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I find it really hard taking notes on my phone, so I’m not sure that I’m going to have much of an overall thesis to share with you. But here’s Harris’s central thesis for this work as he describes it:
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.
And, a few “pages” later:
In my view, morality must be viewed in the context of our growing scientific understanding of the mind. If there are truths to be known about the mind, there will be truths to be known about how minds flourish; consequently, there will be truths to be known about good and evil.
Essentially, there are right and wrong answers to moral questions that are discoverable by science. There are, as far as I can tell, only two presuppositions that undergird that view. The first, when we say morality, we mean the well-being of conscious minds, and the second, there is no such thing as magic.
If you agree with those presuppositions, then Harris’s statements about the scientific discoverability of peaks and valleys on the moral landscape come to little more than a tautology. It is very much like saying A is A. But if you don’t agree with those presuppositions -- and many people do not -- then the ideas in this book can be subversive, and maybe dangerous.
Harris tries to deal with these criticisms in the text itself, addressing himself frequently to philosopher and literary critic Russell Blackford.
By analogy to the rest of science, I have argued that the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone can be presupposed -- and upon this axiom we can build a science of morality that can then determine (yes, “determine”) myriad other human values.
But it is exactly this presupposition -- that “avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone” is a morally valuable goal -- that Blackford, and others, seem to disagree with. Here is Harris quoting Blackford directly.
“[W]e usually accept that people act in competition with each other, each seeking the outcome that most benefits them and their loved ones. We don’t demand that everyone agree to accept whatever course will maximize the well-being of conscious creatures overall. Nothing like that is part of our ordinary idea of what it is to behave morally.”
It seems kind of bankrupt to me -- and to Harris. The Blackfords of the world seem to be saying that “doing what’s good for me and my loved ones” has to be the basis of morality, because we are forever lost in our subjective view of things and can never actually determine objective reality.
Contrary to Blackford’s assertion, I’m not simply claiming that morality is “fully determined by an objective reality, independent of people’s actual values and desires.” I am claiming that people’s actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of this -- indeed, we must -- in order to talk about what is actually good.
There’s a lot of back and forth like this in the book. In my view, Harris’s critics don’t understand the point he is making because they are dualists. They say our values come from magic and your science can’t touch them. But Harris says, no, your values are science, they have to be, because magic ain’t real.
That’s about the best I can do. But here are a few other paragraphs that I managed to highlight in the text, with the commentary I was able to attach to each with the “notes” function.
Muslim Algebra
Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, we will see that there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.
Such an amazing point. The morality of human flourishing is a science, not a culturally-derived practice. The parallel to math is insightful. Just because you were taught 2 + 2 = 5 does not mean it’s true. And just because you were taught to stone unruly children does not make that right.
Getting a “What” from an “Is”
While I agree with Moore that it is reasonable to wonder whether maximizing pleasure in any given instance is “good,” it makes no sense at all to ask whether maximizing well-being is “good.”
Is the problem really this easily resolved? Science doesn’t tell us what we ought to do, it tells us what to do to increase well-being. From the “is,” not an “ought” but a “what”?
Pleasure Does Not Equal Moral
What if certain people would actually prefer the Bad Life to the Good Life? Perhaps there are psychopaths and sadists who can expect to thrive in the context of the Bad Life and would enjoy nothing more than killing other people with machetes.
Sam doesn’t give the most obvious answer of all. Just because one person derives pleasure from it doesn’t mean it’s what’s best for human well-being.
It seems clear that ascending the slopes of the moral landscape may sometimes require suffering.
See previous note. Just as human well-being may require things that most people find unpleasant.
Exorcizing the Noble Savage
Robert Edgerton performed a book-length exorcism on the myth of the “noble savage,” detailing the ways in which the most influential anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s -- such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict -- systematically exaggerated the harmony of folk societies and ignored their all too frequent barbarism or reflexively attributed it to the malign influence of colonialists, traders, missionaries, and the like.
Get this book.
Grotesquely Confused
It seems clear that the Catholic Church is as misguided in speaking about the “moral” peril of contraception, for instance, as it would be in speaking about the “physics” of Transubstantiation. In both domains, it is true to say that the Church is grotesquely confused about which things in their world are worth paying attention to.
Amen to that.
Because most religions conceive of morality as a matter of being obedient to the word of God (generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward), their precepts often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in this world. Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm.
Another amazing point. Religious morality measures against God’s happiness, not against the happiness of conscious creatures. Is it any wonder then why it can actually cause suffering, while still being touted as moral?
The Problem with Trolley Problems
I am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-being).
Yes. Like the trolley problems. They measure our flawed moral intuitions.
It seems to me, however, that a science of morality can absorb these details: scenarios that appear, on paper, to lead to the same outcome (e.g., one life lost, five lives saved), may actually have different consequences in the real world.
The essential problem of the trolley problem. They don’t measure the real world.
The Solution?
Would it be possible to design a video game that could help solve the problem of homelessness in the real world?
The big idea. Build things that people want to do that actually solve problems -- homelessness, climate change, etc. What would they be? And what effect would knowing the solving was taking place have on people’s desire to do them? Would they play a game they knew was solving homelessness?
Societal Insecurity
While it has been widely argued that religious pluralism and competition have caused religion to flourish in the United States, with state-church monopolies leading to its decline in Western Europe, the support for this “religious market theory” now appears weak. It seems, rather, that religiosity is strongly coupled to perceptions of societal insecurity.
Big idea -- if true.
Mental Illness?
The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern. This was made especially vivid in a recent court case involving a small group of very committed Christians accused of murdering an eighteen-month-old infant. The trouble began when the boy ceased to say “Amen” before meals. Believing that he had developed “a spirit of rebellion,” the group, which included the boy’s mother, deprived him of food and water until he died. Upon being indicted, the mother accepted an unusual plea agreement: she vowed to cooperate in the prosecution of her codefendants under the condition that all charges be dropped if her sone were resurrected. The prosecutor accepted this plea provided that that resurrection was “Jesus-like” and did not include reincarnation as another person or animal. Despite the fact that his band of lunatics carried the boy’s corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reanimation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffer from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.
God. Go back and read the diagnostic criteria. How are they not mentally ill? Is it just a semantic definition?
It Is Always a Continuum
What if mice show greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.) What if dogs do too? (Ditto.) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?
What is unique to humans never is. Always a continuum.
Harris at His Best
Thus, Collins’s faith is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba -- and do not even merit an hour on cable television -- somehow become especially credible when set in the prescientific religious context of the first-century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by discrepant and fragmentary copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts. It is on this basis that the current head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:
1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.
2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven” -- where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.
3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truths ever revealed about the cosmos.
4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.
5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.
Harris at his best. More of this, please.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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