Tag Archives: Sam Harris

#8 Post of 2013 – Do Moral Disagreements Mean There Are No Moral Facts?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Moral realists believe that there are real, objective, moral facts. For example, a moral realist would say that it is a moral fact that raping for fun is wrong. Moral anti-realists disagree and would say that there are no moral facts. Statements such as “raping for fun is wrong” are not true or false in the sense that other facts are true or false (e.g., the statement, “the earth revolves the sun”). Moral statements merely express individual or cultural preferences which are completely subjective.

To prove their point, moral anti-realists often argue that the way we know that there no objective moral facts is that individuals and cultures differ in their moral values. One culture is supportive of female genital mutilation and another one isn’t. These disagreements, they argue, prove that moral values are not facts that are true or false, in the same way that scientific facts about physics, chemistry, and biology are true or false.

This argument seems obviously flawed to me, and “New Atheist” Sam Harris agrees. Harris dislikes moral anti-realism almost as much as religion. Here is Harris in his book The Moral Landscape:

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.

What about the fact that there is no consensus on some moral issues?

Another thing that makes the idea of moral truth difficult to discuss is that people often employ a double standard when thinking about consensus: most people take scientific consensus to mean that scientific truths exist, and they consider scientific controversy to be merely a sign that further work remains to be done; and yet many of these same people believe that moral controversy proves that there can be no such thing as moral truth, while moral consensus shows only that human beings often harbor the same biases. Clearly, this double standard rigs the game against a universal conception of morality.

The deeper issue, however, is that truth has nothing, in principle, to do with consensus: one person can be right, and everyone else can be wrong. Consensus is a guide to discovering what is going on in the world, but that is all that it is. Its presence or absence in no way constrains what may or may not be true.  There are surely physical, chemical, and biological facts about which we are ignorant or mistaken.

Although I disagree with Harris on virtually every other subject, he is right to chastise moral anti-realists. The fact that moral disagreements occur no more disproves the existence of moral facts than disagreements in biology disproves the existence of biological facts. It simply does not follow that a lack of consensus on a subject means that there are no facts about that subject.

How Does Christian Metaphysics Ground the Good? Part 3

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In parts 1 and 2, we spelled out how classical Christian metaphysics is able to identify the good for human beings, and thus provide a sturdy foundation for Christian moral realism. Moral values and duties really exist and they transcend time and place.

In a previous series of blog posts, we looked at why Sam Harris’s metaphysical naturalism utterly fails to identify the good with anything transcendent. It will be instructive to compare Harris’s identification of the good with the Christian identification of the good.

Recall the difficulties with Harris’ identification of the good.  First, he falls prey to the naturalistic fallacy.  Harris identifies the brain states that constitute human well-being with the good, but G. E. Moore has persuasively argued that natural facts about the world (e.g., brain states) cannot deliver values, on metaphysical naturalism.

For a Christian theist in the Aristotelian–Thomistic tradition , the naturalistic fallacy is simply not a problem.  On his metaphysics, values are built into the world, and the good is located in formal and final causes.  Edward Feser elaborates in his book Aquinas:

A gap between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ could exist only given a mechanistic-cum-nominalistic understanding of nature of the sort commonly taken for granted by modern philosophers, on which the world is devoid of any objective essences or natural ends.  No such gap, and thus no ‘fallacy’ of inferring normative conclusions from ‘purely factual’ premises, can exist given an Aristotelian–Thomistic essentialist and teleological conception of the world.

Harris’ next difficulty is his assertion that moral values can conceivably reverse in the future.  Cruelty and cheating could possibly become good if neuroscience can deliver feelings of well-being to individuals who are cruel and who cheat. Even worse, Harris concedes that rapists, liars, and thieves could occupy peaks on the moral landscape that are equivalent to peaks occupied by saints.

Although he believes that these scenarios are highly unlikely, his metaphysics allows for the possibility.  For Aquinas, no such scenarios are possible because the good is located proximately in a fixed human nature and, ultimately, in the unchanging nature of God.  Moral values, therefore, can never be reversed in the future, and the goodness of rapists, liars, and thieves can never be equivalent to the goodness of a saint.

Harris’ final difficulty is his belief that it would be morally good for human beings to be sacrificed for the well-being of a vastly superior alien race.  Here again, Aquinas would disagree.  The good of human beings is located in the human nature given us by God, and there is nothing in human nature that would lead us to believe we are designed as sacrifices for an alien race.

Instead, we are designed by God, in his image, as living, free creatures with intellect, will, and passions.  To be used as sacrifices for super-aliens runs counter to the purposes for which God created us, and is, therefore, clearly not good.  Natural law theory affirms our deepest moral intuition, that to be abused by superior conscious beings would be morally wrong, contrary to Harris’ bizarre reasoning.

So what can we conclude from this analysis? It should be abundantly clear that Harris’ naturalistic metaphysics leads him to a completely inadequate account of the source of moral values.  The well-being of conscious creatures fails to provide an unchanging, transcendent ground for the good.  The good is apt to be different for each person, depending on what gives him feelings of well-being.  Although Harris emphasizes that human evolution and the common laws of nature should produce moral values that are more or less constant, the fact of the matter is that nothing in Harris’ metaphysics guarantees what seems completely obvious to all of us: moral values are transcendent.

Christian metaphysics, as expounded by the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, does provide a grounding for moral values that supports our most deeply held moral convictions.  Moral values are based upon human nature and the ends toward which it points.  The finite goods of human beings – health, virtue, pleasure – are the same for Sam Harris and Thomas Aquinas.  However, Aquinas can affirm these as eternally fixed by God, whereas Harris can only affirm them as transient byproducts of purposeless physical processes.  The gaping metaphysical hole in Harris’s moral landscape, then, is the Being of pure actuality from which every good thing comes.  Without God, man is truly a conscious creature of no consequence.  To quote Aquinas, “God alone constitutes man’s happiness.”

How Does Sam Harris’s Metaphysical View Undermine His Moral Landscape? Part 3

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 3 we continue our analysis of Sam Harris’s “moral landscape” in view of his metaphysical naturalism, a worldview which denies the existence of anything that is timeless or transcendent in any sense.

We note that even after identifying moral values with well-being, Harris concedes that his moral landscape may not be good after all.  He explains:

It is also conceivable that a science of human flourishing could be possible, and yet people could be made equally happy by very different ‘moral’ impulses. Perhaps there is no connection between being good and feeling good— and, therefore, no connection between moral behavior (as generally conceived) and subjective well-being.  In this case, rapists, liars, and thieves would experience the same depth of happiness as the saints.  This scenario stands the greatest chance of being true, while still seeming quite far-fetched. . . .

However, if evil turned out to be as reliable a path to happiness as goodness is, my argument about the moral landscape would still stand, as would the likely utility of neuroscience for investigating it.  It would no longer be an especially ‘moral’ landscape; rather it would be a continuum of well-being, upon which saints and sinners would occupy equivalent peaks.

Harris is quick to suggest that because of human evolution and the fact that we all live in the same physical world, this scenario is highly implausible. However, his allowance for the possibility that the good of rapists, liars, and thieves is equivalent to the good of saints, as mapped on his moral landscape, surely indicates that his metaphysics is a disaster for his moral theory.

In this single passage, Harris has completely undermined his identification of the good with human well-being. William Lane Craig revealed this inconsistency during his debate with Harris.  Craig argued that “by granting that it’s possible that the continuum of well-being is not identical to the moral landscape, Dr. Harris’s view becomes logically incoherent.”

Since Harris’ metaphysics fail to provide him a source of moral values which transcends all conscious creatures, another problem surfaces for his moral landscape.  Harris considers the following scenario posed by Robert Nozick: “Nozick . . . asks if it would be ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings.”

Incredibly, Harris answers,

I think the answer is clearly ‘yes.’  There seems no reason to suppose that we must occupy the highest peak on the moral landscape. If there are beings who stand in relation to us as we do to bacteria, it should be easy to admit that their interests must trump our own, and to a degree that we cannot possibly conceive.

Because there is nothing ontologically greater than the physical brain states of conscious creatures, Harris simply must admit that as soon as a greater conscious creature arrives on the scene, then that creature’s well-being becomes identified with the good, and the well-being of human beings falls by the wayside.

Contrary to Harris, it surely is not easy to admit, nor is it intuitive, nor is it even remotely plausible that the wanton destruction of human beings by a superior alien race would ever be good.  Instead of abandoning his naturalistic metaphysics, Harris arrives at the totally counter-intuitive idea that human well-being is good only until a superior conscious creature appears.  I pray that when the aliens ask to be taken to our leader, Harris is nowhere around.

It should be abundantly clear that Harris’ naturalistic metaphysics leads him to a completely inadequate account of the source of moral values.  The well-being of conscious creatures fails to provide an unchanging, transcendent ground for the good.  The good is apt to be different for each person, depending on what gives him feelings of well-being. For Harris, cruelty and generosity could both be good; saints and sinners can both occupy peaks on the “moral landscape.” The fact of the matter is that nothing in Harris’ metaphysics guarantees what seems completely obvious to all of us: moral values are timeless and transcendent.


How Does Sam Harris’s Metaphysical View Undermine His Moral Landscape? Part 2

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 we looked at some serious difficulties that Sam Harris’s metaphysical views cause his “moral landscape” to have. We continue with that analysis in part 2.

Recall that we ended part 1 by noting that Harris’s identification of the moral good with that which brings individual human flourishing and well-being is inadequate. Harris admits that the well-being and flourishing of a psychopath such as Ted Bundy is not morally good, but he can’t know this based on his identification of the good, so he is appealing to moral knowledge outside his own metaphysics.

Harris’s emphasis on the well-being of the community over Bundy still does not save his definition of the good.  What if someone like Ted Bundy lived in a community that generally valued rape and the occasional killing of women as fulfilling?  Harris, himself, sees this problem.  He asks:

But what if advances in neuroscience eventually allow us to change the way every brain responds to morally relevant experiences?  What if we could program the entire species to hate fairness, to admire cheating, to love cruelty, to despise compassion, etc.  Would this be morally good? . . . Is this really a world of equivalent and genuine well-being, where the concept of ‘well-being’ is susceptible to ongoing examination and refinement as it is in our world?  If so, so be it.

Harris concedes that what constitutes well-being could very well change in the future, and that the good could, conceivably, be identified with cheating and cruelty. If you’re scratching your head, join the club.

Surely Harris has misidentified the source of moral values if his source allows for cheating and cruelty to become moral values.  Moral values are, after all, timeless.  We routinely morally judge people who lived centuries ago because we know that moral values do not change over time; they transcend time.

Harris, himself, seems to take for granted that moral values are timeless as he refers to moral progress: “Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable. Our powers of empathy are clearly growing. Today, we are surely more likely to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole than at any point in the past.” Moral progress without timeless moral values would be simply incoherent, yet Harris’ metaphysics leave no room for timeless values.

As a metaphysical naturalist, Harris cannot identify the good with a timeless source that transcends the subjective feelings of individual human beings currently living. Thus metaphysical naturalism acts as universal acid which eats away the foundation of Harris’s moral landscape. In part 3, we will continue to watch the acid do its work.

How Does Sam Harris’s Metaphysical View Undermine His Moral Landscape? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Given Sam Harris’s metaphysical naturalism, how is it that Harris will identify the good? How is the good defined given his metaphysics?

Harris, in line with other moral consequentialists, defines “good” as “that which supports well-being.” Harris further claims that “it makes no sense at all to ask whether maximizing well-being is ‘good.’” The good, according to Harris, simply is that which is conducive to well-being, and nothing else.

Thus moral values are “the set of attitudes, choices, and behaviors that potentially affect our well-being, as well as that of other conscious minds. . . . Given that change in the well-being of conscious creatures is bound to be a product of natural laws, we must expect that this space of possibilities— the moral landscape— will increasingly be illuminated by science.”

Harris’ metaphysical naturalism, then, draws strict boundaries around where he can locate moral values.  Brain states, the physical world around us, and the laws of nature as described by physics, chemistry, and biology exhaust Harris’ ontological resources.

Is Harris’ account of equating moral values, and thus the good, with that which supports well-being, adequate?  The answer is negative as Harris’s metaphysics undermines his moral theory in several different ways.

First, although Harris, in his book, claims to have dealt with G. E. Moore’s “open question argument,” he has not.  Moore argues that, on metaphysical naturalism, properties of the natural world cannot be equated with the good, because it is always an open question whether that property is always good.

Moore argues, “We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.” To assert that because something is natural, or part of the natural world, that it is therefore good, is the naturalistic fallacy.

Although human well-being (described in terms of physical brain states) is a property of the natural world, Harris claims that he nonetheless avoids Moore’s open question argument.  But does he?  It is not at all clear that the well-being of a particular conscious creature is always good.

What about a psychopath?  Some psychopaths gain tremendous pleasure, and thus well-being, from torturing other human beings.  Can we say that the psychopath’s behavior is then morally good?  Harris considers this exact scenario, using serial killer Ted Bundy as an example.

Harris complains that Bundy’s “raping and killing young women was a poor guide to the proper goals of morality (i.e., living a fulfilling life with others).” But notice that now Harris has shifted his definition of the good from Bundy’s personal well-being to Bundy “living a fulfilling life with others,” a tacit admission that moral values cannot be identified with the mere well-being of a conscious creature (e.g., Bundy). It seems that the well-being of some creatures are more important than others. This is a classic thorn in the side of all consequentialist moral theories that Harris has not escaped.

Think about this. Bundy would have said that he was flourishing and living a fulfilling life while raping and killing young women, which would seem to make his behavior good and moral under Harris’s system. In order to save his identification of the moral good, Harris calls an audible and de-emphasizes Bundy’s well-being and instead says that Bundy must live a fulfilling life with others in order to be moral.

Here is the problem. Harris wants to sell us a vision of science studying human well-being as a way of determining what is moral. But when we ask science to study Ted Bundy, Harris concedes that Bundy is a poor guide to morality. So obviously studying the well-being of a conscious creature does not always yield moral guidelines. But how does Harris know this? It seems he is invoking a higher source of the moral good by which to make that call, but he denies that there is a higher source! Something is amiss.

Bottom line: Harris has not escaped the naturalistic fallacy. What is natural (e.g., the well-being of a conscious creature) is not always good. What produced well-being for Ted Bundy was not good at all.

In part 2, we will continue to see how Harris’s metaphysical naturalism fails to ground his moral theory.

What Are Sam Harris’s Metaphysical Presuppositions?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

It is impossible to ground a theory about the source of objective moral values and duties without recourse to metaphysics. Philosopher David Oderberg reminds us that it is “impossible to know how the world ought to go, more specifically how one ought to act (or what makes a state of affairs or action good, or worthwhile, praiseworthy, etc.) without prior knowledge of how the world is.” Metaphysics tells us how the world is.

So what are Sam Harris’s metaphysics? How is the world, according to Sam Harris?

Rather than argue for his metaphysical view, Harris, for the most part in his book The Moral Landscape, merely presupposes that his ontology is correct.  Harris’s worldview can be best described as metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the view that what exists is that which can be described by physics, chemistry, and biology.  Harris reveals that he is a metaphysical naturalist in several ways.

First, recall his thesis summary statement: “Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).” Second, Harris claims that the well-being of conscious creatures “must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.”

In one particularly telling passage, Harris asks the reader to imagine a world where only two people existed, a fictional Adam and Eve.  How might the moral landscape look in that situation?

In fact, there are, by definition, paths that lead to the worst misery and paths that lead to the greatest fulfillment possible for these two people— given the structure of their respective brains, the immediate facts of their environment, and the laws of Nature. The underlying facts here are the facts of physics, chemistry, and biology as they bear on the experience of the only two people in existence.

For Harris, the ontological foundation of ethics consists in brain states, the physical world surrounding human beings, and the natural laws which constrain the physical world.  Again, all of these aspects of reality fit comfortably under the label of metaphysical naturalism.

Might Harris allow other aspects of being into his metaphysics?  How about the notion of a Creator-God?  Harris rules out the existence of God almost immediately in his book as he explains that one of his primary goals is to provide a moral theory which has no need of God.

What about immaterial human souls?  For Harris, the existence of a soul, which is “metaphysically independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person.” In other words, neuroscience has shown that the “soul,” and thus consciousness, really just is neural circuits.

How about the existence of metaphysical principles such as nature, form, or essence?  Harris seems to disavow the existence of essences when he says, “I am certainly not claiming that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings— like the Platonic Form of the Good— or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong.”

It seems that Harris’s ontology allows nothing beyond what physics, chemistry, and biology reveal.  It remains to be seen whether Harris’ metaphysical views can provide an adequate ground for the good.

What Is Sam Harris’s Moral Theory?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

New atheist Sam Harris made a splash with his book The Moral Landscape. In it, Harris claims to have solved the millenia-old debate about the source of objective moral values. Harris is no relativist about moral values. In fact, he reserves some of his harshest criticism for atheists who deny the objectivity of morality.

So what exactly is his thesis? How has he solved the perennial problem of how to ground objective moral values and duties? Here is Harris in his own words:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds— and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

Harris bases his moral theory on the well-being of conscious minds.  These are the two key foundational ideas for him.  For Harris, morality only makes sense given the existence of conscious creatures, since nothing can be valued if there is no conscious creature to do the valuing.  Rocks do not value anything.

Given the importance of conscious creatures, Harris elaborates that “the concept of ‘well-being’ captures all that we can intelligibly value. And ‘morality’— whatever people’s associations with this term happen to be— really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures.” Again, Harris is clear that “meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures— and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.”

Harris’ next move is to make the explicit connection between the well-being of conscious creatures and science.  How exactly does science determine human values?

Questions about values— about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose— are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.

Science, broadly defined as empirical observation and experimentation, can be employed, according to Harris, to determine which thoughts, actions, and behaviors, contribute to the well-being, or flourishing, of human beings.  As human beings flourish, they climb to peaks on a “moral landscape.” The valleys on the landscape represent the misery and suffering of human beings. Harris encourages his readers to allow science to take humanity to the peaks of the moral landscape, and out of the valleys.

Now that we have a basic understanding of Harris’s “moral landscape,” we next need to understand his metaphysical presuppositions. That will come in a future post.

Why Does the Denial of Moral Facts Undercut Knowledge of Any Kind?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Moral skeptics frequently argue that evolution has tricked us into thinking that our moral judgments are based on mind-independent moral facts. Even though it seems like our moral judgments are examples of authentic reasoning, they are not. Joshua Greene is a typical voice of moral skepticism:

Moral judgment is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an emotional nature. Our capacity for moral judgment is a complex evolutionary adaptation to an intensely social life. We are, in fact, so well adapted to making moral judgments that our making them is, from our point of view, rather easy, a part of “common sense.” And like many of our common sense abilities, our ability to make moral judgments feels to us like a perceptual ability, an ability, in this case, to discern immediately and reliably mind-independent moral facts. As a result, we are naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism. The psychological tendencies that encourage this false belief serve an important biological purpose, and that explains why we should find moral realism so attractive even though it is false. Moral realism is, once again, a mistake we were born to make.

Although we may think we are making moral judgments based on mind-independent moral facts, this is imply an illusion caused by evolution. We are simply mistaken to think that moral facts actually exist. According to “New Atheist” Sam Harris, “Greene alleges that moral realism assumes that ‘there is sufficient uniformity in people’s underlying moral outlooks to warrant speaking as if there is a fact of the matter about what’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘just’ or ‘unjust.’’

Harris asks:

But do we really need to assume such uniformity for there to be right answers to moral questions? Is physical or biological realism predicated on “sufficient uniformity in people’s underlying [physical or biological] outlooks”? Taking humanity as a whole, I am quite certain that there is a greater consensus that cruelty is wrong (a common moral precept) than the passage of time varies with velocity (special relativity) or that humans and lobsters share a common ancestor (evolution). Should we doubt whether there is a “fact of the matter” with respect to these physical and biological truth claims?

Greene concludes that moral intuitions cannot be trusted, but that science can:

[M] oral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if they were … If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and sociology— not normative ethics.

Is this true? Did natural selection fail to design moral truth tracking, but succeed in designing biological, psychological, and sociological truth tracking? In other words, did evolution bequeath us the ability to discover mind-independent, objective facts about non-moral domains of knowledge? Harris argues that this is a dangerous move for the moral skeptic to make. The price to be paid is high. Harris explains:

This objection to moral realism may seem reasonable, until one notices that it can be applied, with the same leveling effect, to any domain of human knowledge. For instance, it is just as true to say that our logical, mathematical, and physical intuitions have not been designed by natural selection to track the Truth. Does this mean that we must cease to be realists with respect to physical reality?

Deny that moral facts exist and you end up having to deny that truths of any kind exist. There is no way, says Harris, to argue that evolution gave us the ability to know facts about logic, math, and physical reality, while at the same time fooling us about the existence of moral facts. It’s a package deal, like it or not.

Amusing Take On the "New Atheists"

I read this over on GeoChristian’s Blog.  It doesn’t advance the argument for Christianity at all, but I think it does give the reader some insight into the minds of the crop of new atheist writers who have been attacking Christianity for the last few years.

Rev. Cwirla, in his review of the Charlotte Allen article on atheism that I linked to in my previous post, summarizes the new atheist (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Myers, et al.) arguments as follows:

1.  The existence of God can’t be proven scientifically, therefore there is no God.

2.  Religious people do bad things, therefore there is no God.

3.  No one has yet to convince me there is a God, therefore there is no God.

4.  The world sucks, therefore there is no God.

5.  Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don’t exist, therefore there is no God.

Pretty good summary of the shallowness of modern atheism.