The (Science’s Proper Role in Morality) Party Don’t Start Til I Walk In!

Alternate title: a pretend essay on Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010) . “Pretend” because if a student handed in something like this to me and called it an “essay,” I would probably send it back, but this is a blog, so ha ha ha.

(Alternate alternate title: tl;dr. Fair warning — this is about 2000 words long, twice the length of my usual blogs.)

Thanks to my friend YK for prompting this entry by asking me what I thought of Harris’s ideas of a moral landscape. Just to be clear, what I write here is not in any sense a reflection on or a direct response to what he believes (or doesn’t believe, as the case may be); my opinions, to the extent that they can be, are entirely my own.

I also apologize in advance that I’m working from memory; the book had to go back to the library almost immediately, and although I do enjoy blogging about this subject, I don’t enjoy it enough that I’m willing to spend my leisure time doing what I do for work (taking notes, copying quotes, etc.). So mea culpa.

The Moral Landscape is a dense book with a lot to unpack. Harris goes into many diverse issues that are interesting and relevant enough that I don’t want to call them tangents, which is often a perjorative designation, and it would be possible to make the case that his book has several theses. However, what seemed to me to be the throughline is this: there is a mind-independent universe, and everything important in it is either material or can be boiled down to states of or relationships between material things. The morality of an act is determined by its consequences (for Harris, the pertinent consequence is “well-being” or lack thereof), which are material. The proper domain of science is the material world. Therefore, we can compare the morality of acts or practices via science and scientific study.

For Harris, at least as outlined in this book, the most important consequence of this conclusion is that the position that one cannot comment on moral issues from a scientific standpoint is untenable, and for a scientist to hold it despite having strong moral opinions is unethical. He applies it theoretically to argue against moral relativism and practically to argue that one has the moral obligation to stop certain things affiliated with religion, specifically Christian influence on US legislation and the status of women in the devout Muslim community.

Before getting into why he hasn’t entirely convinced me that this is the case, let me give credit where credit is due. I deeply love that Sam Harris is putting forward a “new” atheism view wherein  being a good person is both reasonable and supported by science. This is a refreshing change from what seems to me to be a recurrent theme in pop culture and literature that doing anything but acting in an utterly selfish manner is irrational and “unscientific.” (You all know what TV show I want to use as an example; let’s make a gentleman’s agreement that I won’t even mention it, okay?)

Unlike other writers on similar topics, Harris makes a coherent and cohesive argument, using precise language and demonstrating familiarity with both foundational works of philosophy and the works of those who disagree with him. He’s a fluid and talented writer with great prose style.  And I also like that his proposed understanding of morality has a multiplicity of both right answers and wrong ones, avoiding the false dichotomies that sometimes seem to plague discussions of ethics and the (I believe) baseless criterion that a robust moral system must point to a single correct action in every situation.

In truth, I have relatively trivial objections to the middle of his argument — the part in which, having made his case for his premises and definitions, he goes on to develop his theories with the assumption of their acceptance by the reader. It’s the beginning (said premises and definitions) and the conclusions that trouble me.

If I had to boil down my reasons to a single point, I’d say it’s because he still hasn’t convinced me that there’s any good reason to consider that values ought to be determined through facts. He does make an extensive case for the idea, but unless one already accepts his definitions, it chases its tail in a question-begging game. Furthermore, his arguments often seem to be missing support for key concepts, especially when those concepts are intuitively appealing to people who already consider themselves to be on the “side” of science. For an example, let me take his Laplace’s-demon-esque proposition that because everything important is material or based on relationships between material things, science will one day be able to predict and explain everything that matters.

I’ll focus on one of his specific claims: that it will be possible to measure well-being directly as a state of brain. Now, I have no expertise in neuroscience. So for the sake of argument, let me take the most optimistic view: someday, it will be possible for neuroscientists to match every state of mind with a state of brain for every individual. (Note that Harris acknowledges that the strength of the evidence for this view rests mostly on its holder’s pre-existing philosophical assumptions about mind and brain.) Even if this is the case, can we then say that, knowing everything there is to know about a particular state of the brain, we know everything there is to know about its correspondent state of mind? The answer isn’t obvious; I might know every material fact there is to know about you, but can I ever know what it is like to be you? How do the emergent properties of the experience of consciousness relate to the physical properties of neurons?

Harris seems confident that this and other micro/macro problems that are some of the biggest unanswered questions in many fields of science and social science reflect difficulties in practice, not in principle, and I’d be happy to agree with him, but he provides no argument for why this should be so. Other works I’ve read written by practicing scientists take the opposite perspective — that while science will soon be able to reduce almost everything to systems of fundamental parts with basic properties that operate according to solvable natural laws, there is something inherent to complex emergent phenomena that resists this method of attack. Again, I would be happy to reconsider this view on the strength of more compelling arguments, but not on a single author’s unsupported assumption.

(This mention of practice vs. principle touches on another criticism I had of Harris, which is that he seems to apply criteria inconsistently depending on what he happens to be arguing*. He warns the reader not to reject his ideas when they can’t be applied in practice because he’s talking about what’s valid in principle — fair enough. But his arguments against religion and cultural relativism tend to focus on how they cash out in practice**. Similarly, he criticizes a fellow scholar for ignoring the self-reported religious motivations of captured terrorists, yet several chapters previous, he suggests that particular scientists whom he heard claim to speak on behalf of the reconciliation of religion and science couldn’t possibly believe what they were saying and were being coerced by the social domination of religion.)

Another key to Harris’s platform is the concept of well-being, which Harris defends on the grounds of its being the only reasonable basis for a system of morals. He invites sceptical readers to consider any other standard for morals and challenges them to find one that does not reduce somehow to a principle about human well-being.

While I’m not convinced that none exists, that’s beside the point; proving a negative is difficult. But I’m also not convinced that even if this is the case, this is good reason to construct an ethical stance around the concept of well-being. Being able to re-state one concept in terms of another doesn’t necessarily mean that the second concept should be taken as primary.

Here’s an example with which I do feel comfortable: numbers. How can one explain what the numeral “1” means without reference to some material example of one thing, whether that thing is an object in your hand, yourself, or ink on a page that indicates a single element in a set? At the end of the day, the concept of number (or the unit) is, at least for us humans, unable to be expressed in a way that isn’t somehow related to the material world. And yet one would have to make a much stronger case to argue that therefore the proper domain of theoretical mathematics is the material world.

(Yes, I know that this proposition about the proper domain of mathematics is counterintuitive but not necessarily wrong. I chose it purposely. Again, my point isn’t that Harris is necessarily wrong — although I disagree with him — it’s that his argument is invalid in the logical sense.)

Moreover, as part of his discussion of well-being as an empirical basis for ethical thought, Harris does something I found recurrent through the book: his argument against positions he considers to be obviously incorrect tends to be along the lines of, “Look at it. Come on!”

While it’s true that my knee-jerk intuitions against some of the philosophers and ideas he dismisses like this are strong, I’ve also read excellent arguments in favour of them that changed my mind. When Harris first brought them up, I was excited to see what I hoped would be his equally strong counter-arguments. I was disappointed to find that there generally were none.

For instance, Harris criticizes feminist philosophers of science like Sandra Harding for suggesting that science as it exists is intrinsically sexist and racist, and he takes to task cultural relativists like an unnamed conference speaker who took the position that one can’t say unilaterally that a society that plucks out the eyes of every third child is “wrong.” I can see that there are interesting, compelling arguments to be made against these ideas. But Harris doesn’t make them. He relies on that knee-jerk feeling of “Come on!” without even making the explicit argument, “You know, these theories go against our intuition, which is an important part of moral reasoning.”

Finally, despite Harris’s calls for a morality based on reason and evidence, his conclusions, in which he condemns particular social and religious practices gets no more support than another, “Come on!” Isn’t it obvious, he writes, that women who live in devout Muslim societies have less well-being than women who live in free Western societies?”

Well, yes, it is — to my intuition. But I thought the whole object of choosing well-being as the core concept of a moral system was that it’s supposed to be empirically verifiable through measurable states of brain and body: it can be examined with the methods of science. And isn’t that one of the things for which the scientific method is (rightly) praised? Its ability to overturn our intuitions and correct our all-too-human biases? So if Harris wants me to believe on the terms of his own system of empirically based ethics that his moral judgment is correct and that the Islamic treatment of women (or the hypothetical society that gouges out the eye of every third child, or… etc.) is wrong, I’m going to need some evidence before I form my conclusions.

Well, everyone, I have plenty more to say on Harris, but this has gone on long enough. (I even cut about 300 words on details of definitions of health. You’re welcome.) If you’re at all interested in these issues, I hope you read this book, and that of Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, and David Hume, and C. S. Lewis, and Francis Collins, and… etc. And I hope we’ll have fruitful and exciting discussions in the future. But most of all, I hope we can all agree on the really important thing: my title is way better than any of theirs.

* Just like everyone else, ever, but still. If one rightly objects when one’s opponent uses this tactic, one can’t disregard using it oneself.

** Also, to be fair, this particular inconsistency makes a whole lot of sense, if, like me, you’re sceptical that one can wholly distinguish between principle and practice. But Harris does not seem to take this view.