Metaethical Moral Relativism versus Sam Harris

Hi again TheOnComingStorm,It is a pleasure to once again have an exchange on so important and relevant an issue as this. Today, I will be proposing the validitiy of Sam Harris' moral arguments from "The Moral Landscape," and therefore conclude that MMR is false.Sam Harris' argument is centered around the idea that moral questions are centered around well-being of conscious creatures, which then fall into the realm of facts that can be scientifically appreciated.[1] Harris reasons that moral issues can be related to health issues, and much like how cancer is cancer no matter what part of the world it may exist in, immoral actions are immoral regardless of their social and cultural context.In order for one to concede with this argument they must agree with his two premises for establishing this.1. Some people have better lives than others.2. These differences relate, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world.[2]Sam Harris uses these two illustrations to support this point.The Good 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."[3]The Bad 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."[3]The "Good Life" and "Bad Life" distinction is important because it illustrates premise #1 that we can speak objectively that some people do have a better conscious experience of the world than others. Why Value Sentient Beings?It is important now to establish that well-being of conscious creatures is worthy of being valued. To do this, I will first ask why we do not have moral issues surrounding the treatment of rocks? What separates throwing a human baby and throwing a rock? Are these mere cultural disctiontions, or is one wrong simply because some divine being says so? Or is it possible to establish that the primary difference between these two is that one of these is a sentient being, capable over experiencing suffering and death, while the other is not. Indeed, it is our consciousness that even allows us at all to make statements about moral issues, without consciousness no one would care about ethical issues. Therefore, the conscious experience especially that of human beings should be valued to the highest degree.For a pracitical example, let's say we encounter a tribe in the far reaches of the Amazonian jungle that still practices human sacrifice. Would we be constrained to state that this practice is acceptable because the culture in which it is practiced deems it so? Or should we be able to know that the conscious experience of those people being sacrificed is not dissimilar from our own and ought to be valued just the same as any westerner? Given that you can establish that there are moral decisions which lead to the greatest possible suffering and also the greatest possible well-being for all conscious creatures, it should warrant us to say that the practice of human sacrifice is a path to human suffering rather than well-being and thus wrong.This argument is driven home by this point from Sam Harris."I am saying that a universe in which all conscious beings suffer the worst possible misery is worse than a universe in which they experience well-being."[4]If one concedes this simple point in addition to the others, we can draw implications on these grounds to build an entire ethical system where we are determining moral values not at the level of a culture, but at the level of our brains. Thus making it universal to every human being with conscious cognitive capactities.I attempted to shorten this initial argument, so as to not give you too much to chew on, but I will flesh out my argument further as the debate rages on. :)Kindest Regards,TrueScotsmanSources:http://skepdic.ru...[1] pg. 8 The Moral Landscape. Sam Harris [2] pg. 16 TheMoral Landscape. Sam Harris [3] pg. 17 The Moral Landscape. Sam Harris [4] pg. 32 The Moral Landscape. Sam Harris