Objection #1:

The "Brave New World" objection (that Harris answers himself here) is abysmal in that it assumes such satisfaction is even feasible or relevant.  When there is too much severance from reality, the odds of maintaining the desired mental state decrease.  If it truly was a genuinely real so-called "fool's paradise" who is the fool? The ONLY reason that dystopian movies convince us that certain visions of the future suck is by appealing to the obvious suckage and misery going on in conscious creatures despite the obviously mistaken pretenses of paradise.  Yo dawg, I pointed out their spot fail on your spot fail so you can fail to spot your fail while proving Harris right. 

How does one attain complex forms of edification based off of mere drug induced states?  We enjoy interacting with our environment to attain those states, so I'm not really sure how the two could be feasibly separated or why it even matters if they can.  If one is just as good as the other, then why are we complaining?  There has to be some basis for the complaint and it seems the scenario, if we assume it is 100% efficient, by definition has eliminated it.  Otherwise it is appealing to something.  And if it is appealing to something, it has to be real, and the only reason we are going to be concerned about it in any way is because of our affinity for certain mental states.  There's no escaping it. 

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On the Amazon website for Harris' book, a commenter raised a similar objection:

If people obtain psychic benefits from such false beliefs, should we discourage them? If someone asks whether we prefer the red pill (reality) or the blue pill (delusion), how should we answer?

In the movie The Matrix, Cypher eventually realizes that he prefers the Matrix delusion:

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.

Is he wrong?

False beliefs can be "okay" but not ideal. Some are more benign than others. Please note that even in the movie Cypher died the horrible death of a coward because he was screwing people over and they weren't very happy about that. There are almost never any "perfect scams" as that behavior is especially risky given the universal law of reciprocation. Only the most absurd of philosophical conundrums can really hope to contradict that rule of thumb. And those things pretty much never happen and shouldn't be a stumbling block to developing a full blown practical moral science as Harris conceives of it. 

The Matrix movie as an example is actually atrociously bad at presenting the peril of a false world, since the world is actually just as good or better than the "real" world.  In fact it manufactures Matrix-depression out of thin air as though just for the sake of it not being real we can somehow mystically detect that.  Neo even goes so far as to say that his favorite noodle eating experience was "invalid" as though that really even means anything.  EVERY noodle eating experience is just a simulation in your brain.  The point here is that everyone was wrong about the Matrix, including the Architect, Morpheous, and pretty much everyone else.  The "path of Neo" was actually about transcending every narrow-minded worldview and doing a new right thing based off of a self-generated humanistic and fallible paradigm.  No one knew what was going to happen given the escalating circumstances of Smiths overrunning the Matrix.  The Architect should have let people out from the beginning and most people that wanted out so badly probably should have stayed in.  With an open-door policy, there's simply no conflict and clearly a well-run Matrix is a better choice than a post-apocalyptic world devoid of natural resources.

But that's just how that fictional story played out, which isn't evidence of anything...  If we are having a serious scientific discussion about morality, it makes little sense to pretend like we can prescribe ignorance. We don't have to be ignorant to be happy.  Although I think there are some instances where we can maturely conclude that knowing more about a narrow given topic would make us needlessly unhappy and would not likely matter logistically for the aim of our lives.  We can't solve all the world's problems, nor hope to process literally every suffering-related bit of information that is out there.  Do I really need to see that next tragic news report about the suffering of some random person I'm never in a million years going to help?  Probably not.  I'm not doing anyone any favors by constantly subjecting myself to that kind of experience over and over again just because I can.  It's impossible to process it all anyway and fails to take into consideration the "moral user" clause that says we need happy enough users to even have moral anythings happening at all.

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Objection #2:

Blackburn brings up the idea that some conceptions of "well being" entail repressing desires like in Buddhism.  However, this is a rather conveniently lop-sided appraisal.  Buddhists are simply favoring a particular kind of mental state.  No one aims for non-mental states.  Even in terms of self-sacrifice where we aim to not-exist for the sake of some higher goal, it is as though we will be around for the sake of the mental states we would have had in the event we could exist while not existing.  Even people who commit suicide to avoid existing end up thinking about it in terms of how good it would feel if all the pressure of their life were off their backs as though that is coherent.  Or, even if they don't have such an understanding, they are weighing their options based on the fact they can't have the mental states they do desire and so are ending the impertinence.  It's still the same realm of backhanded coherency that is based entirely on the aim of choice mental states.  ANYTHING that can be appealed to in order to convince a human being that something is good or bad, to be at all convincing, will be dealing with this choice-mental-state-nomenclature.  And if you think you've found some example that doesn't apply, you are wrong.  But feel free to demonstrate your conceptual failure and present it anyway.

It may well be that Buddhists have discovered the highest peak on the moral landscape via their sequestering of particular mental states over others.  This CERTAINLY is not outside of Harris' conception at all since he continually brings up the possibility himself.  Of course, everyone ignores him...because why?  Anyway...  It is a factual question:  which well-being paradigm satisfies the human condition the best?  If it is the case that someone who manages to strike the best conceivable balance of typical Western impulses simply is not as satisfied than someone who goes off to do their meditation in a cave for six months...then guess who the winner of the moral landscape contest is?  It's not Simon Blackburn, I'll tell you that.

Blackburn wants to say that you have to work it out for yourself and that science can't give you an answer like the above.  Oh really?  Blackburn is switching terms to institutionalized science from Harris' conception of science as universal methodology.  Why wouldn't the bottom line on the above research project not include asides like, "Not everyone can necessarily achieve these mental states."  Or:  "People who have been encultured a certain way for most of their lives are typically unable to use these monastic tools to achieve the same level of effects."  Or:  "Everyone who has given these tools a test run despite their personal misgivings finds that they do in fact enjoy the best the human condition has to offer."  There's not some imaginary wall that separates these concepts.  "Working it out for yourself" has to do with mental states and the facts of the world.  A moral science could be all on top of that even if practically that has to include you doing your part of that equation based on the best external information the institution of science has worked out for you on your behalf.  Isn't that how all medicine works (to use Harris' choice analogy)?  It doesn't uber-cater to you.  There's room for error.  In Harris' moral world, that all goes together under the same banner.  Prescriptive moral science doesn't have to make inept narrow-minded prescriptions which fail to take into consideration still other real facts of the world.

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Objection #3:

Science can't tell you how to prioritize your life.  Oh really?  What can then?  Oh...right we have to do that for ourselves.  But what are we basing that off of?  Our affinity for choice mental states and the actual facts of the world...or what?  That's the same thing "science" has to work with.  Blackburn switches meanings on Harris again to make his dull contribution to the discussion.  What prioritization scheme best suits a human being in general?  Do you have the personal time to test out the implications of every possible scheme?  Well no, it'd be great if we had help.  Those are facts of the world science can evaluate systematically, which may well include the "user" component that says science may not actually be able to study the divergent particulars of you personally.  That doesn't mean it shouldn't be the same empirical process in essence. 

Then he says that ethics is more complicated than just the basic orientation of "everyone is miserable" vs. "everyone is happy."  He goes so far as to say that it is no help at all.  No help at all?  Blackburn conflates Harris' task of getting people on board with the most basic picture of moral realism with the playing out of every complexity.  That's not Harris' fault that Blackburn fails to appreciate the aim of Harris' message.  He says this despite many allusions that Harris makes to how complicated things can be.  That again is another mere failure to pay attention based off of a premature value judgment.  In reality land, we can easily understand Blackburn's insistence that folks need to go on holiday despite the fact they could be making the world a better place with the same funds and effort.  Why is that?  Well it's completely explicable within the confines of people seeking choice mental states.  We need breaks for our brains.  Saving children in Africa doesn't necessarily do that for us.  The amoral reality is that we have to deal with the coherency of our own lives first before we can hope to save the rest of the world.  But all of this falls under the basic paradigm that Harris has laid out and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.

Blackburn closes with "it is a complete illusion that science will give us all the answers" as though Harris has not already noted many times that the impracticality of science being able to literally stand over our shoulder navigating every single life decision.  This has nothing to do with the principle that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions in ways that science can address.  This is just not paying attention.   This is the world of professional philosophy failing us as usual to ever come to a reasonable consensus on ANYTHING.  "Thanks" smart people. 

Ben

 

Singer's first mistake is that he misunderstands what Harris means by "science."  His whole notion of "we need to reflect" as though that is not part of the scientific endeavor Harris advocates is the problem.  If evolution had not given us the basic moral impulses, we'd have no motivation or ability to correct what we got.  We note the logical inconsistencies, but evolution is still the father of the motivation in the first place.  It aligned us with the choice mental states in the first place and gave us the tools to work out the details.  The only way that science can stop solving the problem (in the manner Harris conceives of it) is if there is nothing further to go on.  The conversation either gets into details that still square with the basic premise Harris advocates or by definition there isn't some other mode of thinking to solve it other than "do something random based on total ignorance."  There is nothing about what Harris says that indicates such narrow conceptions of "our biology equals the 100% measure of right and wrong without any caveat" yet Singer sees that anyway.  That's his problem.

The problem Harris continually faces is that people rush to premature value judgments.  They allow their switches to be flipped before they really understand the full and balanced picture Harris advocates.  Did he mention science?  Oh, I know all about that.  Did he mention anti-religion?  Oh I know all about that.  Did he mention evolution?  Oh, I know all about that.  Etc.  No reason to pay further attention even though any plausible account of morality is going to have to solve all the age old issues even if it sometimes resembles failed attempts that came before.  Nuances matter.  Our culture is filled with half-baked notions on all of these connections.  Clearly even the preeminent ethical philosophers of our day, like Singer, are susceptible to the same attention deficit biases.  So, mainly it's a matter of just rounding up the, "no, Harris already covered this" because people judge first and pay attention second. 

Intro:

I do not wish to belabor this conversation since I intend to hit up a number of similar ones in this series.  To clarify what I see that Bryan doesn't seem to be aware of or isn't considering: 

Harris isn't attempting to invent new ideas, but rather he's waging a framing war to claim morality from religious conceptions that want to remove moral truth from the realm of the well-being of conscious creatures and also to claim it from secular conceptions that want to suppose morality is too relative for any universal appeal. That's a very "Hulk smash" level in principle as Harris merely is trying to establish that there are correct answers to moral questions (even if it turns out to be impractical to actually know what any given answer is) if only we input the most obvious and defensible starting assumptions:  That everyone being really miserable is bad and that the direction away from that is "good."  I think Bryan takes that too literally at times and doesn't allow Harrisian morality to claim the category of "all of the above" when it comes to evaluating upward moves on Harris' moral landscape that Harris and I would readily factor in to our final assessment on any given question.  Bryan also seems to want to have a more advanced conversation than Harris' current aim.  That's fine in and of itself and I would hope that kind of thing is around the corner, but that's not the focus right now as Harris himself explains:

My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy is unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the prominent philosophers I've consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.

So, hopefully with some adjusted expectations we can clear up some of the other difficulties.

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Bryan brings up a good point about the "weighting" of the many important parameters that would go into a "best" picture of human flourishing, but these seem only like details.  I imagine Alonzo Fyfe's "desirism" would likely be the next iteration of complexity (or level of clarification) which would resolve the weighting issue.  Important desires ("good desires" or "desires that deserve more weight") are the ones that in principle tend to satisfy other desires rather than thwart them.

Most of the things I brought up in terms of the pros and cons of voluntary burqa wearing all seemed about equally important.  And surely if some things were weighted in particular ways, that would impact the ability of the other desires (or goals) to be properly fulfilled.  So not every weighting scheme will be born equal, but the final test will have to do with their overall impact on the well being of a conscious agent.  To whatever extent there is an acceptable "give" in terms of weighting is to the extent it doesn't really matter (in other words, the maximally fulfilled life will entertain all of those considerations reasonably well).  If there are a few different ways to weight the goals without any serious compromise of another important aspect of the human capacity to be fulfilled, then those are just different peaks on the moral landscape and do not concern us in principle here. 

The only real issue remaining in terms of defending that basic starting frame of reference for scientific inquiry is the supposed disconnect between morally relevant issues and the well-being of conscious creatures.  

In the comments of my previous post to Bryan, he said:

...who would say non-brain state enhancing outcomes was not welfare improving?

Harris would.  I would.  What can you mean by "welfare improving" unless that has some positive impact on brain states?

Bryan attempts to re-illustrate this divide here:

Black Americans face many prejudices that the civil rights movement has done a great job diminishing. Nevertheless, black people still live fundamentally different lives due to these cultural norms. They may not experience any adverse events in their life (e.g., being arrested, profiled, or beaten) for being black, but the ultimate quality of their life is different. Sen reveals in Development as Freedom (p. 22) that for all age groups American black male survival rates are substantially lower than whites, and lower than male Chinese or Indian (Kerala), too (data available from the World Health Organization). Do these sort of facts lend themselves to Harris' thesis? I would disagree precisely because these sort of health outcomes are not part and parcel with the sort of directly related cognitive states Harris has in mind.

Bryan already made such examples and I already responded to them.  It appears from his comments on that post that he got thrown off by my one "Ferrari" comment at the expense of the rest of what I said (since it doesn't appear that he quotes anything from that). I'll try to repeat myself as little as possible here, but either there is a reason to be morally concerned that relates to the actual mental states of these Black Americans or there isn't.  If we don't think the lives of these Black Americans can actually be improved in some way (even though Bryan even says they DIE sooner, as though that doesn't relate to mental states), then why are we just obsessed with apparently meaningless differences in their inherited cultural baselines?  Clearly Bryan thinks there is some relevant moral difference, that their self-reporting doesn't square with the maximum capacities we know are possible or something along those lines?  "You can get the same mental deal and work less, which will mean you'll live longer."  Harris would add, "So that you can have even more of that mental deal you like."  Right?  Why else would we collectively work to even the playing field and count ourselves morally righteous for the effort?  Why waste our time otherwise? 

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Outro:

I don't understand how Bryan can hope to successfully argue that the considerations he's talking about fall outside the confines of Harris' conception of the moral landscape.   Any example that attempts to disconnect morality from the well being of conscious creatures is probably just a trivial conceptual problem that can be resolved simply enough with a bit more thought.  I invite any more counter-examples though!

Ben

 

Intro:

I've taken the liberty of argument-mapping my exchange with Christian apologist, Steve Hays, on the topic.  The history of this particular conversation started with Triablogue's "The Infidel Delusion" (TID) response to atheist, John Loftus' "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD).  Hays started responding to my review of TCD and that generated three rather long posts of his and contributed a significant chunk to my review of chapter 4.  Hays attempted to undermine TCD in his intro in a number of ways, one of which was questioning the epistemic duties of non-theistic worldviews.

SPOILER ALERT:  All you need is some motivation and some utility to it to care about truth in order to bother addressing or refuting the beliefs of anyone on any topic.  Iknowright?  But that doesn't stop Christian apologists from "objecting" with nonsense anyhow.  It also ends up churning up some interesting other nonsense as well (for those interested). 

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"Atheists have no principled reason to care about truth" is a stock objection from Hays so any time he wants to toss this onto the path, it'll be pretty clear where that gets him.

Click on the thumbnail to embiggen:

If anyone would like to contribute more iterations of the debate, feel free.  Also, if there are any typos or grammar errors, I'll make corrections. 

I've used Compendium to start mapping out a huge network of interrelated debates.  A fellow atheist challenged me to a public debate on the TAG which is the Christian presuppositionalist beachhead of all forms of naturalistic incredulity.  Hence, as you can see:

Each of those nodes opens up a whole other argument map (each of which I'll eventually post I'm sure).  I had to be prepared for just about any tangent that could come up. That's the whole idea of the TAG strategy is to be vague and presumptuous, and then pretend that nonbelievers have to solve every problem in philosophy and metaphysics before they are "allowed" to doubt all the other evidential claims of Biblical Christianity.  It would almost be "fair" (since some of the issues are legitimate enough) if they didn't ignore the worldview shopping cart of all things Christian they could honestly at-least-as-equally doubt as well.  But giving all the tough questions of one positive worldview a pass while holding another to the grindstone is dubious to say the least.  Are you not sure about all the implications of metaphysical naturalism?  Okay...we have a word for that.  It's called "agnosticism."  Not "Christian." 

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Outro:

I'd covered the vast majority of the material already in my review of TCD, so it was mainly a matter of appropriating it for the argument map network.  Eventually I'll have a network that covers pretty much all the most typical philosophical issues that come up in these debates and I can provide that meta-file to download.   It's on the "to do" list. 

Ben