March 23, 2009
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Bill Vallicella & "Sam Harris, Atheists, and Moral Foundations"
Intro:I happened upon an interesting post over at Maverick Philosopher's typepad blog, titled, "Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil." Basically, Bill gives his perspective on a quote from Sam Harris' book, Letter to a Christian Nation. Sam said, "If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)" Bill puts this in argument form, criticizes it as illogical, and then tells us that Sam Harris is confused about morality. I haven't figured out how to post long comments on Bill's site, so this may only show up here.
Hello all!I hope you guys don't mind me adding a little atheist commentary to this post and comment exchange here. Perhaps I can shed a little light on some of the complexities of the morality scuffle between theists and atheists.
I'm glad to see that Bill says: "Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists '. . . are at least as well behaved as the general population.'"
And yet, even in his own comments, a representative of the people Sam Harris is clearly addressing speaks his mind:
Matt says, "For my part, I think it's got to be true that atheists are on the whole less moral than atheists." [emphasis mine]
Bill says: "But the point of this post is not to take sides on the question of the basis of morality, but simply to point out that Sam Harris has confused two quite obviously distinct questions."
I'd like to point out instead that theists often enough are just as "confused" as Harris is and that it confuses the issue even further to not recognize that and deal with the problem.
And yet Edward warns, "I know of no prominent theist philosophers who have actually argued that atheists are in fact less moral as a people than theists. Harris, along with all of the other anti-theists, is responding to a straw-man."
Matt seems to think it's not so much of a straw-man.
After all this, Matt says: "But you fail to mention what, if anything, is illegitimate or wrong-headed about my expressed attitudes."
The connection isn't logical. It's an emotionally intuitive dead end as the stats Sam points to show. Thus, in my opinion, Bill misdirects the conversation with a technically accurate yet practically meaningless point. Prominent theistic philosophers may indeed pay lip service to the facts both Sam, Bill, and Edward (and myself) affirm. By making a stink about it and bringing such misdirected criticism against folks like Sam, they reinforce the non-sequiter in the general populace. People naturally expect the lack of a supernatural foundation to morality to matter. And who can blame them?
Edward says: "How can atheism have a metaphysical foundation for anything?"
Just what is this claim all about? What metaphysical foundation do these "inconsistent" atheists need to be justified in continuing to do what they clearly are already doing? The whole spectrum of the human population finds ways to be relatively as well behaved as everyone else and apparently they don't need a spiritual connection to God or holy writ to do it. Are we to believe these people do not understand anything about why they act as they do? How plausible is that? And yet John seems to be rather convinced:
John says: "Edward, that's what atheists get out of a content-less definition" [emphasis mine]
What exactly does "content-less" really mean here? It is as though it is admitted that everyone carries around a pocket watch, but that only theists have little gears in theirs. But somehow the atheists' pocket watches still keep just as good of time? Weird. Either these moral "gears" are things that are easily understood as mere persistent patterns of human psychology (or ideas that make that work best) applicable to most or they are maybe in reality something like the magic feather from the old animated Disney film, Dumbo . You can tell me why I should think otherwise, but that's not really important right now. Theists expect the "moral watch" to not work without the "gears." Yet, the "watches" actually work and the things that atheists will tell them about are the exact same basic moral gears most people live and die with (like the principles of reciprocation, for instance). Despite what Bill in this post would like to affirm in passing as uninterestingly true, it appears what he does think is more interesting unravels and degrades in practice for many theists (if not for Bill himself) to basically the same thing that Sam was getting at. I find this rather irresponsible of Bill and many theistic philosophers like him. I'm not picking on you, Bill! This is my first comment here! eek...don't take too much offense.
It is one thing to believe you have some technically correct philosophical point to make in order to defend your worldview in the public square of ideas. It is another to recognize in terms of decision theory that putting the issue on the back burner has no detrimental practical effect to society as a whole. In fact, by finding common moral ground in conversation and building from it, everyone profits from this and Christianity looks better for it. Non-believers are not "accidentally" dehumanized with this unstable, moral foundation talk and Christianity doesn't look like it's trying to claim what it cannot prove it owns when more important matters to solidarity are clearly at stake. If Christianity's philosophers are correct, then the suggested forbearance is a good advertisement and lead in towards their understanding of moral things. On the other hand, it seems to me that maintaining the issue (even if correct) retards the overall conversation on morality in our culture making it about things that apparently don't really matter in practice.
In fact, Bill even says, "This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?" [emphasis mine]
Further, if in the event Christian intellectuals are wrong about the technicality and morality is actually all in our heads (a la mirror neurons and such), wow. That'd be a double bummer wouldn't it?
To summarize my unsolicited advice here, minimize the technicality and address the more important issue, because theists like Matt are alive and well and quite numerous it seems. Food for thought, if nothing else.
Thanks for reading! I hope I've added something worthwhile to the conversation.
Ben
Outro:What I find thoroughly uninteresting about this "conversation with a Christian nation" is that it keeps public discourse spinning on meaningless philosophical minutia that high brow philosophers cannot even work out and attain a consensus on themselves. It is continually deferred to from a lay level as though it isn't anything other than another equally contentious and even less understood debate. Bill asks if atheists are "justified" in heeding a moral code and he might as well ask them if they are justified in heeding gravity if the Standard Model is incomplete. Who the hell are theists to tell atheists that their reasons for being moral are not justified? Theists want to fix what is not broke. Their unsubstantiated extraordinary philosophical category of conclusion asserting circular justification is just as indefensible as the ancient dysfunctional morality it supposedly endorses. Not only are theists of many stripes egregiously wrong on these issues, but their anti-materialistic incredulity keeps an incredibly important cultural conversation locked up at the most banal of levels. Whereas theistic philosophers like Bill would like to direct the conversation towards the non-empirical and the practically meaningless, I would be incredibly happy to direct them towards evaluating explicitly empirical, practical moral claims that are too difficult and complicated to figure out in terms of ordinary personal experience. That's what science is for. Moral facts are facts of how human psychology actually works in the real world. Folks like Sam Harris and Richard Carrier are known for promoting the advancement, respect, and desire for just such a science of morality. Unfortunately too many people are too busy defending superstition with modern sophistry to get the public discourse to a meaningful and engaging level. I often wish I'd been born in the future after these petty, stupid, and ignorant battles would have already been long over.
Ben
