On a whim I downloaded The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris this evening. There’s an interview at the link which gives a sense of what he’s arguing. Harris argues that “ethics is an undeveloped branch of science” and that sciences such as neurology and various social sciences can reveal genuine and objective moral truths. In this respect, Harris is a descendent of thinkers such as Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Deleuze, and many others besides. For him ethics appears to be about living well (and notably he doesn’t restrict this to humans, but to all conscious beings). His thesis seems to be that through neurology and various social sciences we can discover objective facts about forms of practice conducive to these aims and those that tend to undermine these aims. I doubt this will end well, but I’m left wondering how or why he’s wrong. Why is this untrue? We’re all familiar with the normative fallacy and the is/ought fallacy, yet are these genuinely fallacies? Why would it be false to argue that facts about the nature of our being entail truths about how we should live our lives?
January 26, 2011
January 26, 2011 at 5:30 am
BBB world news international, which airs on American radio, interviewed some white British women who have converted to Islam recently — incidentally, about 500 people a month convert to Islam in Britain these days. One of the women said she feels that the clothing restrictions in Islam protect her and free her from the opposite extreme valuations of her own culture. Harris is claiming that draconian clothing restrictions are objectively wrong. He also believes the sex-sells skin-fetishism of Western culture is also objectively morally wrong. These extremes are representative of the polarization of competing cultures.
How does anyone expect to curtail the adverising and pornography industries in America, on grounds that neurology and social sciences prove the moral truth of their negative impact on social psychology and civilized wellness?
Just as in dietary regulations we allow toxic substances to be ingested by multitudes, so too with ethical practices.
Whether or not there are truths about how we should live our lives, more important than an is/ought distinction there is an ought/must distinction.
Men and women will band together to oppose reconfigurations of Muslim dress codes, just as they would in the West if we attempted to implement Harris Laws.
The only way to go about reforming ethical practices based upon neurology and social sciences is through voluntary lures.
The science Harris needs is a science of voluntary lures whose internal organization and external relationships entail views about neurology and social sciences.
***
Just as Reform Judaism doesn’t maintain dress restrictions like Chasidism does, so too with Islam in some countries. Perhaps in the coming decades countries with Wahabbist leadership may convince their populations to accept variations in the ethical practices of restrictive dress. If this is what Harris has in mind, his arguments are connected to arguments for a set of political practices.
As you say, Levi, this may not end well. As of now, the extremes of ethical practices in sectors of Western and Islamic cultures have counterparts in extremes of sociopolitical responses to intrusions into prevalent ethical order. Where the ethical truths established by neurology and social sciences meet sociopolitical practices of social change, a variety of chain reactions are in store.
Good luck, Uncle Sam!
January 26, 2011 at 6:01 am
Cameron,
I don’t think we need to accept the specifics of Harris’s proposals to accept the thesis that there is a relationship between our actions, psychological states, states of the world, and well-being. Whether or not his claims about well-being are true is contestable. That’s part of the point. Additionally the claim that it seems difficult to persuade people to do x strikes me as irrelevant. There are all sorts of things that are physically bad to eat yet people still eat them. This doesn’t change the fact that they’re physically bad to eat.
January 26, 2011 at 11:47 am
Harris’ work would be much more convincing if only he’d bothered to read any contemporary work in ethics.
Since he relies upon utilitarian conceptions of morality, it would have been professional for him to attempt to respond to the criticisms, not exactly new (e.g. Rawls in the 1970s, to cite only the most famous) that have made the case that a formal system of utilitarianism is a practical impossibility. Without doing this, Harris ends up looking wildly ignorant.
Honestly, the idea that well-being can be reduced to neurobiological facts is so wildly scientistic that I can’t believe that anyone is touting it as a serious philosophical position. Values are constituted at a culture and individual level, and it is these that determine the moral landscape – if one is to treat neurology as the measure of wellbeing, why not plug ourselves into Nozick’s machine? Harris doesn’t want to tackle this point either.
The one thing that Harris seems to draw upon is Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” – but he doesn’t seem to have grappled with any of the dilemmas that Parfit throws up for himself – problems that cause him to conclude, in the end, that his attempt at ethics is a failure. Parfit’s magnum opus is an important work, but it is not a foundation to build upon but a pool of new problems to be addressed. Harris doesn’t even acknowledge these problems. I wonder, to be honest, if he actually read Parfit at all.
And apparently Harris comes from a philosophy background? It doesn’t show.
January 26, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Chris,
Neither of your criticisms are accurate. He refers to ethical philosophy throughout the book. Additionally he doesn’t make the claim that ethics can be reduced to neurology. Rather he argues that neurological facts are relevant to our understanding of what well-being might be. I think the book suffers moreso due to it’s strident tone with respect to religion.
January 26, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Interesting, I also downloaded that book a couple weeks back! I think the topic is especially important to SR because the Speculative Turn book was hinting at the difficulties of ‘grounding’ ethics and politics. I also know there were debates on this site about Onticology and the possibility that it entails ethical nihilism (which I disagree with). If ethics can be shown to have an objectively ‘real’ source rather than relying on tiresome metaphysical is/ought debates, we might be able to revolutionize the way we think about ethical debates in a realist fashion. YET I am also on the fence here, because I noticed Harris cites but then dismisses Mackie and Joyce, two moral error theorists who I greatly admire. If morals are indeed defined as transcendental norms/categorical imperatives than Hume was right- objective moral facts couldn’t possibly exist. This seemed like a strange move from Harris, because the moral landscape he describes loses some of its ‘prescriptive’ edge in favor of descriptive norms by his odd omission of the moral error theory arguement. However, I was curious to know the Onticological approach to this issue: would denying moral values conflict with the Principle of Irreduction, or could we assert that moral objects are real, but are ultimately fictional (I think you mentioned the true/false pair not coupling with the being/non-being pair)? I would actually be interested in writing a short book on ethics in relation to SR theories, but if you beat me to it I won’t get too upset. :)
January 27, 2011 at 2:35 am
I am curious: How much does Harris confront Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis? My touchiness about happiness or well-being-based ethical arguments has always focused on the nature of the desires which lead to that well-being and what generates these desires and whether or not we can envision a world in which well-being is not tied to the satisfaction of these particular desires. And then there is the issue of how one rationalizes acts which are done more for the exercise of capricious freedom than for anything–acts which explicitly do harm to our well-being but also (maybe?) enhance it in a way by reminding us that we can go against our own bodily or social health.
January 27, 2011 at 2:55 am
Stanley,
Not at all as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, I would situate Freud/Lacan squarely in the virtue/Epicurean ethical tradition. What they have to say about death drive/desire/unconscious are precisely the sorts of things we need to know in posing questions of eudaimonia. Lacan’s critique of happiness seems to revolve not so much around happiness itself, so much as the really pathetic conception of happiness presented by what he calls “the American way of life”. He thinks that this particular form of “happiness” is a great contributor to the formation of paralyzing symptoms as it involves a betrayal of desire. I think, however, it’s a mistake to throw out the baby with the bathwater and suggest that somehow psychoanalysis is refusing the idea of improving the lives of people. Rather, part of the point is that eudaimonia is impossible if one cedes her desire. Jonathan Lear is excellent on all of this.
January 27, 2011 at 3:53 am
Maybe Glenn Beck could pass Harris his pointer to use when he’s pushing those well-worn Taliban buttons; they must be ground down to nubs by now. “Operation Enduring Freedom” commenced October 7, 2001. Only 40 Long War years to go!
January 27, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Reading through the book again, I am still in agreement with Harris that there are indeed objective criteria for what constitutes human well-being and much of this criteria conflicts with our biological drives, as Harris says evolution has not programmed us for happiness. However, I object (and this is probably where 90% of his critics are coming from) to the use of the term ‘moral’. It is one thing to assert well-being as a goal but it is another to suggest it is a moral imperative. Of course, this is confusing to readers because Harris is redefining morality apart from the Humean problem and apart from imperatives. There are objective criteria for what constitutes healthy food, for instance, but that doesn’t imply we MUST eat apples rather than cheeseburgers.
“Maybe Glenn Beck could pass Harris his pointer to use when he’s pushing those well-worn Taliban buttons”
I think you miss the point. Harris is aiming primarily at so-called moral relativists who, in one example he gives, a woman becomes upset by the treatment of detainees and works as a bioethics advisor to the President, but has no problem accepting the ‘culture’ of the Taliban or other radical Islamic groups. Its moral doublethink that bothers Harris and as a liberal he is shocked by the moral nihilism that makes most liberals conceptually defenseless against the ‘moral majority’.
January 27, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Possibly, Drew, but if it’s moral doublethink that bothers him, I doubt very much he would have agreed to have the book blurbed by the usual suspects. I doubt I’ll read it based on the Amazon excerpt; I’m not that whimsical!
January 30, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Intriguing. I too have affinities with Harris, and despite his off-putting scientism (see his unnecessary rudeness in debate with Deepak Chopra, easy to get), I think he’s onto something. His immediate trouble, interestingly, is not so much humanities (though surely he has his disagreements there) but scientists, actually, sone of whom are loth to take him up. I’m not sure offhand what the reasons are–we could find out?
January 31, 2011 at 10:56 am
I don’t have any general insight into what scientists think, but the negative views I’ve run across in my circles (who are mostly positive on Harris) object to his framing of scientific results using “unscientific” language from normative ethics, instead of the more traditional approach of just presenting scientific results as descriptive, and leaving the ethical implications of the discovered facts, if any, to a separate inquiry.
I haven’t read enough Harris myself to know if that’s a fair criticism. In his talks he sometimes does come across as promoting a very normative view of ethics, while also believing that such norms are objective facts discoverable by science, which is almost exactly the approach criticized as the “naturalistic fallacy”. It’s possible he takes a more eudaimonistic view in his books (it’s also possible that the naturalistic fallacy isn’t actually a fallacy).
January 31, 2011 at 6:26 pm
At Timothy Morton:
“I’m not sure offhand what the reasons are–we could find out?”
Having followed his work, I can say the reasons are primarily political. He identifies as a liberal but unlike his fellow scientists he is an outspoken critic of religion and blasts his fellows for giving in to the “but religion is a positive force in this world/science has nothing to say about values” narrative. To put it nicely, he sees most atheist scientists as cowards before the religious masses. Like fellow athiest Christopher Hitchens, he has a flip-flop view towards the war on terrorism. Unlike Hitchens he never said he supported it, merely that the Bush administration was weak for not calling it a war on Islam and for the left to gloss over the obivous religious dimension of terrorism. He has also bashed Noam Chomsky for being what he perceives as ethically clueless. I would recommend reading The End of Faith to see why some people are upset about him.
At Mark:
“instead of the more traditional approach of just presenting scientific results as descriptive”
I agree, having just finished the book I am on board with Harris’ assertion that the fact/value distinction is an illusion (ie there ARE objective facts about what constitutes human well-being). However, as you said, he confuses people by using terms like morality and ethics as well as ethico-normative language when he even admits in one chapter that he could simply drop the term “morality” altogether in favor of “well-being”. I don’t doubt he did this just to get more people to pay attention to the book. The merit of the book is that he grounds such ideas in scientific facts and considerations apart from the sophistry of theological and philosophical arguements in favor of morality.
As for your assertion that we should leave moral questions to seperate inquiry, I strongly disagree. This is precisely the issue that Harris seeks to overcome, he wants to show how science DOES have something to say about human values and is not merely the domain of cold calculating fact finding that should remain silent on ‘moral’ issues. This is what is refreshing and I would recommend the book to anyone interested in serious conversations about ethics.