I’m waiting for a chance to read Sam Harris’s new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. I like Harris’s thoughtfulness, his recognition of moral realities, and his stand against religiously motivated violence. That doesn’t mean his attempts to create a scientifically-based moral system make sense, however. He told Jon Stewart last week,
I think the biggest challenge we’re facing is finding some way to create a global civilization based on shared values. We have to converge on the same kind of economic and political and social goals and so forth. We have to begin giving similar answers to the most important questions in human life; and the only way forward to do that I see is to begin to talk about morality and human values very much in the context of our growing scientific understanding of ourselves in the world….
To take a scientific perspective on moral questions can often be crucial. Consider global warming and carbon usage: if there is a link between carbon release and potential serious climate change, then carbon usage has moral implications. Our knowledge of that linkage and its potential moral repercussions depends on what we can learn through good, objective, hard science. Science really does inform moral decision-making.
But Harris wants it to do much more than that: not just to inform moral valuations, but to ground them, to function as their sole basis. In he stands nearly alone, for most thoughtful observers doubt science has the capacity to deliver right, true, and trustworthy answers to questions of morality and value. At least he recognizes how lonely his position is:
We have a problem. The only people on the planet at this moment who think that there are truly right answers to moral questions are religious demagogues who think the universe is 6,000 years old. Everyone else seems to think that there’s something suspect about the concept of moral truth.
Never mind his egregious distortion of religious belief there, which is too obvious to waste time or attention on. It would be fascinating to read the book and see how he justifies his idiosyncratic stance on science’s ability to ground morality. I seriously doubt he succeeds in that justification. There is, after all, a reason most people don’t think science can deliver us moral truth: it can’t. Not unless Harris has come up with something utterly earthshaking in the history of philosophical reflection. It won’t be this:
Morality and value clearly relates to human and animal well-being, and our well-being emerges out of the laws of nature; it depends on the way the universe is…. all of these domains fall within the purview of science.
Well-being? Define “well-being” on the basis of science, Mr. Harris? What constitutes the good life? Is that in your book? Are there scientific journal articles or conference proceedings to back it up? Science can, in some limited cases, describe how best to achieve life x as opposed to life y. If you assume life x maximizes well-being and life y accomplishes something less, then you might fool yourself into thinking science can show how to maximize well-being.
My guess is that when I read the book, I’ll find that life x‘s superiority will be taken as an implicit assumption throughout. I’m quite certain there will be no peer-reviewed, field- or laboratory-based agreement as to the value of life x; nor will there be consensus in other relevant fields of inquiry such as philosophy. (Harris claims that science is his only authority, but he’s practicing philosophy when he says that.)
What I’m saying is that we know at this moment in human history that the answer to that question [regarding burkas] is no; and to doubt this scientifically is to pretend that we know nothing about human well-being. A science of the human mind will understand how communities flourish, and it’s a myth that we can’t get there through science.
Here’s what I suspect is going on behind all these assumptions—just a suspicion, mind you. Harris is a moral realist (the opposite of relativist, for which I give him much credit) whose god of knowledge is Science. He is a monotheist in that sense: there is no other knowledge for him but what the Science-god can deliver. Therefore if there is moral knowledge, it must be scientific moral knowledge. It outlines this way:
1. There are moral truths.
2. There are no truths but scientific truths.
3. Therefore moral truths are scientific truths.
Therefore practically (if not logically) speaking,
4. I’ll figure out a way to wring moral truths out of the findings of science, and
5. Because I’m committed to (1) through (3), I’m going to publish something on (4) even though everybody else knows it’s wrong, impossible and false.
Harris has to find something to support (4), even if there’s nothing there to find. It’s a desperation move to salvage his beliefs in moral reality and the knowledge-god Science.
Also posted at Thinking Christian.
Meanwhile: Are you coming to the National Conference on Christian Apologetics in Charlotte this weekend? Please look me up there—I’ll be doing two talks on Friday morning—or send an email so can find a place and time to meet. I’d love to connect with you.
October 13th, 2010 | 2:50 pm | #1
Hi Tom,
You might also appreciate this recent post by Albert Mohler titled
Evolution and the Empty Nest Syndrome.
October 13th, 2010 | 3:27 pm | #2
I saw that earlier. Evolutionary explanations of behavior have different problems, but no less difficult than those of evolutionary explanations of ethics. (That’s not quite the same as purely scientific explanations, but close, in that most people who try to ground ethics in “just science” use evolution as their basis. I’ll have to wait and read the book to see if that’s how Harris tries to work it.)
October 13th, 2010 | 4:15 pm | #3
I wish him good luck in his unicorn hunt. Sadly, he seems like the kind of guy who will pursue it for a long, long time.
By the way, does anyone else think the top portion of Mr. Harris’s face looks like Ben Stiller’s? That picture really brought the similarity out.
October 14th, 2010 | 3:25 am | #4
Harris does deserve credit, for distinguishing himself, from the rather odoius postmodernist crowd, and accepting moral truth. But there are problems, in terms of trusting him.
As you state, Tom, he claims that, there are two groups of people: those who believe in moral truth, but are religious believers, and also believe in a six thousand year old earth, and those nonreligious typres, who don’t believe in moral truth. This is, an amusing fallacy. Never mind, that there are devout Christians, such as Francis Collins,M.D.,Ph.D, who believe in all the findings of modern science, (Collins achievements make Harris’s look ridiculous, by comparision), but Collins considers them to be just as deserving of contempt, as the young earthers.
When one considers, that the majority of humans, on the earth, believe in some form of religion, how does Harris expect to form common ground, in his search for moral truth?
October 14th, 2010 | 3:28 am | #5
Sorry, I meant to say Harris believes that they’re (Christians believing in an old earth) are just as deserving of contempt as the young earthers, not Collins. My lack of sleep is showing!
October 14th, 2010 | 9:56 am | #6
If you ask Mr. Harris how old the universe is, what will be his answer? Then ask him what science’s answer was 10 years ago. 20? 50? 100?
And then ask him whether it’s likely that science’s answer today will change in the future, and how often?
The “scientific” grounds for a shared morality will have the same solid foundation.
October 14th, 2010 | 10:26 am | #7
How in the world is Sam Harris going find a universal foundation for morality and ethics when his own ethic begin with contempt for what his fellow man believes and thinks.
Consider the back story for “The Parable of the Good Samaritan.” Jews and Samaritans had a contempt for each others religious belief, yet the Samaritan in the story goes out of his way to aid the Jew. Isn’t one of the messages here that we ought not to have contempt for what someone else believes?
To be scientific about it let’s do a little thought experiment. Which kind of ethic is going to lead to a better world and society? One that begins with (A) contempt for religious belief in general, or (B) one that maintains that we ought not to have contempt for what our fellow man believes and thinks? I think the answer is pretty obvious: A is a non-starter.
Jesus ended his ethical teachings in the “Sermon on the Mount” with a metaphor of a house built on the sand vs. one built on a rock. Clearly Harris is trying to build his ethic on a very uncertain foundation.
October 14th, 2010 | 10:55 am | #8
I want to go on record as a Luddite who thinks that the earth is maybe 10,000 years old or so. It may be “scientifically” absurd, but it certainly isn’t exegetically, historically, or philosophically so. Three out of four ain’t bad.
October 14th, 2010 | 4:01 pm | #9
Short of saying “Romans 1 refers to me”, I don’t know how much more plainly Harris can admit that he knows that God is real but that he wishes He wasn’t…
October 15th, 2010 | 1:37 pm | #10
I look forward to reading his book as painful as it might be.
October 18th, 2010 | 8:29 pm | #11
The book is extremely painful, though I appreciate that he’s calling his ethical relativist colleagues to task for choosing to ignore cultural atrocities such as female genital mutilation. Continuing to read…
October 28th, 2010 | 6:38 pm | #12
I watched Harris put forward this stuff and its pretty obvious that he doesn’t know much about either normative ethics or meta-ethics.
It may be true that nature disposes us to “flourish” or aim for “well being” but it dosn’t follow that this is in fact valuable, unless we know that nature is correct in doing so. As Hume noted, we can’t get in back of nature to inevestigate its springs, at least not without divine disclosure.
Harris also conflates moral value with usefulness. It may be true that such and so behaviors are useful to achieving a specific end or goal, but that doesn’t tell us if the goal is morally valuable.
Do yourself a favor and Google Russ Manion’s essay, The Other Side: Metaphysics and Meaning. Make sure it has three sections.
And in any case, “flourishing” has proved nortoriously difficult to define for contemporary Virtue Ethics and usually ends in a form of cultural relativism. See MacIntyre’s, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
If Harris is thinking along the lines of the argument above, its going to lead him to Moral Nihilism real quick, if he’s consistent about it. Note: Press Moral Nihilism with metaphysical Naturalists.
October 28th, 2010 | 9:50 pm | #13
Perry, I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I did find the link and I’m posting it here for others’ convenience. I will certainly read it when I get a chance.
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