Sam Harris battles the is/ought divide
Apr. 9th, 2010 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essentialsaltesSam Harris gave a TED talk on "Science can answer moral questions". Following the initial feedback, in which he was called an idiot, he blogged at length about the matter. The TED talk is too long, the blog post is too long, so let me tackle the NPR summary of his main argument:
Now, I have nothing against wellbeing. Wellbeing is pretty nice. But somehow I don't think this criterion was determined scientifically. So yes, if we have a pre-determined criterion, science can certainly help us experiment to determine how to maximize it.
That said, I really don't see how this program is going to be very helpful. Indeed, I think you can see how this scheme has affected American politics for the worse. Let's raise taxes. Wellbeing of constituents goes down. Ok... let's cut services. Wellbeing of constituents goes down. What about the wellbeing of future generations? Fuck em. Similarly, we can look at the 'morality' of climate change. Maybe we can ask Sam Harris to measure the wellbeing of the people of 2050 and decide how to weigh that against the wellbeing of the people of today.
Something as simple as stealing becomes a problem. What if poor guy's wellbeing is increased more than yours decreases by being robbed by him? Sure, to deal with these situations, you can maybe jigger your definition of total wellbeing to make this work out the way you want it to, but to then say that science determined the answer is a complete sham. We're firing science arrows and then drawing targets around the one we want to be the right answer. There's nothing wrong with using some sort of rational process to come up with definitions of wellbeing (or right and wrong), but to somehow imply that the result of that process was just 'out there' waiting to be discovered is silly.
Seriously, if Harris came up with a wellbeing-o-meter and discovered that women who wear the burqa have higher self-esteem, less anxiety about their appearance, less frustration with choosing what to wear, experienced fewer catcalling incidents, and had more disposable income to spend on rearing their offspring, while experiencing signficantly reduced pleasure in the shaking what her mama gave her department. If he found that -- on balance -- their overall wellbeing was higher than that of non burqa wearing women...
would Harris say:
A) Often science contradicts our common sense ideas. I thought it was obvious that forcing women to wear the burqa reduced their wellbeing. However, I have discovered that such a strategy would maximize wellbeing. Thus, as an act in the interest of the public good, the scientific overlords have therefore passed such a law.
B) Clearly, the wellbeing formula needs to place higher numerical weight on the shaking what her mama gave her factor.(*) This is merely a simple recalibration of the universal objective wellbeingometer. It's technical.
1. Science can, in principle, answer moral questions even if it cannot do so in practice now.
2. The science that will answer these questions will be the rapidly advancing fields of brain, cognitive and, ultimately, consciousness studies.
3. The criterion on which these questions will be answered is "human wellbeing."
Now, I have nothing against wellbeing. Wellbeing is pretty nice. But somehow I don't think this criterion was determined scientifically. So yes, if we have a pre-determined criterion, science can certainly help us experiment to determine how to maximize it.
That said, I really don't see how this program is going to be very helpful. Indeed, I think you can see how this scheme has affected American politics for the worse. Let's raise taxes. Wellbeing of constituents goes down. Ok... let's cut services. Wellbeing of constituents goes down. What about the wellbeing of future generations? Fuck em. Similarly, we can look at the 'morality' of climate change. Maybe we can ask Sam Harris to measure the wellbeing of the people of 2050 and decide how to weigh that against the wellbeing of the people of today.
Something as simple as stealing becomes a problem. What if poor guy's wellbeing is increased more than yours decreases by being robbed by him? Sure, to deal with these situations, you can maybe jigger your definition of total wellbeing to make this work out the way you want it to, but to then say that science determined the answer is a complete sham. We're firing science arrows and then drawing targets around the one we want to be the right answer. There's nothing wrong with using some sort of rational process to come up with definitions of wellbeing (or right and wrong), but to somehow imply that the result of that process was just 'out there' waiting to be discovered is silly.
Seriously, if Harris came up with a wellbeing-o-meter and discovered that women who wear the burqa have higher self-esteem, less anxiety about their appearance, less frustration with choosing what to wear, experienced fewer catcalling incidents, and had more disposable income to spend on rearing their offspring, while experiencing signficantly reduced pleasure in the shaking what her mama gave her department. If he found that -- on balance -- their overall wellbeing was higher than that of non burqa wearing women...
would Harris say:
A) Often science contradicts our common sense ideas. I thought it was obvious that forcing women to wear the burqa reduced their wellbeing. However, I have discovered that such a strategy would maximize wellbeing. Thus, as an act in the interest of the public good, the scientific overlords have therefore passed such a law.
B) Clearly, the wellbeing formula needs to place higher numerical weight on the shaking what her mama gave her factor.(*) This is merely a simple recalibration of the universal objective wellbeingometer. It's technical.
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Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections
Date: 2010-04-11 03:56 am (UTC)Personally, my biggest problem with his argument is that he elides any concrete definition of "well-being" by saying that 1) it's intuitive, 2) you might derive "well-being" from different sources than I do (although your total well-being would still be measurable with the wellbeing-o-meter just like mine), and 3) just because well-being is a universal truth doesn't mean he understands its definition in full. Harris is really putting forth a philosophical argument, not a scientific one, and as such I'd like to ask him some questions about this maximization of well-being that defines morality.
To take another recent cause celebre, clearly the wellbeing of a large number of Mississippi high school students was increased by excluding lesbians and retards from prom. They made sure to publicize exactly how much fun they had! Either we must weight the unhappiness of the ostracized people by a huge factor (artificially, I would argue) in order to get the 'right' answer. Or we must agree that the majority acted morally in ostracizing the weirdos.
I think that we're into the weeds here with the issue of how one constructs the wellbeing-o-meter. Nothing Harris says implies that it's simply a measurement of one's happiness at a particular moment in time. I think Harris might say it should take into account the long-lasting effects on McMillen and the other excluded students and those who read about the incident and empathized with McMillen, the possibility that it gives encouragement to others to treat homosexuals just as poorly, and perhaps future attacks of conscience suffered by the rest of the students. Again, Harris isn't claiming to have the wellbeing-o-meter, only saying that if he had perfect knowledge, he could construct one.
Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections
Date: 2010-04-11 04:38 pm (UTC)Harris is really putting forth a philosophical argument, not a scientific one
I quite agree, but that's not what he's saying. Which is why I'm all bent out of shape about it.
Nevertheless, I still see huge problems in principle, rather than in practice [contra his own opinion about his detractors].
Nothing Harris says implies that it's simply a measurement of one's happiness at a particular moment in time.
Yes, and I see this as a problem. If it were such a simple measurement, then (still given the unjustified-but-plausible assumption of utilitarianism) it might have some claim to objectiveness. But in the face of rather elementary objections, it's clear that wellbeing must involve a large number of different factors. I will stipulate that Harris can measure each of these factors with infinite accuracy.
The potential space of wellbeing metrics, mixing together these factors, is enormous. And there is no objective way (I argue) to choose among them. Using one metric, Bob has more wellbeing than Alice, while using a different metric, Alice has more wellbeing that Bob. How do we choose the correct metric? We can't just ask them who's happier right now or over the course of their lives, because we already know that's a faulty measure of wellbeing. We need an objective metric of wellbeing in order to come up with an objective metric of wellbeing.
And it seems clear to me that if we granted both Sam Harris and Pat Robertson perfect knowledge of all the measurable wellbeing factors, they would come up with different metrics. And Harris' critics are right when they say that any wellbeing metric he comes up with "must be a mere product of my own personal and cultural biases."
Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections
Date: 2010-04-11 06:45 pm (UTC)Actually, this paragraph of his blog post suggests otherwise:
See, to construct your "well-being" matrix properly, you just need to know whether and how we'll be rewarded in the afterlife for our actions here on Earth. Simple.
So yes, you're right about the question of how to construct the well-being matrix. Harris does a little hand-waving about "moral experts", but you once again have a chicken-and-egg problem; who chooses the experts? Are we going to put a Catholic priest on this panel? How about a Wahhabbist imam?
It's nice that Harris got a lot of people to think about all this stuff, but as we both seem to agree, his argument is ultimately just about meaningless without an agreed-upon definition of "well-being".
Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections
Date: 2010-04-11 08:15 pm (UTC)Even if we grant this perfect knowledge of the afterlife, this may not determine W. Suppose our perfect knowledge told us that the Bible is 'literally' true. Dawkins has described the God of the OT as "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Would it increase Dawkins' well-being to obey the commands of such a character, regardless of the potential bribe this monster offered him? How many witches would he kill? Could it be better to rule (or suffer) in Hell than to serve in Heaven?
I'm not at all certain that perfect knowledge (even of metaphysical matters unreachable by science) would uniquely determine W.