I’m annoyed by credentialism, but do not think that this the clearest way to demonstrate that Harris is a pretender. It is most clear in considering this two alternatives:
Is Harris employing science as a tool to promote a personal agenda with the falsely claimed authority science?
Or is Harris advancing science as a public good that is for all people?
If Harris is #2, he is a friend of science. Regardless of his particular credentials and accomplishments, he would be serving the common good. Even if he is making mistakes, it will be easy to come alongside him and help him do better.
If Harris is #1, he is a pretender who is doing far more damage to science than Ken Ham. By using science as a tool for atheism, he is excluding good people from science, because of his personal religious agenda. He is posing as scientist for the purpose of promoting a divisive personal view, and he is able to do this a way that poisons the well of mainstream science. Everyone knows that Ken Ham is biased outside the scientific community. Harris, however, is biased while pretending to be one of us.
So which one is he? Harris seems obviously to be #1. He is does not yet know that science is greater than him. Allowing people like this to use science as a weapon instead of a place of common ground is dangerous. I have no respect for it.
I can’t claim to be particularly familiar with Harris’ work on the relationship between science, morality, and atheism, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him “exclude good people from science” or “use science as a weapon”.
Apparently Harris believes that science has something to say on the issue of secular vs religious morality, and he talks about it. Why does that earn him your distain?
What makes you say that Harris is doing this? I don’t get that feeling when I hear him speak, fairly often. Looking at the preview and afterword of his book on morality, I don’t see it either. Nor on the About page of his blog.
It seem that @NLENTS likes Harris because he is making a place for science in conversations about morality. I’d agree with @PdotdQ that this has been well known for a long period of time. That is an important point, and I have no quarrel with that.
The bigger problem is that he is trying to argue a type of pseudoscientific version of positivism, in that science can govern questions of morality. This betrays fundamental misunderstandings about both the nature of science and the nature of ethics. Of note, @NLENTS does not go this far with him, but that is the precise point of his book. This is his major contribution to New Atheism:
Popularized by Sam Harris is the view that science and thereby currently unknown objective facts may instruct human morality in a globally comparable way. Harris’ book The Moral Landscape[80] and accompanying TED Talk How Science can Determine Moral Values[81] propose that human well-being and conversely suffering may be thought of as a landscape with peaks and valleys representing numerous ways to achieve extremes in human experience, and that there are objective states of well-being.
This is not only pseudoscience, it is also divisive and dangerous.
I don’t see at all how this is equivalent to “employing science as a tool to promote a personal agenda”. He’s making an argument, and has done so at length in book form.
Most of the preview can be read here:
Why shouldn’t he make this argument? I don’t understand that at all.
I can’t see how you get this from that brief statement either.
Maybe I am being hard on him. I just think we need better. Science is a public good and those of us with scientific training, in my view, have a duty to serve the common good, including those with whom we disagree.
I think that’s what he’s trying to do. What he seems to be saying to me is that there are scientific facts about morality which potentially can be accessed. Is that dangerous? I’ve heard him talk about his utilitarian views often and never heard anything shocking. Maybe I’ll have to give the book a look! I don’t think science is ever going to govern our reading of morality personally, and I’m not sure if he’s saying that.
The most controversial aspect of Harris’ book is not that there are scientific facts about morality. Science of course can determine good and bad actions once you pick a particular brand of utilitarianism. What I believe is the most controversial claim of the moral landscape is the statement that the is-ought gap can be bridged. Further, he claimed that not only a bridge across the is-ought gap possible, but he had constructed such a bridge, and what do you know the bridge is exactly his preferred form of consequentialism. Note that he did this while not engaging with any previous literature from the moral philosophy community.
In my reading of his arguments, I think it is clear that he does claim that science should be used to “govern our reading of morality”.
Is this a dangerous idea? I think the most dangerous part of his idea is him convincing the public that science has solved morality and that the whole field of moral philosophy can be discarded - especially those such as virtue ethics or deontology that do not agree with him.
Given @swamidass’ burning hatred of utilitarianism and positivism he probably can come up with other reasons why this idea could be “dangerous”.
Harris’ is the precisely same logic as the Nazi’s final solution, eugenics, and Machiavellian depots everywhere. Utilitarianism justifies sacrificing the few for the benefit of the many. This is precisely the lesson of history. All we need to do to justify great evil is to change our utility function.
The disturbing error here is that he ignored the lessons of the last three centuries. Utilitarianism is not a coherent moral philosophy. It can justify all sorts of evil, but also calm our conscience too. Their are many simple rebuttals to his work. One of the easiest is: “Tyranny of the Majority.” He really needs to read John Stuart Mills.
In many ways, this argument is equally as bad as Bill Nye’s ignorant rant against philosophy. Harris has not even considered the basic entailments and risks of his proposal.
I should clarify that I don’t have a hatred of utilitarianism. Rather, it seems obvious that utilitarianism is not a complete view of morality. Without a deeper grounding, it can quickly descend into “ends justifies the means.” Everything depends on the utility function, and there is no solid way to come to agreement on what it should be.
Positivism? It is hard to hate something that is so obviously false. I’m really just puzzled by it. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that for several generations most thinkers were convinced it was true. Perhaps I am bound to my time, but it seems just obviously wrong. I usually can put myself into another person’s point of view. Maybe I’m just to close to it, but int his case I have a hard time understanding what they were thinking.
I think I’m going to see if @rcohlers can explain it to me.
That, indeed, is the deep mystery of public “knowledge.” Were the flaws in positivism simply invisible, or was the intellectual consensus just so overwhelming that one didn’t dare think about the possibility of error.
Over on another site, somebody was humbly wondering how he’ll be ashamed of his current prejudices in years to come. To me, the more interesting question is how we will know our current prejudices weren’t actually correct, but were swept away by future prejudices!
Josh, I’m surprised that you’re being this unfair to Harris. Even a cursory familiarity with him as an intellectual should immediately cause alarm bells to go off in your head when you suggest that Harris hasn’t considered literally the most basic criticisms of pure utilitarianism. I know I’ve heard him discuss these things before, and it took me all of 40 seconds of googling and reading to find Harris specifically addressing this point, making it clear that he’s aware of these criticisms:
I would further add that the concept of “well-being” captures everything we can care about in the moral sphere. The challenge is to have a definition of well-being that is truly open-ended and can absorb everything we care about. This is why I tend not to call myself a “consequentialist” or a “utilitarian,” because traditionally, these positions have bounded the notion of consequences in such a way as to make them seem very brittle and exclusive of other concerns—producing a kind of body count calculus that only someone with Asperger’s could adopt.
Harris could be described better as a rule utilitarian. To suggest that Harris’ philosophy of ethics is no different from that of the Nazis is insulting and untrue. He’s obviously read Mill, and he’s obviously aware of the implications of things like the Holocaust on utilitarianism. In fact, he even mentions Mill on the 5th page of “The Moral Landscape”, so plainly he’s familiar with Mill’s work. By all means criticise the guy, but don’t don’t do it on false premises.
I don’t know why I am in a sour mood today. I’m normally more charitable.
That is not what I meant, though I see the problem. I need to do more prequalificaftions if I am to ever drop the Nazi bomb. Duly noted. For the record, I expect Harris wold clearly would reject the holocaust as immoral. The issue I have with it is that there is no scientific basis by which to determine that the Nazis are wrong and we are not. They had a different utility function than us. How do we adjudicate which one is correct? I’m sure we can offer criteria, but how do we know which criteria is correct?
Any how, I agree I need to back off the poor guy. I’ve ranted my fair share on this one.
Josh, I understand that Sam Harris strikes a nerve with you because his attacks on the very existence of religion are so pointed, one-sided, and mean. That is not the Sam Harris that I like (and same goes for Dawkins). But I think these characterizations of him are not fair and too sweeping. I think we need to take him at his word that he really believes that the world would be better without religion and he’s trying to build a better, more equitable, more prosperous world in which all people have their basic needs met and a good shot at real flourishing, as he calls it.
I don’t think there is a basis to assign ulterior motives when his actions so perfectly align with his stated motives - that is, trying to increase dialogue about big issues that is driven by data alone and not by what he sees as indefensible theological reasoning. And I say this because, as a listener of his podcast, he points his harsh analysis at many, many other systems of belief, politics, values besides just religion. He goes after everything that he sees as unscientific, and while he used to be more squarely focused on religion in the post-9/11 climate, he now points his criticism much more widely.
In fact, you may be basing your opinion on what you heard from “early Sam Harris,” (whom I also thought little of for years). But over the past five years or so, he has pivoted away from his focus on religion to a more straightforward defense of science and the hallmarks of scientific debate as the best way to solve the problems we face. In fact, very few episodes of “Waking Up” are about religion. It comes up here and there, and it’s clear his positions haven’t softened, but it’s definitely not his main thrust for many years now. He prides himself on trying to bring science, evidence, and clear-thinking to big questions with which society is struggling. There are episodes that make me want to slap him, but current Sam Harris is much more interesting than early Sam Harris, I promise you.
Yeah, this is very unfair, Josh. You are taking an extreme as representative of the entirety. The fact that some depots and monsters have used parts of an idea for their justification isn’t, by itself, evidence of anything other than that you can corrupt ideas for your own ends. An objective use of the utilitarian framework (one that values Jewish life as much as German life, for example) completely collapses the Nazi’s attempted use of it.
I think your point about the changing “utility function” is closer to the key point here. I think what Sam Harris is saying is that this might be a new area where science can speak. As you’ve pointed out, science has long been trusted as a source to bring data to the function, but Harris is saying that science may soon be able to actually help determine what that function is as we gain our ability to accurately measure human suffering and human flourishing (and that of other animals, it should be said). This is where I agree with him - I think science should do more than just provide data, but should highlight that these questions may have objective answers, not just the subjective answers that the humanities usually provide.
I think Harris would have a huge problem with how you’ve characterized his position here. The only way the Nazis could reach a conclusion that their approach was morally acceptable was to apply greater value to German than non-German flourishing and this is a non-starter with any scientifically based view of utilitarianism.
Interesting. I’ll have to give the book a look and see.
I’m not sure that he’s succeeding in that!
Whatever you might say about this, I don’t think it could be called dangerous.
I don’t agree. Harris talks about well being, and the Nazis were as horrible as they are precisely by impacting on the well-being of many people. Any serious analysis of well-being and harm would exclude this possibility. That’s what Harris is talking about when I have heard him.
Harris is talking about a morality based on well-being and harm when I hear him speak. Things that impact on the well being of others or cause harm to them are immoral in this calculus. Although some situations are complex, he’s not talking at all about a “tyranny of the majority” reckoning in order to gain the greatest amount of well being, or what have you.
he probably can come up with other reasons why this idea could be “dangerous”.