scientific, in the modern sense, or novel; considering that this is exactly what Aristotle said, oh, 2000 years ago.
Posted by: Reflect | Mar 23, 2010 10:23:42 PM
Reflect, you're right. Mr. Harris was doing ethics on the pretext of doing meta-ethics.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 23, 2010 11:30:09 PM
Well, I thought this was a little philosophically naive, if only in that he seemed to merely state the reducibility of moral facts to facts about well-being. Obviously, if that were true, morality would be a subset of empirical science. Just as obviously, reducibility is controversial in the extreme. The fact that he failed to flag the extraordinary philosophical difficulties attending that move was particularly unfortunate.
Posted by: Vesuvium | Mar 24, 2010 4:28:32 AM
Not even to mention the fact that, repeatedly, Harris chose to work with very extreme examples. He talked about spectrums, but never did he alight on any point on the spectrum that wasn't the Taliban or fundamental Islamic law. I'm not questioning his choice of religion to work with -- he can work with any religious fundamentalism that he cares to -- but his unwillingness to venture into more grey areas of discussion.
Even if moral facts were reducible to facts about well-being, there would still be normative philosophical questions to answer, e.g. what is well-being, how do we know it when we see it, whose well-being matters, how should each of us act vis a vis each others' well being...
Posted by: Adam | Mar 24, 2010 5:39:01 AM
Adam, the questions you raise are epistemological. They are, in theory at least, answerable. Or, at the very least, you can have a debate over whether they are answerable.
The point Hume is making (when he says you can't derive an "ought" from an "is") has nothing to do with epistemology. It is an unalterable fact of life.
The real question (in the present ethical discussion) is: why should human well-being matter to humans? Point is, there is no "scientific" answer to that question.
Again, and this time with feeling:
you cannot derive an ought from an is!
you cannot derive an ought from an is!
you cannot derive an ought from an is!
Posted by: M73 | Mar 24, 2010 6:14:19 AM
"Even if moral facts were reducible to facts about well-being, there would still be normative philosophical questions to answer, e.g. what is well-being, how do we know it when we see it, whose well-being matters, how should each of us act vis a vis each others' well being..."
Interesting. And while we spend the next thousand years debating these questions, the Scandinavians have gone ahead and built a society based on well-being. Some things are not that hard to understand, at least until philosophers get involved.
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 24, 2010 10:51:23 AM
M73,
Why are you inventing quotes and attributing them to David Hume? Hume never said "you cannot derive an ought from an is".
The issue is a lot more complex than and controversial than you make it out to be:
More generally, simply repeating the supposed dichotomy "is" and "ought" without providing a justification for it is not helpful. Many people these days think that no such dichotomy exists.
My apologies to Nick and to everyone else, for that wrongful quote attribution. I'd always assumed Hume had said that in just so many words.
But in any case, the truth of that terse aphorism still remains.
Indeed, we often have a scientific answer to the question: which of these two things is better? But only if we have first specified to achieve what end. Science by itself cannot come up with the end. "Well being" (or Aristotle's Eudaimonia) has been offered as a candidate. Surely, well-being is sought universally, and therefore requires no further justification?
What if, tomorrow, a new species arose (let us call it the Na'vi) that was superior to the human race in every respect, and whose survival depended on the extermination of the human race? What would happen to the well-being argument in that case? How would Science judge between human and Na'vi well-being? Even assuming science could give us an answer, would we be willing to accept scientific advice, no matter what?
Moral evaluations are irreducibly subjective and anthropocentric in nature. There are no objective, "out there" vantage points from where such evaluations can be made. Well, actually, humans have always asserted the existence of such vantage points (and even murdered each other in the name of those vantage points), but today we deem such beliefs mythical rather than scientific. With mythical thinking, yes, the fact-value dichotomy does disappear.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 24, 2010 12:48:05 PM
M73,
I think I addressed the difference between scientific meand and ends in this post from another thread, if I may quote myself:
"You are confusing science and technology with the broader term, rationality. Of course science can be misused. You can build nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs; one is a rational use, the other is not. Rationality must encompass both means and ends. Divorced from compassionate and humane goals, science could be as bad as religion. In fact, our scientific know how could destroy us if it was misused. This does not make science itself evil. It is a neutral tool".
When you ask "How would Science judge between human and Na'vi well-being?", of course the answer is that it can't. Science is not a belief system, but a non-belief system. Human morality could not be founded on science, but it can be founded on what is rational for humans. If an alien race was hell-bent on destroying us, it would be rational for us to fight them. The "universe" is, of course, completely indifferent to any life forms that may happen to evolve on obscure lumps of rock revolving around obscure stars. While we and other life forms that may exist have consciousness, you can't say that stars or galaxies have consciousness. What other moral standard could we have but the well-being of humans?
Posted by: J.Hawkins | Mar 24, 2010 1:32:21 PM
I think Harris made a good point: we know enough scientifically to make claims about moral claims -if that morality is ultimately about "well-being," which seems obvious, nobody chooses a belief system in which they don't ultimately win somehow.
Is wearing a huge bedsheet conducive to women's well being? We can use science to inform a large part of that decision.
Posted by: chris | Mar 24, 2010 4:00:06 PM
J Hawkins, by shifting the onus of morality from "Science" to "rationality" you're merely deferring the problem, not solving it. You still need to show that rationality will give us some objective means of knowing what's right. Objective is the operative word here.
To use your own formulation, "If an alien race was hell-bent on destroying us, it would be rational for us to fight them." Well then, is it not also perfectly rational for the alien race to destroy us (if their survival depended on it)? Clearly, rationality - that objective touchstone of truth - is in this case supporting two contradictory ends - and it is again up to us, humans, to choose which end we should pursue (Btw, you can be sure that there will be many humans - like myself - who will choose Na'vi survival :-). You can try to solve this problem by separating human rationality from alien rationality. In which case, rationality degenerates to mere expediency. Now, I have no problem with expediency forming the basis of our ethics. That's the kind of thing ethical systems like Utilitarianism are based on.
But then, let's not confuse human expediency with objective, "out there" truths. That's precisely the kind of error that religious ethics are founded on.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 24, 2010 10:07:45 PM
Sam's absolutely spot-on, of course, it's just that you're just not supposed to say these things in polite company.
Name me a culture, WITH gender balance, where women freely choose to hide themselves behind heavy hessian hellholes in searing summer temperatures... Where was that again..?
These supposed "quotes" from Islamic women extolling the virtues of their get-up as as sign of their commitment to Allah simply smack of Stockholm syndrome. Where are the Western feminists shouting at the doors of this violent patriarchal backwater in the name of their oppressed sisters in the desert? Oh that's right, either intimidated into silence or off somehwere wallowing in cultural relativism.
Posted by: MattInOz | Mar 25, 2010 6:31:08 AM
MattinOz, very good to see you here. Re: women in chadri, you raise a very good point about how far Western feminists should take their sisterhood. It's a disquieting subject, to say the least. There are many ways for feminists in the West to empower and encourage the rights of women living in oppression, illiteracy, and innumeracy. But urging them to "leave the veil at home" is asking them to lay themselves open to attack and reprisals. The physical safety of these women is important to Western sisters -- their lives and the lives of their daughters are precious, their right to autonomy and decision-making is precious. Besides, freedom is not something Western sisters can confer on women elsewhere who struggle with oppression. Freedom is something they must take for themselves, when they know how.
This is not cultural relativism. It's a recognition that absolute gender parity has not yet been achieved anywhere on earth, so the struggle for that is far from over in the West. We recognize that it takes a very long time. There are limits to the effectiveness of our passionate hopes for sisters far away. There are fewer limits to what can be achieved if these sisters cherish passionate hopes for themselves. As many of them do.
I agree with you. I should have said that morality is based on human expediency, and that that expediency is the most rational goal for us. If utilitarianism is that which promotes the greatest well-being for the greatest number of people, then I am proud to be a utilitarian. Isn't that, at least in theory, the goal of democracy - the greatest good for the majority of ordinary people? (Not that any country is a real democracy).
Of course, it would also be rational for an alien race to pursue their own expedient interests. I think it highly unlikely that those interests would include designs on our small planet, however. It's a big universe. By the way, when I say that the well being of humans is a basis for morality (and, in fact, the only possible basis that I can see), this does not imply disregard for other species. We obviously need a healthy planet Earth if we are to enjoy life as humans. Morality, based on human expediency requires us to be caretakers of the planet and its life. We need to do a much better job at this. On the other hand, if an asteroid threatened all life on Earth, there is no other species that would stand a chance of saving Earth by diverting it in space. We could be Earth's heroes instead of the customary villains.
Such an outcome would benefit all living things on Earth even though based on our own interests.
In short, "what's right" is, for us, simply whatever is conducive to human life. Our summum bonum is to survive and continue to develop our mental abilities. What contributes to that is good, what detracts from that is bad. There is no need or justification for invoking supernatural deities.
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 25, 2010 10:54:51 AM
If we're taking it as given that "human well-being" is the bedrock value of moral reasoning, how would science help to make decisions when there is a conflict between freedom of choice and human well-being? It seems to me promoting human well-being might well come down on the side of paternalism more than many of us would be comfortable with. I don't particularly want to make a hypothetical case for paternalism, but I think it's fairly obvious that human beings are prone to self-destructive activities. How does "promoting human well-being" reconcile with the freedom to choose self-destructive activities?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 25, 2010 12:25:54 PM
@J. Hawkins: Good to know we're in broad agreement now. I too would like to have an ethics that is secular, but at the same time undeluded about the human/subjective origins of it's first principles.
@Vicki Baker: The objection you raise can be answered by an ethical system that includes, within its definition of well-being, the kinds of freedoms you're talking about. After all, the most highly secular and rational countries permit euthanasia and masochism because they want to promote the well-being of all their citizens.
How about raising the stakes and asking: What if I wanted to be destructive towards others? How about if I wanted to commit genocide for recreational purposes? Is the rightness or the wrongness of my desire an objective fact? It plainly isn't, if, as any student of Science, you assume that the laws of the Universe are indifferent to such issues.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 25, 2010 1:43:00 PM
M73,
I think we agree as well. And certainly, human freedom, even the freedom to be self-destructive, is a necessary part of any good society. After all, there are many recovered drug addicts or people who have attempted suicide who have gone on to happier lives. The goal is not utopia, but a compassionate and humane society.
As far as being destructive toward others, this is clearly wrong by the standards of utilitarian morality. Anyone guilty of murder or of other anti-social acts that harm others must be prevented from doing so. But the individual murderer is rare compared to the politicians or other leaders who lead us into mass murder in wars. These do far more harm and a good society would do everything to prevent war mongering, especially at the level of educating children as to the true nature of war.
While murder is clearly wrong by human moral standards, it is not wrong by "laws of the universe" simply because there are no moral laws of the universe. We exist as animals on a small rock orbiting an average star in a suburban arm of an ordinary spiral galaxy.
Life is simply a side effect. The stars are the main attraction. But we get to look at them.
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 25, 2010 2:26:29 PM
OK, instead of comparing Sweden with Afghanistan, let's compare Singapore with San Francisco. How would science tell us which culture had the right balance between autonomy and control?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 25, 2010 3:07:19 PM
The utilitarian argument is compelling because it seems to clear away so much metaphysical brush in one stroke. But utilitarian thinking is terrible at distinguishing the good from the normative. What we want and what we ought to want are not always the same. What we know and what we ought to know are not always the same.
If Harris is not willing to say that his values (which are normative for someone of his place and time, but by no means universal) are not ideological, that's his choice. But to let moral reasoning emerge unquestioned from the set of factual questions we have already asked (owing to metaphysical presumptions that we are now pretending never pertained) seems to me about as morally autonomous as asking advice from the Oracle at Delphi or the Dodonian Oak.
@Chris Schoen: I don't think the analogy holds between knowing and wanting. "What we ought to want" is essentially "what we want" with gratification deferred - or sometimes eliminated. It is not a whole other kind of thing.
In positing something like "the good" (outside of human utility) are you not also promoting some kind of metaphysical thinking?
I agree, there are problems with utilitarianism. It could lead to practices which (in our epoch at least) seem morally rephresensible - like euthanasia for mentally/physically infirm infants and for anybody else who is construed to be "a burden on society." Also, it is considerably more difficult to make a case for animal rights within a purely utilitarian ethics. Perhaps we can appeal to consistency and reciprocity (do unto others as you will have them do unto you) and achieve "the good" you're talking about. But even there, we will have to explain to ourselves the utility of values like consistency. These remain problems to be solved - but I think we're better off solving them in a hard-headed way, rather than by resorting to transcendental signifiers like "the good."
Posted by: M73 | Mar 26, 2010 1:31:36 AM
"OK, instead of comparing Sweden with Afghanistan, let's compare Singapore with San Francisco. How would science tell us which culture had the right balance between autonomy and control?"
Nobel Prize winners possibly?
Singapore has none.
Berkeley has a parking lot for their winners.
I know, its across the Bay, but comparing the two regions is embarrassing.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 26, 2010 9:50:00 AM
Dave, what about your native Marin? It's on a par with Singapore in terms of Nobel Prize winners. Is it something in the bongwater?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 26, 2010 12:04:59 PM
Are you not also promoting some kind of metaphysical thinking?
Unabashedly.
But "hard-headedness" promotes a kind of metaphysics too, even if it does it less consciously. Didn't you say above that
I too would like to have an ethics that is ... undeluded about the human/subjective origins of it's first principles.
That's metaphysics.
"The good" is just a name for what is good; I'm not proposing there is a Platonic Goodness independent of us. (Though maybe...)
"What we ought to want" is essentially "what we want" with gratification deferred - or sometimes eliminated. It is not a whole other kind of thing.
This presents an awfully high threshold for what "a whole other kind of thing" would be. Delayed or eliminated gratifications are the things civilizations are built on. I'm not suggesting all moral choices are about sublimation, since that would demote the role of asking the moral question in the first place, which is itself a choice. The point is that there are conflicts between competing wants and needs. Utilitarianism pretends to solve the problem by invoking a pre-loaded notion of goodness, and then asking the question of how it is best distributed. But it is the goodness--whether consequential or deontological--that we were interested in all along, and utilitarianism bypasses this investigation. Afghanistan and Sweden, Singapore and Berkeley, all have a different conception of what the greatest good for the greatest number of people (or sentient creatures) is, involving different admixtures of individuality and collectivism/ecology, freedom and security, material and spiritual wealth. They all have their dark sides. It's not moral relativism to say so, as long as this doesn't paralyze us against making a positive judgement one way or the other.
Harris remarks:
Just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish will change the way we talk about morality.
He means right and wrong in the sense of true and false, of course. Perhaps he's correct to say so, but if so, this presents an ironic affront to the liberal value of critically examining what it means to flourish in the first place. In defending liberal modernism he has to advocate its destruction. That's the point I was getting at with my mention of oracles.
"Dave, what about your native Marin? It's on a par with Singapore in terms of Nobel Prize winners."
But Marin has half the population of Huntington Beach, while Singapore has over three million people, or should I say obedient corporate associates.
We are busy making movies, hiking in the Redwoods and soaking in our hot tubes (is that enough stereotypes?) to be concerned about Nobel Prizes, as they are more proletarian in nature.
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Comments
It's a great talk. Harris brings a lot of horsepower to the topic in just 20 minutes.
Posted by: mrgoodbar | Mar 23, 2010 6:12:43 PM
mrgoodbar, you got the "horse" part right.
This was an astonishing naive lecture.
Mr. Harris, please find a blackboard and write 100 times:
After that, try to understand why Mr. Hume would say something like that.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 23, 2010 9:51:01 PM
Hopefully, a more helpful comment then what M73 has so generously volunteered.
It seems that Harris spends most of his time arguing against absolute moral relativism, and not for his stated topic of how one could draw a moral system from out of scientific precepts.
The closest he seems to get is saying that we should be looking for a mean, or average, between two poles. That there might be, like food, more than one healthy thing to eat. If this is the case, I fail to see in what way this is scientific, in the modern sense, or novel; considering that this is exactly what Aristotle said, oh, 2000 years ago.
Posted by: Reflect | Mar 23, 2010 10:23:42 PM
Reflect, you're right. Mr. Harris was doing ethics on the pretext of doing meta-ethics.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 23, 2010 11:30:09 PM
Well, I thought this was a little philosophically naive, if only in that he seemed to merely state the reducibility of moral facts to facts about well-being. Obviously, if that were true, morality would be a subset of empirical science. Just as obviously, reducibility is controversial in the extreme. The fact that he failed to flag the extraordinary philosophical difficulties attending that move was particularly unfortunate.
Posted by: Vesuvium | Mar 24, 2010 4:28:32 AM
Not even to mention the fact that, repeatedly, Harris chose to work with very extreme examples. He talked about spectrums, but never did he alight on any point on the spectrum that wasn't the Taliban or fundamental Islamic law. I'm not questioning his choice of religion to work with -- he can work with any religious fundamentalism that he cares to -- but his unwillingness to venture into more grey areas of discussion.
Posted by: Samanth | Mar 24, 2010 4:34:45 AM
Even if moral facts were reducible to facts about well-being, there would still be normative philosophical questions to answer, e.g. what is well-being, how do we know it when we see it, whose well-being matters, how should each of us act vis a vis each others' well being...
Posted by: Adam | Mar 24, 2010 5:39:01 AM
Adam, the questions you raise are epistemological. They are, in theory at least, answerable. Or, at the very least, you can have a debate over whether they are answerable.
The point Hume is making (when he says you can't derive an "ought" from an "is") has nothing to do with epistemology. It is an unalterable fact of life.
The real question (in the present ethical discussion) is: why should human well-being matter to humans? Point is, there is no "scientific" answer to that question.
Again, and this time with feeling:
you cannot derive an ought from an is!
you cannot derive an ought from an is!
you cannot derive an ought from an is!
Posted by: M73 | Mar 24, 2010 6:14:19 AM
"Even if moral facts were reducible to facts about well-being, there would still be normative philosophical questions to answer, e.g. what is well-being, how do we know it when we see it, whose well-being matters, how should each of us act vis a vis each others' well being..."
Interesting. And while we spend the next thousand years debating these questions, the Scandinavians have gone ahead and built a society based on well-being. Some things are not that hard to understand, at least until philosophers get involved.
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 24, 2010 10:51:23 AM
M73,
Why are you inventing quotes and attributing them to David Hume? Hume never said "you cannot derive an ought from an is".
The issue is a lot more complex than and controversial than you make it out to be:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io
More generally, simply repeating the supposed dichotomy "is" and "ought" without providing a justification for it is not helpful. Many people these days think that no such dichotomy exists.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Mar 24, 2010 11:44:12 AM
My apologies to Nick and to everyone else, for that wrongful quote attribution. I'd always assumed Hume had said that in just so many words.
But in any case, the truth of that terse aphorism still remains.
Indeed, we often have a scientific answer to the question: which of these two things is better? But only if we have first specified to achieve what end. Science by itself cannot come up with the end. "Well being" (or Aristotle's Eudaimonia) has been offered as a candidate. Surely, well-being is sought universally, and therefore requires no further justification?
What if, tomorrow, a new species arose (let us call it the Na'vi) that was superior to the human race in every respect, and whose survival depended on the extermination of the human race? What would happen to the well-being argument in that case? How would Science judge between human and Na'vi well-being? Even assuming science could give us an answer, would we be willing to accept scientific advice, no matter what?
Moral evaluations are irreducibly subjective and anthropocentric in nature. There are no objective, "out there" vantage points from where such evaluations can be made. Well, actually, humans have always asserted the existence of such vantage points (and even murdered each other in the name of those vantage points), but today we deem such beliefs mythical rather than scientific. With mythical thinking, yes, the fact-value dichotomy does disappear.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 24, 2010 12:48:05 PM
M73,
I think I addressed the difference between scientific meand and ends in this post from another thread, if I may quote myself:
"You are confusing science and technology with the broader term, rationality. Of course science can be misused. You can build nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs; one is a rational use, the other is not. Rationality must encompass both means and ends. Divorced from compassionate and humane goals, science could be as bad as religion. In fact, our scientific know how could destroy us if it was misused. This does not make science itself evil. It is a neutral tool".
When you ask "How would Science judge between human and Na'vi well-being?", of course the answer is that it can't. Science is not a belief system, but a non-belief system. Human morality could not be founded on science, but it can be founded on what is rational for humans. If an alien race was hell-bent on destroying us, it would be rational for us to fight them. The "universe" is, of course, completely indifferent to any life forms that may happen to evolve on obscure lumps of rock revolving around obscure stars. While we and other life forms that may exist have consciousness, you can't say that stars or galaxies have consciousness. What other moral standard could we have but the well-being of humans?
Posted by: J.Hawkins | Mar 24, 2010 1:32:21 PM
I think Harris made a good point: we know enough scientifically to make claims about moral claims -if that morality is ultimately about "well-being," which seems obvious, nobody chooses a belief system in which they don't ultimately win somehow.
Is wearing a huge bedsheet conducive to women's well being? We can use science to inform a large part of that decision.
Posted by: chris | Mar 24, 2010 4:00:06 PM
J Hawkins, by shifting the onus of morality from "Science" to "rationality" you're merely deferring the problem, not solving it. You still need to show that rationality will give us some objective means of knowing what's right. Objective is the operative word here.
To use your own formulation, "If an alien race was hell-bent on destroying us, it would be rational for us to fight them." Well then, is it not also perfectly rational for the alien race to destroy us (if their survival depended on it)? Clearly, rationality - that objective touchstone of truth - is in this case supporting two contradictory ends - and it is again up to us, humans, to choose which end we should pursue (Btw, you can be sure that there will be many humans - like myself - who will choose Na'vi survival :-). You can try to solve this problem by separating human rationality from alien rationality. In which case, rationality degenerates to mere expediency. Now, I have no problem with expediency forming the basis of our ethics. That's the kind of thing ethical systems like Utilitarianism are based on.
But then, let's not confuse human expediency with objective, "out there" truths. That's precisely the kind of error that religious ethics are founded on.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 24, 2010 10:07:45 PM
Sam's absolutely spot-on, of course, it's just that you're just not supposed to say these things in polite company.
Name me a culture, WITH gender balance, where women freely choose to hide themselves behind heavy hessian hellholes in searing summer temperatures... Where was that again..?
These supposed "quotes" from Islamic women extolling the virtues of their get-up as as sign of their commitment to Allah simply smack of Stockholm syndrome. Where are the Western feminists shouting at the doors of this violent patriarchal backwater in the name of their oppressed sisters in the desert? Oh that's right, either intimidated into silence or off somehwere wallowing in cultural relativism.
Posted by: MattInOz | Mar 25, 2010 6:31:08 AM
MattinOz, very good to see you here. Re: women in chadri, you raise a very good point about how far Western feminists should take their sisterhood. It's a disquieting subject, to say the least. There are many ways for feminists in the West to empower and encourage the rights of women living in oppression, illiteracy, and innumeracy. But urging them to "leave the veil at home" is asking them to lay themselves open to attack and reprisals. The physical safety of these women is important to Western sisters -- their lives and the lives of their daughters are precious, their right to autonomy and decision-making is precious. Besides, freedom is not something Western sisters can confer on women elsewhere who struggle with oppression. Freedom is something they must take for themselves, when they know how.
This is not cultural relativism. It's a recognition that absolute gender parity has not yet been achieved anywhere on earth, so the struggle for that is far from over in the West. We recognize that it takes a very long time. There are limits to the effectiveness of our passionate hopes for sisters far away. There are fewer limits to what can be achieved if these sisters cherish passionate hopes for themselves. As many of them do.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 25, 2010 10:26:20 AM
M73,
I agree with you. I should have said that morality is based on human expediency, and that that expediency is the most rational goal for us. If utilitarianism is that which promotes the greatest well-being for the greatest number of people, then I am proud to be a utilitarian. Isn't that, at least in theory, the goal of democracy - the greatest good for the majority of ordinary people? (Not that any country is a real democracy).
Of course, it would also be rational for an alien race to pursue their own expedient interests. I think it highly unlikely that those interests would include designs on our small planet, however. It's a big universe. By the way, when I say that the well being of humans is a basis for morality (and, in fact, the only possible basis that I can see), this does not imply disregard for other species. We obviously need a healthy planet Earth if we are to enjoy life as humans. Morality, based on human expediency requires us to be caretakers of the planet and its life. We need to do a much better job at this. On the other hand, if an asteroid threatened all life on Earth, there is no other species that would stand a chance of saving Earth by diverting it in space. We could be Earth's heroes instead of the customary villains.
Such an outcome would benefit all living things on Earth even though based on our own interests.
In short, "what's right" is, for us, simply whatever is conducive to human life. Our summum bonum is to survive and continue to develop our mental abilities. What contributes to that is good, what detracts from that is bad. There is no need or justification for invoking supernatural deities.
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 25, 2010 10:54:51 AM
If we're taking it as given that "human well-being" is the bedrock value of moral reasoning, how would science help to make decisions when there is a conflict between freedom of choice and human well-being? It seems to me promoting human well-being might well come down on the side of paternalism more than many of us would be comfortable with. I don't particularly want to make a hypothetical case for paternalism, but I think it's fairly obvious that human beings are prone to self-destructive activities. How does "promoting human well-being" reconcile with the freedom to choose self-destructive activities?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 25, 2010 12:25:54 PM
@J. Hawkins: Good to know we're in broad agreement now. I too would like to have an ethics that is secular, but at the same time undeluded about the human/subjective origins of it's first principles.
@Vicki Baker: The objection you raise can be answered by an ethical system that includes, within its definition of well-being, the kinds of freedoms you're talking about. After all, the most highly secular and rational countries permit euthanasia and masochism because they want to promote the well-being of all their citizens.
How about raising the stakes and asking: What if I wanted to be destructive towards others? How about if I wanted to commit genocide for recreational purposes? Is the rightness or the wrongness of my desire an objective fact? It plainly isn't, if, as any student of Science, you assume that the laws of the Universe are indifferent to such issues.
Posted by: M73 | Mar 25, 2010 1:43:00 PM
M73,
I think we agree as well. And certainly, human freedom, even the freedom to be self-destructive, is a necessary part of any good society. After all, there are many recovered drug addicts or people who have attempted suicide who have gone on to happier lives. The goal is not utopia, but a compassionate and humane society.
As far as being destructive toward others, this is clearly wrong by the standards of utilitarian morality. Anyone guilty of murder or of other anti-social acts that harm others must be prevented from doing so. But the individual murderer is rare compared to the politicians or other leaders who lead us into mass murder in wars. These do far more harm and a good society would do everything to prevent war mongering, especially at the level of educating children as to the true nature of war.
While murder is clearly wrong by human moral standards, it is not wrong by "laws of the universe" simply because there are no moral laws of the universe. We exist as animals on a small rock orbiting an average star in a suburban arm of an ordinary spiral galaxy.
Life is simply a side effect. The stars are the main attraction. But we get to look at them.
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 25, 2010 2:26:29 PM
OK, instead of comparing Sweden with Afghanistan, let's compare Singapore with San Francisco. How would science tell us which culture had the right balance between autonomy and control?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 25, 2010 3:07:19 PM
The utilitarian argument is compelling because it seems to clear away so much metaphysical brush in one stroke. But utilitarian thinking is terrible at distinguishing the good from the normative. What we want and what we ought to want are not always the same. What we know and what we ought to know are not always the same.
If Harris is not willing to say that his values (which are normative for someone of his place and time, but by no means universal) are not ideological, that's his choice. But to let moral reasoning emerge unquestioned from the set of factual questions we have already asked (owing to metaphysical presumptions that we are now pretending never pertained) seems to me about as morally autonomous as asking advice from the Oracle at Delphi or the Dodonian Oak.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Mar 25, 2010 5:35:19 PM
@Chris Schoen: I don't think the analogy holds between knowing and wanting. "What we ought to want" is essentially "what we want" with gratification deferred - or sometimes eliminated. It is not a whole other kind of thing.
In positing something like "the good" (outside of human utility) are you not also promoting some kind of metaphysical thinking?
I agree, there are problems with utilitarianism. It could lead to practices which (in our epoch at least) seem morally rephresensible - like euthanasia for mentally/physically infirm infants and for anybody else who is construed to be "a burden on society." Also, it is considerably more difficult to make a case for animal rights within a purely utilitarian ethics. Perhaps we can appeal to consistency and reciprocity (do unto others as you will have them do unto you) and achieve "the good" you're talking about. But even there, we will have to explain to ourselves the utility of values like consistency. These remain problems to be solved - but I think we're better off solving them in a hard-headed way, rather than by resorting to transcendental signifiers like "the good."
Posted by: M73 | Mar 26, 2010 1:31:36 AM
"OK, instead of comparing Sweden with Afghanistan, let's compare Singapore with San Francisco. How would science tell us which culture had the right balance between autonomy and control?"
Nobel Prize winners possibly?
Singapore has none.
Berkeley has a parking lot for their winners.
I know, its across the Bay, but comparing the two regions is embarrassing.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 26, 2010 9:50:00 AM
Dave, what about your native Marin? It's on a par with Singapore in terms of Nobel Prize winners. Is it something in the bongwater?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 26, 2010 12:04:59 PM
Unabashedly.
But "hard-headedness" promotes a kind of metaphysics too, even if it does it less consciously. Didn't you say above that
That's metaphysics.
"The good" is just a name for what is good; I'm not proposing there is a Platonic Goodness independent of us. (Though maybe...)
This presents an awfully high threshold for what "a whole other kind of thing" would be. Delayed or eliminated gratifications are the things civilizations are built on. I'm not suggesting all moral choices are about sublimation, since that would demote the role of asking the moral question in the first place, which is itself a choice. The point is that there are conflicts between competing wants and needs. Utilitarianism pretends to solve the problem by invoking a pre-loaded notion of goodness, and then asking the question of how it is best distributed. But it is the goodness--whether consequential or deontological--that we were interested in all along, and utilitarianism bypasses this investigation. Afghanistan and Sweden, Singapore and Berkeley, all have a different conception of what the greatest good for the greatest number of people (or sentient creatures) is, involving different admixtures of individuality and collectivism/ecology, freedom and security, material and spiritual wealth. They all have their dark sides. It's not moral relativism to say so, as long as this doesn't paralyze us against making a positive judgement one way or the other.
Harris remarks:
He means right and wrong in the sense of true and false, of course. Perhaps he's correct to say so, but if so, this presents an ironic affront to the liberal value of critically examining what it means to flourish in the first place. In defending liberal modernism he has to advocate its destruction. That's the point I was getting at with my mention of oracles.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Mar 26, 2010 1:27:11 PM
"Dave, what about your native Marin? It's on a par with Singapore in terms of Nobel Prize winners."
But Marin has half the population of Huntington Beach, while Singapore has over three million people, or should I say obedient corporate associates.
We are busy making movies, hiking in the Redwoods and soaking in our hot tubes (is that enough stereotypes?) to be concerned about Nobel Prizes, as they are more proletarian in nature.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 27, 2010 8:51:29 AM
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