Sam Harris battles the is/ought divide

[essentialsaltes]

Sam 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:

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.

Comments

Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

I agree that it is a fact that Harris has moral intuitions. They can be as immediate to his experience as the fact that he sees the sky being blue colored. I am not trying to wave that away with radical skepticism.

It is true that Harris sincerely believes that mandatory-burqa-laws are obviously wrong.
However, it is also true that there are people who believe that mandatory-burqa-laws are obviously right.

So I'm not denying the truth that people have moral intuitions.
I'm just pointing out that different people have different moral intuitions. Moral truths are not held universally, and in this sense they are subjective... differing from person to person.

Of course, Harris believes that his moral intuition is right on this count (and heck, I agree with him). And he does certainly believe that there just is a right answer to this question. To this extent, he is a moral realist. That's fine. It's a philosophical position with a long history and he's welcome to it (though I don't share it).

But, where he fails spectacularly (in my opinion) is when he suggests that science provides the justification for why his intuition is right, and the Taliban's is wrong.

He explicitly mentions the distinction you're talking about here when he discusses tinnitus. Yes, it is true that so-and-so is experiencing a ringing noise, and it is true that the doctor doesn't. Here, we can bring in science to settle the matter of whether there is actually a noise or not. The lack of sound does not make it untrue that the patient experiences a sound. But it does tell us (we hope) something about the true state of affairs out in the universe, rather than in our heads.

[This reminds me... in a recent discussion elsewhere, someone said something like "Morality is all in our heads," implying that it was imaginary or illusory. And my immediate thought was, "Where else would you expect to find it?"]

Anyway, Harris' program is, as far as I can tell:

Step 1: Assume some form of utilitarianism is true.
Step 2: Use science to determine moral facts.

I don't have a problem with this program, except that I think he's being disingenuous about step 1. How did he 'scientifically determine' that utilitarianism is the correct tool for determining moral facts?

Thus, by starting my talk with the assertion that values depend upon actual or potential changes in consciousness [wellbeing], and that some changes are better than others, I merely assumed what I set out to prove. This is what philosophers call “begging the question.” I am, therefore, an idiot.

And then, rather than justifying his selection, he goes on to wring his hands about all the people attacking his position. He does consider one alternative: "So how much time should we spend worrying about such a transcendent source of value? I think the time I will spend typing this sentence is already far too much." I submit that this is not an experimental result.

He leaps the is/ought divide by assuming utilitarianism without proof (either scientific or any other kind), so -- if his program is to provide a scientific basis for moral truths -- this is where he fails before he even begins.

Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

But, where he fails spectacularly (in my opinion) is when he suggests that science provides the justification for why his intuition is right, and the Taliban's is wrong.

I'm not sure that he actually says that anywhere. I read him as saying "Let us accept that this is the metric; then we can use science to measure whether one thing is better than another," not "Science has decreed that my metric is best." Harris writes:

So what about people who think that morality has nothing to do with anyone’s wellbeing? I am saying that we need not worry about them—just as we don’t worry about the people who think that their “physics” is synonymous with astrology, or sympathetic magic, or Vedanta.

He spends many paragraphs on a defense of his view that wellbeing=morality, but again, this part of his argument is clearly philosophical in nature, not scientific. He even yields the point that his personal definition of "morality" is not definitive:

And, as I emphasized in my talk, there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive—many peaks on the moral landscape—so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in life, this diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science. As I said in my talk, the concept of “wellbeing,” like the concept of “health,” is truly open for revision and discovery.

Personally, I think that all this reduces his argument to near-meaninglessness. He says that if we accept that morality should be based on well-being, and if we could agree on what "well-being" means, and if we had perfect knowledge of how various actions would impact everyone's well-being, we could decide between courses of action by choosing the one that maximizes well-being. Well, yes. And if I could shoot fireworks out of my ass, I could fly to the Moon. Still, the thing you're pillorying Harris for - the claim that his premise of morality is based on Science - is a claim I don't see him making.

(again, I only read the interminable blog post, I didn't watch the video, so maybe he does make that claim elsewhere.)

Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Oops. In my post above, "He even yields the point that his personal definition of 'morality' is not definitive" should have read "He even yields the point that his personal definition of 'well-being' is not definitive".

Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think that all this reduces his argument to near-meaninglessness. He says that if we accept that morality should be based on well-being, and if we could agree on what "well-being" means, and if we had perfect knowledge of how various actions would impact everyone's well-being, we could decide between courses of action by choosing the one that maximizes well-being.

If that's all he's saying, then it's pretty boring, or tautological. Science can help us maximize variable W, once the criteria for W are defined.

When he says "Rather I was suggesting that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want..."

Imagine that he sets up a W that satisfies him. Using this variable and the power of Science, he determines the best way to maximize W. I'm unconcerned with how difficult this would be practically. But as a matter of principle, where in this process would he discover that actually he shouldn't have wanted W, but W'?

Maybe, as you seem to be suggesting, he doesn't think science would provide that answer. That instead, in the give and take of public discourse, ethicists would work out a W that changes (or there would be partisans for many different competing W's), and science's role is simply to evaluate different policies and how they would affect the global W.

But I don't think that's what he's suggesting. When he says "there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind." I don't think he's saying that science will evaluate policies (in the light of a W determined by the usual rational discourse) to figure out which course is right and which course is wrong.

Re: OMG my comments was too long Re: (*) further reflections

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

If that's all he's saying, then it's pretty boring, or tautological. Science can help us maximize variable W, once the criteria for W are defined.

Well, yes, but I think his point is that people don't generally think of W as being measurable objectively. The idea that we could quantify well-being through brain scans (or whatever) is the quote-unquote revolutionary idea that he's setting forth. I think that the difficulties inherent in 1) deciding the criteria for W and 2) measuring those criteria make the idea unworkable as a comprehensive solution. But to offer the most favorable possible interpretation to Harris, we could say that even if we can't agree on all the criteria for W or figure out how to measure all the criteria, we might be able to agree upon and quantify some of them, and that might inform policy-making, even if it can't provide comprehensive answers.