I think it’s not quite as simple as that. When we discussed the scope of science in a university seminar one of my fellow students said: “If scientists where to find out that rooms which are painted yellow make students happy, couldn’t we then say that the university ought to paint its rooms yellow? Isn’t then science able to answer one of those pesky ‘ought’-questions?”
The logical slip is a subtle one. The ‘ought’-question to answer is not whether the rooms ought to be painted yellow, it’s whether students ought to be happy. Sure, if you know that what you want are happy students or a flourishing human society, morality becomes a problem that is easily accessible to the tools of empiricism or science. But that first step is a problem.
I don’t, however, think it’s a big problem. Humans are remarkably similar – most of us want the same things: flourishing societies and rather more happiness than suffering. And that’s pretty much all it takes to lay your foundation. After that it’s all smooth sailing with the tools of science. Sure, there are edge cases (abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so on) but to claim that religion has any kind of edge in answering those cases is completely ridiculous.
Ronald Merrill suggested a couple of decades ago that "normative ought" and "instrumental ought" are likely two sides of the same issue which he called the "unification of oughts" (rather like Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism, Merrill was an engineer). That "normative ought" in morality is an instrumental ought with an understood object (for example to improve your or someone else's life); and I would suggest the proper study of morality may be to understand, make explicit, and rank/prioritize those implicit objects.
Sure, science can answer moral questions IF you have a pre-scientific moral framework. For instance, "the suffering of conscious beings should be avoided." Then science can help you figure out who/what are conscious beings, under what circumstances they suffer and how to end their suffering.
Unfortunately, the speaker misses the fact that science alone gives no basis for morality.
The point is that you can have a moral (whatever that means) society without religion.
Mirror neurons is what allow us to put ourselves in others place, thus feeling empathy with them. This and this alone is the basis for the possibility of some sort of social dynamics.
I have people in my life I love and don't want anything to happen to so I can recognize that there are other people who feel the same about some they care about.
I am therefore willing to make a deal with these other people that we don't hurt those who other people love and they don't hurt who we love.
It's really that simply but of course the emergent complexity of this is much bigger.
Honestly as someone who has spent the better part of his life studying Ethics it’s sad that something like this is given credence. Not because he’s completely off base but because he’s an amateur whose put no study into the actual field. He’s repeating things that Immanuel Kant and Sir Thomas Aquinas thought up centuries ago but doesn’t know it because he’s never bothered to look past his own echo chamber.
His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering” and his scientific twist on this is that technology such as neuroscience can objectively gauge suffering for us.
The problem with his theory is that it’s simplistic and is in fact the moral philosophy that’s usually debunked on day one of a good Ethics class. Generally the counter argument is something like this…
Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?
Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. Bottom line: Sam Harris treats secular morality as if it’s some kind of new concept and it just isn’t. People have been studying it since at least 400 B.C. (namely Aristotle) and anyone talking about a topic while ignoring 2,410 years of previous thought towards that topic is nothing more than a fool.
You miss the point entirely, and your "counterexample" is a non-sequitur.
The purpose of Harris's speech is to argue, against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain, that there are ethical and moral truths to be found even if we cannot yet discern them. In response you mount a straw-man argument against a coarse implementation of utilitarian ethics, but this doesn't even relate to Harris's point.
To answer: yes, it would be a bad idea to kill all children found torturing small animals. Why? Because, as human beings, we would suffer greatly in such a society (to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling, and children don't flourish into healthy adults in a society where their murder is considered acceptable), even if a naive implementation of utilitarian ethics incorrectly indicates that such an approach leads to the greatest overall happiness. That this is a fact subject to evidence, rather than a simple matter of opinion, is Harris's point here.
I've noticed an interesting internet trend over the years.
1) I spent several hundred hours chasing down some topic I like, such as ethics, philosophy of science, global warming, The Crusades, whatever
2) Joe Blow the famous internet guy gets a bug stuck in his butt about the same topic -- perhaps he saw it on Oprah or read it on a discarded cocktail napkin. Who knows.
3) Joe does a TED talk, writes a blog, or some other way tells us his deep thoughts, most of which sound like a spin-off of The Matrix. Very cool. Very shallow. And without any historical context.
Everybody oohs and ahs and talks about how cool Joe is.
I'm not saying that has happened here. I'm not saying that I have some kind of deep insight. God knows I'm Joe to some other schmuck. All I'm saying is that reading blogs or watching videos in which people say trivial things while others applaud is getting a bit tiring. I love everybody participating in a debate! But I wish there was some way to rank the content of the material so I wouldn't have to go over elementary material -- many times arguing with people who don't know better. Talk about a waste of time for everybody.
Some kind of difficulty-rating system for internet material would be really cool. Save us all a lot of time on mis-matched conversations.
For someone who has spent the better part of his life studying ethics, I'd expect you to come up with a better example to refute someone who has also spent a great deal of time studying ethics and written books on the subject.
Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?
This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
The problem with this scenario is that it vastly oversimplifies utilitarianism, presuming that only deaths matter and that a utilitarian model of ethics would demand the death of the child; an emotionally repugnant act.
In fact, the quantifiable harm from society intentionally killing a child due to its potential risk could be far greater than the eventual potential deaths from letting that child survive. It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
Well, to do the least harm, you would probably send the kid to therapy, monitor them, or even lock them up, not kill them. The reason it seems so odd to lock up a kid for torturing a small animal is that it's really not that predictive. Not even close. So your example is just really, really terrible.
So, great, you're the Ethics (capital E!) genius of Hacker News. I still thought it was a great talk though. But what do I know.
First, Harris has a degree in philosophy, so he has had your "Ethics class";
Second, you sound exactly like those religious nutjobs that attacked Dawkins for "The God Delusion" because he didn't know theology.
Third, "Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings." is almost certainly a bogus claim reasoning from that we know most psychos started by tormenting animals to the unjustified claim that most who torment animals go on to harm humans. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name on the fallacy right now.
>His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering"
You've got it flat-out wrong.
Suffering is one value where he's pretty sure he's got the right factual answer, and some good answers on achieving the value, so he used it as an example.
He DID say that all human values he's seen boil down to being about conscious experience, but that's also a factual claim. There could be values outside of that.
If you asked most people to name 2 or 3 current Professors of Ethics you'd find Peter Singer at the top of your list. I wonder if he can also refute Bentham on day one of a good Ethics class as you can.
I would certainly not call Sam Sam Harris an amateur and I would place a large bet on his close familiarity with Aquinas, Kant as well as Bentham or Singer with whom he is in agreement from his degrees in philosophy, his constant debates on the subject and his professional life as a writer and lecturer on the subject.
He is a proponent of treating questions of a moral, religious or transcendental nature as scientific questions to be approached via reason. He is a neuroscientist.
* I'm think Thomas Aquinas was a saint, not a knight.
I counter your example by proposing that we are headed for a world where my unborn children and grandchildren would be monitored and reevaluated until that confidence level is as small as society will demand, and that treatment responses will not be limited to a simple extinguishing of life. It then becomes acceptable loss.
I believe this is the key message that Sam Harris wanted to deliver is that technology will significantly swing the power of scientific methods in relevant moral debates.
Moral systems have evolved because that is a good way of maintaining the complex dynamics of a society.
How they work can perfectly well be explained by science if we are too look at it from a social dynamic point of view with mirror neurons at the center. Which also will explain why some people don't have empathy.
Science can obviously not explain WHY something is right or wrong but there is absolutely nothing that indicates that this can or should be answered. As long as the mechanics work.
I'm not sure when it comes out, but he earlier did an authors@google talk on the same subject, which has been embargoed so the TED version came out first. My comments are based on that earlier version of this talk.
Sam did a very good job of demonstrating that it would be really good if we could get morality from science. He did a good job of pointing out that science can validly inform our decision making. However he misses the fact that science is about problems that are tractable, not important. And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has.
In essence it is the same mistake the social sciences make. The case that something is important, and that data is a useful thing to have in studying it, does not suffice to make a compelling case that we are on the right line of research.
One point at least briefly mentioned in the TED version is the advancements in brain scanning. I am personally an advocate of the singularity theory of technology, and I am of the opinion that we will get to a point where the psychological and social issues will be describable with sound neurology, and it will become a tractable problem.
"And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has."
That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.
i know it's difficult or often impossible to accurately title talks like these, but this one is pretty far off. he stays somewhat on topic for a while but ends up drifting really far into compromising western and middle eastern values. i think "moral expertise" or something along those lines would have been better.
The problem with basing your morals on religion (or science for that matter) is that biblical passages can often be taken out of context to validate any action, the same way scientific data can be looked at in many different perspectives (lying with statistics).
Morality is difficult to explain. I think most people just know what is right and what is wrong. A lot of people look to a higher power (religion or science) to justify the wrong actions they want to take.
Everyone thinks they know right from wrong. The problem comes when what one person "knows" disagrees with what the next person "knows". Society is full of important debates about moral questions which people legitimately disagree on. (See abortion.) And Sam's presentation does nothing to help us sort those questions out. (Well actually he asserts his morality. But that won't convince people who fundamentally disagree with him.)
Now some people like to point out that evolutionary biology has a lot to say about why we develop the internal moral compasses we do. Morality really does seem to be bred into us. But the problem is that the same evolutionary incentives that breed moral behavior also breed negative characteristics like xenophobia and a willingness to selectively cheat. So evolution explains both what we like and dislike about human behavior, and provides no useful way for us to distinguish them.
Good talk, but I can't help feeling that John Stuart Mill said all this more than a century ago, and most of the history of economics consists of his and other people's attempts to address the same questions.
On the other hand, with so much ignorance and BS in the world, even in wealthy societies, restating these ideas as often and fluently as possible is a worthwhile endeavor.
Careful, of all the places where language makes it easy to trip up and misunderstand each other, this one is particularly filled with land mines.
Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded.
He is, I think, fairly clear in saying that science does not tell us what specifically is morally "good" or "bad," but rather that science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness. I'm sure most everyone here will agree that this is not an outrageous claim. Since moral questions usually deal with issues of prosperity and happiness, he concludes that we shouldn't be afraid to bring up science in such discussions.
I agree with you (and him) that "science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness." However, that presupposes that "human prosperity and happiness" is something that we should consider valuable. This is (almost) a classic utilitarian POV. But what if we don't all agree that utilitarianism is what we should be after? What if you're a Kantian? Or an Egoist? Or an emotivist/expressivist?
Harris sells us utilitarianism and utilitarianism alone. His views would be much more palatable if he distinguished between the moral theory he is espousing and his argument that science can help us interpret/apply the theory.
I believe that deontological ethics - that is, coming to decide right and wrong actions - is superior to consequentialist ethics, which is to judge actions by their expected results.
Many people would disagree with me - a lot of people are consequentialists. But consequentialism usually fails, once you start saying "The ends justify the means" you get into bad places really fast.
Historically speaking, consequentialism has produced lots of problems and not much success.
Another way of saying this would be that you can create a mathematical model of morality and have it answer your questions of morality in particular situations. If you come from the viewpoint that there is a mathematical model of everything (waiting to be discovered) then this is pretty obvious.
[+] [-] ugh|16 years ago|reply
The logical slip is a subtle one. The ‘ought’-question to answer is not whether the rooms ought to be painted yellow, it’s whether students ought to be happy. Sure, if you know that what you want are happy students or a flourishing human society, morality becomes a problem that is easily accessible to the tools of empiricism or science. But that first step is a problem.
I don’t, however, think it’s a big problem. Humans are remarkably similar – most of us want the same things: flourishing societies and rather more happiness than suffering. And that’s pretty much all it takes to lay your foundation. After that it’s all smooth sailing with the tools of science. Sure, there are edge cases (abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so on) but to claim that religion has any kind of edge in answering those cases is completely ridiculous.
[+] [-] billswift|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgejman|16 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, the speaker misses the fact that science alone gives no basis for morality.
[+] [-] ThomPete|16 years ago|reply
Mirror neurons is what allow us to put ourselves in others place, thus feeling empathy with them. This and this alone is the basis for the possibility of some sort of social dynamics.
I have people in my life I love and don't want anything to happen to so I can recognize that there are other people who feel the same about some they care about.
I am therefore willing to make a deal with these other people that we don't hurt those who other people love and they don't hurt who we love.
It's really that simply but of course the emergent complexity of this is much bigger.
[+] [-] indrax|16 years ago|reply
What we value is a matter of fact, it is complex and not directly clear to us, so it's exactly the kind of problem we need science to help with.
[+] [-] andrewcooke|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|16 years ago|reply
His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering” and his scientific twist on this is that technology such as neuroscience can objectively gauge suffering for us.
The problem with his theory is that it’s simplistic and is in fact the moral philosophy that’s usually debunked on day one of a good Ethics class. Generally the counter argument is something like this…
Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?
Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. Bottom line: Sam Harris treats secular morality as if it’s some kind of new concept and it just isn’t. People have been studying it since at least 400 B.C. (namely Aristotle) and anyone talking about a topic while ignoring 2,410 years of previous thought towards that topic is nothing more than a fool.
[+] [-] Niten|16 years ago|reply
The purpose of Harris's speech is to argue, against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain, that there are ethical and moral truths to be found even if we cannot yet discern them. In response you mount a straw-man argument against a coarse implementation of utilitarian ethics, but this doesn't even relate to Harris's point.
To answer: yes, it would be a bad idea to kill all children found torturing small animals. Why? Because, as human beings, we would suffer greatly in such a society (to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling, and children don't flourish into healthy adults in a society where their murder is considered acceptable), even if a naive implementation of utilitarian ethics incorrectly indicates that such an approach leads to the greatest overall happiness. That this is a fact subject to evidence, rather than a simple matter of opinion, is Harris's point here.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|16 years ago|reply
1) I spent several hundred hours chasing down some topic I like, such as ethics, philosophy of science, global warming, The Crusades, whatever
2) Joe Blow the famous internet guy gets a bug stuck in his butt about the same topic -- perhaps he saw it on Oprah or read it on a discarded cocktail napkin. Who knows.
3) Joe does a TED talk, writes a blog, or some other way tells us his deep thoughts, most of which sound like a spin-off of The Matrix. Very cool. Very shallow. And without any historical context.
Everybody oohs and ahs and talks about how cool Joe is.
I'm not saying that has happened here. I'm not saying that I have some kind of deep insight. God knows I'm Joe to some other schmuck. All I'm saying is that reading blogs or watching videos in which people say trivial things while others applaud is getting a bit tiring. I love everybody participating in a debate! But I wish there was some way to rank the content of the material so I wouldn't have to go over elementary material -- many times arguing with people who don't know better. Talk about a waste of time for everybody.
Some kind of difficulty-rating system for internet material would be really cool. Save us all a lot of time on mis-matched conversations.
[+] [-] fnid2|16 years ago|reply
I think your condescension is misdirected.
[+] [-] aphyr|16 years ago|reply
This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
The problem with this scenario is that it vastly oversimplifies utilitarianism, presuming that only deaths matter and that a utilitarian model of ethics would demand the death of the child; an emotionally repugnant act.
In fact, the quantifiable harm from society intentionally killing a child due to its potential risk could be far greater than the eventual potential deaths from letting that child survive. It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
[+] [-] xenophanes|16 years ago|reply
I don't think moral discussion should focus on unpleasant edge cases. More interesting and useful is how to handle more common situations.
[+] [-] pkulak|16 years ago|reply
So, great, you're the Ethics (capital E!) genius of Hacker News. I still thought it was a great talk though. But what do I know.
[+] [-] billswift|16 years ago|reply
First, Harris has a degree in philosophy, so he has had your "Ethics class";
Second, you sound exactly like those religious nutjobs that attacked Dawkins for "The God Delusion" because he didn't know theology.
Third, "Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings." is almost certainly a bogus claim reasoning from that we know most psychos started by tormenting animals to the unjustified claim that most who torment animals go on to harm humans. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name on the fallacy right now.
[+] [-] ThomPete|16 years ago|reply
I also find it quite ironic that you speak of echo chambers. This is exactly how I see Ethics.
Ethics is interpretation of phenomena it's not something that exist "out there" it's not something you can study as anything but history IMHO.
It's not in a one to one relationship with what is "really" going on. Just as Love, Hate and so many other human constructs.
[+] [-] indrax|16 years ago|reply
You've got it flat-out wrong.
Suffering is one value where he's pretty sure he's got the right factual answer, and some good answers on achieving the value, so he used it as an example.
He DID say that all human values he's seen boil down to being about conscious experience, but that's also a factual claim. There could be values outside of that.
[+] [-] netcan|16 years ago|reply
I would certainly not call Sam Sam Harris an amateur and I would place a large bet on his close familiarity with Aquinas, Kant as well as Bentham or Singer with whom he is in agreement from his degrees in philosophy, his constant debates on the subject and his professional life as a writer and lecturer on the subject.
He is a proponent of treating questions of a moral, religious or transcendental nature as scientific questions to be approached via reason. He is a neuroscientist.
* I'm think Thomas Aquinas was a saint, not a knight.
[+] [-] winthrowe|16 years ago|reply
I believe this is the key message that Sam Harris wanted to deliver is that technology will significantly swing the power of scientific methods in relevant moral debates.
[+] [-] ThomPete|16 years ago|reply
How they work can perfectly well be explained by science if we are too look at it from a social dynamic point of view with mirror neurons at the center. Which also will explain why some people don't have empathy.
Science can obviously not explain WHY something is right or wrong but there is absolutely nothing that indicates that this can or should be answered. As long as the mechanics work.
[+] [-] btilly|16 years ago|reply
Sam did a very good job of demonstrating that it would be really good if we could get morality from science. He did a good job of pointing out that science can validly inform our decision making. However he misses the fact that science is about problems that are tractable, not important. And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has.
In essence it is the same mistake the social sciences make. The case that something is important, and that data is a useful thing to have in studying it, does not suffice to make a compelling case that we are on the right line of research.
See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h... for a more detailed explanation of my opinions about what is and is not science.
[+] [-] winthrowe|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Niten|16 years ago|reply
That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.
[+] [-] xenophanes|16 years ago|reply
It's immoral to live in a non-error-correcting way because doing so dooms you to repeat your mistakes (whatever they may be) indefinitely.
[+] [-] godDLL|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hubb|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmiller|16 years ago|reply
Morality is difficult to explain. I think most people just know what is right and what is wrong. A lot of people look to a higher power (religion or science) to justify the wrong actions they want to take.
[+] [-] btilly|16 years ago|reply
Now some people like to point out that evolutionary biology has a lot to say about why we develop the internal moral compasses we do. Morality really does seem to be bred into us. But the problem is that the same evolutionary incentives that breed moral behavior also breed negative characteristics like xenophobia and a willingness to selectively cheat. So evolution explains both what we like and dislike about human behavior, and provides no useful way for us to distinguish them.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|16 years ago|reply
On the other hand, with so much ignorance and BS in the world, even in wealthy societies, restating these ideas as often and fluently as possible is a worthwhile endeavor.
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] itistoday|16 years ago|reply
Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded.
He is, I think, fairly clear in saying that science does not tell us what specifically is morally "good" or "bad," but rather that science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness. I'm sure most everyone here will agree that this is not an outrageous claim. Since moral questions usually deal with issues of prosperity and happiness, he concludes that we shouldn't be afraid to bring up science in such discussions.
[+] [-] rgejman|16 years ago|reply
Harris sells us utilitarianism and utilitarianism alone. His views would be much more palatable if he distinguished between the moral theory he is espousing and his argument that science can help us interpret/apply the theory.
[+] [-] lionhearted|16 years ago|reply
I don't think it is particularly well founded for a reason that hasn't been mentioned yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
I believe that deontological ethics - that is, coming to decide right and wrong actions - is superior to consequentialist ethics, which is to judge actions by their expected results.
Many people would disagree with me - a lot of people are consequentialists. But consequentialism usually fails, once you start saying "The ends justify the means" you get into bad places really fast.
Historically speaking, consequentialism has produced lots of problems and not much success.
[+] [-] marshallp|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogermugs|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jemfinch|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cousin_it|16 years ago|reply
And don't even get me started on the Repugnant Conclusion problem...