Sam Harris: Objections Sustained

It’s time for a final look now at Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape, specifically his recent online response to objections (with thanks again to Melissa who pointed it out to us). As I’ve said before, I affirm him for insisting that there are objective moral facts. The question is whether he has found a way to fit them into a naturalistic, scientistic framework.

His continued defense goes wrong in multiple ways. I’ll lift out just a few of them. I’ll begin with his own summary statement:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds – and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).

Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

This is a restatement of his position: that morality is entirely a matter of conscious minds’ well-being, and that it must be susceptible to scientific inquiry. This is the thesis he needs to support. Responding primarily to Russell Blackford, he writes,

Blackford and others worry that any aspect of human subjectivity or culture could fit in the space provided: after all, a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream is a natural phenomenon, as is a preference for the comic Sarah Silverman over Bob Hope. Are we to imagine that there are universal truths about ice cream and comedy that admit of scientific analysis?

Well, in a certain sense, yes. Science could, in principle, account for why some of us prefer chocolate to vanilla, and why no one’s favourite flavour of ice cream is aluminium.

….

These are ultimately questions about the human brain. There will be scientific facts to be known here, and any differences in taste among human beings must be attributable to other facts that fall within the purview of science. If we were ever to arrive at a complete understanding of the human mind, we would understand human preferences of all kinds. Indeed, we might even be able to change them.

Understanding preferences is one thing; showing that one is actually, objectively better than another is something else entirely. He gives up the scientific game from the start by saying “these are ultimately questions about the human brain.” Science simply cannot show that the question ultimately lands there. It could, at best, show what one might conclude if one thought that was the ultimate point of reference. But what if there is something fundamental about being human that is beyond the reach of science? Most of us think so. On what basis could science tell us we’re wrong? It can’t. Science cannot tell us that the world that science can investigate is the only world there is; for if there is anything beyond that world, then science is by definition incapable of commenting on it.

But Harris keeps trying anyway. He finds his best hope in an analogy with medicine and health:

I believe all of these challenges are the product of philosophical confusion. The simplest way to see this is by analogy to medicine and the mysterious quantity we call “health.” Let’s swap “morality” for “medicine” and “well-being” for “health” and see how things look:

1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant “health” primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)

While the analogy may not be perfect, I maintain that it is good enough to obviate these three criticisms. Is there a Value Problem, with respect to health? Is it unscientific to value health and seek to maximize it within the context of medicine?

No. Clearly there are scientific truths to be known about health – and we can fail to know them, to our great detriment. This is a fact. And yet, it is possible for people to deny this fact, or to have perverse and even self-destructive ideas about how to live.

How well does this analogy work? To be morally sound is not to the same as to be physically/medically sound. A healthy person is one whose condition (physically) is good, and that is something we can all value. A morally sound person is one who values the good. Health is not the valuing, it is that which is valued. Morality, in contrast, is the valuing. There’s a reflexive thing going on with morality that is absent from health. We can assume valuing in the case of health; in the case of morality, we can assume it on one level but it remains in need of explanation on another level. Harris needs to address the difference before he can succeed with his analogy. He does not seem even to have noticed it.

There’s another significant disanalogy in his “Measurement Problem.” Simply stated, we know how to measure health. After thousands of years of trying, we know how to measure morality, too—but only if we measure it according to an objective, external standard, such as God. Those who seek to ignore God as a standard can agree that certain really, really bad things are really bad (a point of which Harris makes much in his book); but they have never been able to agree on what is really good.

So the measuring stick for morality is more like a shrub instead, with one end anchored in what is obviously bad and the other end—what is really good—ambiguous and undefined. Is abortion good? Is homosexual “marriage” good? How welcoming should America be toward immigration (speaking from a moral and not just an economic perspective)? How much place should religious belief have in the public square? Can we agree on any of these answers by some scientific measurement?

Harris recognizes something like that when he speaks of various peaks and valleys on the moral landscape. He doesn’t deal sufficiently with the way people on various peaks are calling out to each other, “Your morality is wrong!” How will he settle this, by measuring each peak’s elevation? If he’s counting on that analogy to shore up his medical analogy, it’s too late already; it has collapsed.

You can see how heavily he depends on his medical analogy, as he quotes and answers Blackford:

“If we presuppose the well-being of conscious creatures as a fundamental value, much else may fall into place, but that initial presupposition does not come from science. It is not an empirical finding … Harris is highly critical of the claim, associated with Hume, that we cannot derive an ‘ought’ solely from an ‘is’ – without starting with people’s actual values and desires. He is, however, no more successful in deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’ than anyone else has ever been. The whole intellectual system of The Moral Landscape depends on an ‘ought’ being built into its foundations.”

Again, the same can be said about medicine, or science as a whole. As I point out in my book, science in [sic] based on values that must be presupposed – like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesn’t share these values cannot do science. But nor can he attack the presuppositions of science in a way that anyone should find compelling.

Scientists need not apologize for presupposing the value of evidence, nor does this presupposition render science unscientific.

Wait a moment, did you catch that? He said, “nor does this presupposition render science unscientific.” It’s not the first time: see the above, where he says, “Is it unscientific to value health and seek to maximize it within the context of medicine?”

Recall the thesis he’s trying to defend: that science can determine moral values. Notice to where he has now retreated: relying on presuppositions is “not unscientific.” Sure, we can all agree that it’s not unscientific; but it’s also not determined by science. It’s not opposed to science, it’s not anti-science, but it’s also not produced out of science, as he thinks morality could be. His whole argument is collapsing around him as he retreats from the position that science can determine these things—and (again) he doesn’t even seem to notice.

He draws on another false analogy later:

In my book, I argue that the value of well-being – specifically the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone – is on the same footing. There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it.

To say that the worst possible misery for everyone is “bad” is, on my account, like saying that an argument that contradicts itself is “illogical.” Our spade is turned. Anyone who says it isn’t simply isn’t making sense.

To say that the worst possible misery for everyone is “bad” is indeed obvious, but it’s not obvious in the same way as logic is. The law of non-contradiction is not only intuitively obvious, it is also functionally necessary for all thinking and communication. To say “the worst possible misery for everyone is not bad” is a different kind of nonsense than, for instance, speaking of a three-sided figure with exactly two sides. The former communicates something that we all know is wrong; the latter communicates nothing whatsoever. Neither one “makes sense,” but they are nonsensical in completely different ways. So much for another analogy.

From failed analogies Harris descends to naivetë. Again, a quote from Blackford followed by Harris’s response.

“There could be situations where the question of which course of action might maximize well-being has no determinate answer, and not merely because well-being is difficult to measure in practice but because there is some room for rational disagreement about exactly what it is. If it’s shorthand for the summation of various even deeper values, there could be room for legitimate disagreement on exactly what these are, and certainly on how they are to be weighted. But if that is so, there could end up being legitimate disagreement on what is to be done, with no answer that is objectively binding on all the disagreeing parties.”

Couldn’t the same be said about human health? What if there are trade-offs with respect to human performance that we just can’t get around – what if, for instance, an ability to jump high always comes at the cost of flexibility? Will there be disagreements between orthopaedists who specialize in basketball and those who specialize in yoga?

Sure. So what? We will still be talking about very small deviations from a common standard of “health” – one which does not include anencephaly or a raging case of smallpox.

We’re not talking about such a common standard of moral goodness in today’s world. Witness the divisions in our own relatively homogeneous culture on the “culture war” issues, and then think globally from there. No, it’s not as clearcut as physical health. Not even close.

Harris would settle those differences by way of scientifically-measured “well-being”—not to mention some technologically-applied coercion, which is supposed to carry us the final distance toward agreement on what is really good—but this measurement cannot be scientific, for apart from some agreed objective standard (such as God) there will always remain genuine disagreement as to what it means to be living what is good. His vision of a utopia sounds awful to me. What science could determine which of us is right? Each of us bases his position on our view of what it means to be human, and that’s not a scientific question.

Harris closes his defense with this:

Unless you understand that human health is a domain of genuine truth claims – however difficult “health” may be to define – it is impossible to think clearly about disease. I believe the same can be said about morality. And that is why I wrote a book about it.

The same thing cannot be said in the same way about morality. And that—along with the rest of what I’ve noted here—is why I can’t believe what he wrote in his book about it.