Sam Harris' 'The Moral Landscape'

The Young Dr. Crane and I have been looking forward to this exchange for some time, and so I also want to express my appreciation for his patience, and thank him for instigating the debate. I lastly thank Dr. Sam Harris for making this debate possible by his contributions to philosophy and neuroscience, and humbly admit that my writing will no doubt pale in comparison to the author whose shadow I dare to stand in. As I am arguing in favor of the proposition Harris formulated in his book, let me first establish that it is unreasonable for me to be tasked with the defense of any positions which he himself has not taken. Allow me to quote page 26 of The Moral Landscape: “I hope it is clear that when I speak about “objective” moral truths, or about the “objective” causes of human well-being, I am not denying the necessarily subjective(i. e. , experiential) component of the facts under discussion. I am certainly not claiming that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings—like the Platonic Form of the Good 4—or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong. 5 I am simply saying that, given that there are facts— real facts—to be known about how conscious creatures can experience the worst possible misery and the greatest possible well-being, it is objectively true to say that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice. ”[1] Con’s demand that I be able to show “objective moral values about right and wrong apply to every possible world” may miss Harris’ point, because by his own admission Harris would have nothing to say about possible worlds which do not contain or impact conscious beings. Even for those worlds which do contain conscious beings, Harris does not claim to know what those moral truths happen to be, or claim that we may ever be able to know the answers to all moral truths – he simply argues that moral truths do exist. An example he uses to help make sense of the difference between “answers in practice” and “answers in principle” is to invite the reader to imagine the set “birthday wishes” consisting of every silent birthday wish ever made in the history of humanity. He asks, “Will we ever be able to retrieve these unspoken thoughts? Of course not. ” But goes on to observe that this doesn’t mean the wishes never existed, or that true and false statements can’t be made about them (imagine the claim that they were all made in Latin, which is specific, but surely false). Harris argues that “a concern for well-being (defined as deeply and as inclusively as possible) is the only intelligible basis for morality and values” and compares the science of morality with the science of health. While the definition for what constitutes “good health” may be vague, medical science can nevertheless tell us there there are truths to be known about health. What constitutes a “healthy food” may be ambiguous and complex, but there is clearly a difference between a food, even an “unhealthy” one like chocolate cake, and a poison like arsenic. Likewise, there are differences in the conscious experience of sentient beings. There are two premises Harris (and I) must defend. 1) some people have better lives than others. 2) these difference relate in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world. To do so, Harris defines what he calls “The Bad Life” and “The Good Life”. The Bad Life You are a young widow who has lived her entire life in the midst of civil war. Today, your seven-year-old daughter was raped and dismembered before your eyes. Worse still, the perpetrator was your fourteen-year-old son, who was goaded to this evil at the point of a machete by a press gang of drug-addled soldiers. You are now running barefoot through the jungle with killers in pursuit. While this is the worst day of your life, it is not entirely out of character with the other days of your life: since the moment you were born, your world has been a theater of cruelty and violence. You have never learned to read, taken a hot shower, or traveled beyond the green hell of the jungle. Even the luckiest people you have known have experienced little more than an occasional respite from chronic hunger, fear, apathy, and confusion. Unfortunately, you’ve been very unlucky, even by these bleak standards. Your life has been one long emergency, and now it is nearly over. The Good Life You are married to the most loving, intelligent, and charismatic person you have ever met. Both of you have careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding. For decades, your wealth and social connections have allowed you to devote yourself to activities that bring you immense personal satisfaction. One of your greatest sources of happiness has been to find creative ways to help people who have not had your good fortune in life. In fact, you have just won a billion-dollar grant to benefit children in the developing world. If asked, you would say that you could not imagine how your time on earth could be better spent. Due to a combination of good genes and optimal circumstances, you and your closest friends and family will live very long, healthy lives, untouched by crime, sudden bereavements, and other misfortunes. (pages 16-17) It seems clear that both premises would be defended by an honest analysis of these examples. Compare this kind of example with our inquiries into the science of economics. While the utility assigned to a single good is arbitrary in a vacuum, utility provided by one good can be compared in a meaningful way to another. Ceteris paribus, a new Audi can reasonably be expected to provide higher utility to a consumer than a rusted out, broken down, beat up used Audi. Can con pretend that lives can't be compared in a similar fashion? I invite Con to convincingly argue that either premise 1 fails and one life is not better than the other, or that 2 fails and the quality of these lives has absolutely no relationship to their brains and to states of the world. If he cannot do this, then both premises stand, and the rest of Harris’ argument will follow from there. At that time, I will have been able to prove beyond a preponderance of the evidence that Sam Harris has offered a sound moral ontology which demonstrates objective (true regardless of individual opinions) moral right and wrong and follows from the use of true premises and logically valid formulations. 1) . http://skepdic.ru...