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. 

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.

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.

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.

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? 

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). 

"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." 

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

Intro:

Luke Muehlhauser, over at Common Sense Atheism, influences a lot of atheists in the popular blogosophere.  Most of the time that's a good thing, imo.  However, on the question of moral discussion, even though his choice theory (desirism) is one I accept as probably correct, I think many of his observations on Sam Harris' latest book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" are unhelpful and counterproductive.

Where is Sam Harris' positive argument anyway?

Luke says:

To which Harris has already replied:

Apparently Luke expects to be taken seriously for some reason.  Luke had already grabbed a quote from that very Sam Harris article as though his objection had not been addressed.  Hence the conversation is going backwards.  To go forward (or rather to simply catch up to where Harris already is) it entails making the "huge" leap from ordinary general notions of well-being to something a bit more specific (or as Harris said: "a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures") like:

And not:

You are human, right Luke?  I know you know what these things are given our mutual pattern recognition abilities as well as general mental disposition for seeking out the former states over the later.  And I know you are smart enough to formulate a simple mental picture of "well being" vs. "misery" (aka, the moral landscape).  I didn't need Harris to spell it out for me, because I share a great deal of psychological dispositions with members of our species like Harris.  I allow his words to refer to my background knowledge without unnecessarily disrupting the conversation.

So...what is another Luke excuse?  Luke says:

Or perhaps well-being just means happiness? Then his claim is not circular, but is probably false. We humans value other things than happiness, which is why many modern utilitarians speak of maximizing “preference satisfaction” or “desire satisfaction” rather than happiness.

Somehow happiness doesn't roughly equal preference and desire satisfaction in Luke's world?  Very strange. 

The intellectual implausibility of Luke's position is obvious.  How could he have ever even known what he was looking for in a moral theory in gist unless he was already operating under the basic assumptions Harris lays out?  Luke, on his blog, has related that he was grossly concerned with finding the right moral theory because otherwise he wouldn't know if he were doing a great deal more harm than good.  But such a sentiment is only explicable with Harris' presentation.  If desirism had somehow pointed to the "bad" category and not the "good" category, would Luke have embraced it?  Um...probably not.  Let's be honest.  Or we'd rightly think he was crazy for doing so.  How could we know what "dead" means unless we already kinda-sorta-know before we get to the point of spelling out that a "dead" body is one that fails to live up to (as Harris says):

Right? 

Will someone somewhere in the world challenge our categories to some degree as we get more and more specific?  I'm sure.  And the debate will progress rather than regress through territory already covered.  Desirism may well be on the horizon of moral science as the next level of articulation, but offering up these kinds of nonsense objections in the meantime when establishing ground zero is entirely inappropriate for someone as knowledgeable and skilled as Luke Muehlhauser, imo.

Americans don't know a great deal about "honor," for example, even though the sentiment "It is better to die than to live without honor" is a moral truism of many cultures.  I certainly don't live my life guided especially by the metric of honor, though I could characterize much of what I do as honorable.  I would like to think that an honest, systematic, and comprehensive cross-cultural evaluation could be brought to my doorstep giving me the full list of pros and cons about what it means to live in a collectivistic honor/shame society (especially as compared to other types of societies).  And since I'm not so close-minded, I might well find myself at some moral disadvantage for having grown up in a society that emphasizes other things.  I'm human.  They are human.  Obviously everything has something going for it.  It's obvious any one person or culture isn't going to be born with a perfect set of cultural moral expectations.  None of them are going to be completely wrong either.

When person x dogmatically asserts that their preferred overblown singular mental state is the only way to go even though obviously that's not true or representative of most of the population, we don't have to listen.  People can be wrong and solipsistic.  Obviously.  Am I alone in these kinds of sentiments?  I sure hope not. 

Outro:

Will we be dogmatic and close-minded when others offer reasonable challenges to our moral goals or will we be the kind of person who is on that journey and exploration of the possibilities to sort through?  Will we empathize with honest alternatives or will we give up, because thinking things through is just so darn hard?  Those questions are a great deal more relevant to the conversation and our moral growth, imo, than the cliche' (conversation stifling) philosophical hairsplitting that Muehlhauser appears to have presented. 

Ben

A commenter on my Amazon review of Sam Harris' latest book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" asked me this:

Ben,

You're obviously very excited about this book. What changes do you envision for our government, exactly? Do you want to direct scientists to study things they don't already study? (If so, I can't imagine what those things might be.) Do you want to replace voters and voter representatives with a board of scientists? Do you want to abolish religion? Or what?

I'm not sure exactly where this person was coming from (since there are some absurd suggestions and incredulity packed in there), but it's a fair question in essence.  So I responded:

S. Prewitt,

Thanks for commenting. I'd definitely like to know Harris' thoughts on the matter of what the first step is after the scientific community accepts his basic premise and acknowledges that there can be a branch of science for morality.

I'm not in the best position to say what that might be. Though to speculate (since this wouldn't be a fun comment if I didn't), since there is already quite a bit of research on human behavior and psychology from the sciences that does exist, it would seem (given the second step of the scientific method) that would be the "gather information" phase to see exactly where we are at. There's probably tons of info and it would need to be restructured in terms of Harris' basic framework.

How do we formulate what we already know in terms of moral prescriptions for improving our standing on the moral landscape? What issues arise from attempting to do this? I'm assuming that would entail evaluating specific metrics to see which if any are feasible and scientifically operational. Surely there'd be a debate over all the most plausible candidates for choice mental states (like the ones I referenced in my review near the end). Although I've seen studies on that already where people from all over the world were asked what they thought the best qualities of a person are. Something like that might be a heuristical starting place. We'd have to see what objections arise from beginning to create our recipe for "the good mental life" that is genuinely cross-cultural.

Ultimately, I'd like to see research that can be condensed into a textbook on the topic of morality. I'd like to see there be moral education in schools. I'd like to see rigorous study on effective government structures and ways of nation building that have been shown to work around the world in bits and pieces. I'd like to see politicians who can brag about their higher education in morality. I'd like to see science advisors to leaders of the country to keep tabs on evidence-based policies and perhaps create a give and take environment where advice is given and studies are commissioned based on current needs. Perhaps questions like, "How should we structure our business world so that people get the best balance out of a satisfying career and also leisure time?" would be good to pursue. It would also be interesting to create some kind of automated online "moral advice" service designed to walk people through normative life decisions or something like that. We have that kind of thing for physical health issues (though there is possibly already something like it for mental health issues, but possibly not in a positive constructive sense?). Perhaps "what moral science says" can be included on voter ballots on particular issues and people can feel free to disregard the facts just like they do with all the current science on issues like vaccines, global warming, and whatever else.

I don't think we should abolish religion or do anything like a scientific takeover of government. It should all be open-ended and complementary to most of what we already have going for us. The information should be made as available and easily accessible as possible in all the venues where it could help the most. But no one should be forced to use it. When moral science says, "initiative x would be the best we can do for our community" any group will have the opportunity to step up and pitch in towards that end. There shouldn't be some thought-police clause concerning everything you happen to believe.

Anyway, that's my general conception of what may lie ahead in the next 10-20 years. If artificial intelligence is around the corner a few decades after that, then we'll start wanting to talk about how to use what we know to program moral mind machines. We'll want to talk about transhumanistic issues on how to augment the brain to correct for whatever issues evolution never quite got around to perfecting. We'll want to have all of the basic issues worked out well in advance, because the next challenges ahead are going to be even more difficult than getting the ball rolling here.

Ben

And then we kill 7 million Jews.  I may have left that part out.

Ben

Intro:

I recently posted my general review of Sam Harris' latest book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values."  A fellow xangan, bryangoodrich, let me know that he'd previously posted his thoughts on a Sam Harris Tedtalk on the same topic.  There's enough one to one correlation with the talk and the contents of the book to make this relevant to my review of the book.

Bryan says:

Rather than use the terms "objective" and "subjective" it may be better to use "common ground" to refer to common psychological capacity for mental states as members of the same species and "arbitrary" to refer to benign divergence from that.  People who don't know about higher moral peaks and are relatively content in their ignorance still have the psychological capacity to have a different and better life.  That's "billard ball objectivity" to me as things just aren't "agent relative" enough in any relevant sense to undermine Harris' proposal.

Bryan makes a perplexing claim:

Bryan's objection might make sense if Harris was only talking about active suffering, but he is also talking about the positive side of the moral landscape as well.  Surely there's no overwhelming reason to discuss monastic techniques for achieving amazing levels of contentment, yet Harris brings that up a lot more than all of the other new atheists out there, doesn't he?  So there's not really a conflict here as Bryan imagines. 

Bryan says:

All humans self-justify their choices as a means of preserving the norms of their self-esteem.  That doesn't mean their every perceived beneficial justification actually represents what they think it does.  I don't think we should necessarily assume that liberty makes everything okay.  It just often makes things better since people are free to navigate away from imposed suffering and towards mental states that they at least believe work better for them.  Individuals tend to be the best judges of that to a point, but ignorance is a factor as well.  Even the women who have the liberty to choose the burqa can be wrong about that choice as a lifestyle just as someone who chooses to fast can be wrong about the benefits of fasting.  They might make different choices if introduced to certain facts or methodologies which accomplished the same goal better.  It is not an uncommon post-hoc sentiment to look back on the choices made in the past and exclaim, "What was I thinking!?" as though there is a problem with their memory. 

Bryan says:

The active suffering of Muslim women of this kind is just a factual question Harris may be wrong about.  If there aren't any problems, and burqa wearing turns out to be as awesome as it gets, then Harris is going to have to agree by his own logic.  Even if the example of the burqa can be found not to work for some reason and that active "oppression" is entirely contrived from our narrow-minded Western perspective, surely Bryan is aware of repressive cultural norms in general?  Virtually everything feminists and gay rights activists argue for fall into that category.  Religious people push back when their cultural options are cut off in a secular society, etc.  Pick a different one and we can simply use that as our example, but I don't think we have to.

Aside from the idea of just pleasing the arbitrary whims of Allah*, what exactly is a Muslim woman trying to accomplish in her day to day experience by wearing a burqa?  What are the psychological expectations of a woman in the West who chooses to show a great deal of skin on a daily basis (since that dichotomy is Harris' common example)?  Taking into consideration whatever each woman might report in addition to a full cross-cultural analysis of women from around the world on the same kind of issue, what are all of the possible "psychological goals" that human females are attempting to actualize with their clothing choices?  We already have some idea of what that palette of experiences will be to do a preliminary assessment (which of course can be checked for bias and other mistakes with further analysis).  Who is hitting the best balance of modesty, self-respect, personal liberty, net solicitation of flattering social approval as well as comfortable indifference (which would also entail different encultured assumptions for men as well in a full picture), and whatever else we may find that tends to be important to women.  Who can boast the most?  Surely someone can.  It's not like every moral/relational mental framework is static and perfectly attuned to every representative individual. 

Harris suggests something in between the extremes.  Someone may claim that they have the maximum possible level of self-respect for example, but perhaps we can do brain scans to show just how active that part of their mind is when feeling that way in comparison to another person's alternative claim.  Perhaps further research might also be able to cut through the self-reporting artifacts by determining the frequency and longevity of such experiences in every day life as well.  In all likelihood, when all the facts are in and when the logic is corrected there will probably be a meaningful answer (whether Harris' moderate answer is correct or not) that the vast majority of women who care about their experience of themselves should want to know about in a morally prescriptive sense on the issue.

As I said in my review:

If my own convention is to mean anything at all, and if I have anything in common with other humans, we can in principle sort this stuff out even if it turns out the practical science can't be used to tease out results.  I really don't understand how anyone can hope to argue for an arbitrary dividing line where those tools cease to apply to sorting out the human condition.  Otherwise we're just making a whole bunch of arbitrary stuff up that doesn't actually correlate with improving one's life or avoiding the many flavors of misery. 

Bryan says:

I don't get the impression that Harris' conception of the moral landscape entails that everyone drives a Ferrari.  Bryan feels free to use the value-laden terms "abused" and "overworked" in reference to the housewife.  That's a little confusing since there's no reason to call someone abused if there are no symptoms of abuse to appeal to.  I'm assuming Bryan is not using the example of "stable" dysfunctional relationships that are clearly problematic from the outside and yet viciously defended from the inside despite the cycles of abuse.  We must be talking about something more low key than that.   

It's definitely an interesting point and contributes additional complexities to the discussion.  People don't know what they don't know and may report "wellness" from their current level of expectations given their knowledge base of possible mental states.  However, to speak for Harris (if I may, or at least to speak for myself), I don't consider this a meaningful stumbling block to proceeding with moral science.  It can just become an axiom of moral science that humans can achieve the maximal states of happiness with a variety of life expectations.  Is that really a problem?  Cinderella might be able to be just as happy slaving under her step-mother if she never has another option as she is living the life of a fully appreciated princess.  Even taking the pictures that Bryan presents for granted as static demographics (which probably isn't ever entirely true, since I don't know of anyone who doesn't ever consider other options for their life), that's only a slice of the spectrum of humanity and doesn't refute the relevancy of the rest of the spectrum.  There can be many stunted "I don't know any better" hills on the moral landscape where perhaps not a lot of suffering is happening (and hence, less worthy of our time as far as solving the world's problems go). 

However that doesn't mean that someone who happens to know better can't evaluate them and make educated guesses as to what might be better.  We do that all the time with friends and family going through the complexities and dramas of their lives.  We make constant judgments about when others are failing to meet their "full potential" in their ignorance and this isn't crazy talk (or crazy thoughts) in principle even though often enough we can be hasty and make poor judgments based on the wrong things.  It is logically possible for someone to be more aware than someone else when it comes to positive and even negative mental states.  I don't think that should be a controversial claim.  In our own person experience and life history it is typical to be informed of higher elevations on the moral landscape whether by stumbling into them or through advertisement from others.  Presumably, a comprehensive appraisal of what is possible for human beings could inform us where the highest peaks are.  If I can hope to find higher elevations on the moral landscape in my personal experience (which is obviously true), I see no reason why a concerted effort on the part of our most rigorous methods couldn't do even better. 

There probably is some limited detriment to informing people of what they don't have in terms of mental states.  They become "have nots" whereas they otherwise would have been "didn't know any betters."  One could construe situations where "ignorance is relative bliss" but in an information age and in public discourse, this isn't as important as building the best picture of human capacities that we can.  It may be an issue with dealing with primitive cultures around the world which are not on the main street of the world community, but I don't think the "right to be ignorant" applies to anyone else in a responsible conversation that attempts to get all of our moral facts straight. 

Bryan says:

Liberty, rights and justice either have consequences for the well-being of conscious creatures or there is no reason to defend them and that's what Harris has been seamlessly arguing for all along.  The error that Harris constantly harps on is to allow the discussion to separate those realms. 

*I'm assuming there are conceptions of Allah where he and Harris could be on the same page in principle in terms of stipulating behaviors that maximize well-being.  Many theists have this kind of view where guidelines for proper human behavior can simply be "reverse engineered" from experience.

Outro:

So there appears to be just a few minor conceptual errors and misunderstandings.  Most of what Bryan says in his post, I think Harris would agree with.

Ben

Intro:

I started and run a forum called Responsible Public Debate at the local Ethical Society in St. Louis, MO.  I invite various speakers to present their position in contrast to another.  They give their   presentation, respond to each other's points, and then we take audience questions.  Two weeks later after some fact checking, video uploading, and some argument mapping we meet again to build off of the cases laid out in the debate, evaluate the outcomes of the fact checking, and catch all those loose ends that typically tend to get lost when debates come and go.  All in all, it can be a very enriched experience tackling an issue for those who participate.  This is an exercise in civility and responsible epistemology and a learning experience on just how to make this kind of thing happen.  Ideally, I'd like to see RPD groups (or something like them) pop up all over the country at a grass roots level and become an expected staple of a healthy democratic society.  I'm also sure to promote any other forums in the area and abroad that embody similar values and give shout outs to instances of healthy cross-ideological conversations that happen in our media. 

The argument map (click to rebiggen):

The issue is about including a clause in anti-bullying legislation that goes out of its way to define specific categories of victim groups.  The clause reads:

Does this help or hinder?

My answer:  It probably helps. 

Eleven states that have enumeration in their laws have fewer reported cases of bullying.  As even the research points out, correlation is not causation, but the logic behind why enumeration helps seems more solid than the logic against it.  Enumeration empowers teachers to be able to speak up and say that something like "being gay" is okay in some authoritative sense where otherwise they might fear losing their job for being some gay activist.  It is legal in Missouri to fire someone for being gay or to kick them out of their apartment and so have a specific legal clause that ensures this category is protected means that teachers can freely do their job.  It also enables students who have a minority status to feel more secure when perhaps the local prejudices of the school they attend might otherwise seem set against them by default.  Even if more tolerant and understanding school districts happen to be the ones most likely to adopt enumerated policies (in other words, the enumeration didn't exactly cause the benefit), this doesn't seem like an argument against the positive case for enumeration.  Its seems more like an argument for a change in attitude on behalf of the states and school boards to get in step with the idea behind the legislation which would further contribute to that end. 

I await to see the evidence that shows that enumeration somehow lop-sides the focus on protecting certain kinds of victims over others that have not been spelled out.  It is not like we are introducing teachers to the concepts of ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.  They were there all along and I don't think calling attention to them is somehow mental sabotage or blinders towards other more vague kinds of bullying as much as it is legal structure to protect all parties involved, enabling them to do what should be done.  Most of us have probably been bullied at some point in the past as one of our debaters pointed out (I think I can count the number of times on one hand for me), but some of us were bullied much more frequently than others and for basically the same set of obvious reasons.  Some of the broadest sides of the barn need to be spelled out and the Safe Schools Act can simply add an open-ended clause in addition.  The punishments for bullying, as I understand it, are no more harsh for any other kind, so this doesn't appear to be a "thought crimes" issue.  Certainly more study could be done on the issue to tease out every angle which could be addressed to further inhibit bullying in schools. 

I'd like to again thank Kerry Messer from the Missouri Family Network and Morgan Keenan from PROMO for participating in our forum.  The video of their debate can be found here.

Ben

Intro:

Mostly what I want to say is that I highly recommend this book and completely support Harris' initiative to get the ball rolling on developing morality as a legitimate branch of science.  I also wish everyone who read the book would say the same.  On that note, I appreciate the pains he must be going through, putting up with the incredulity from many sides.  I do not envy him, though I am glad there is someone out there talented enough and willing enough to take on the burden and the challenge.  People, even smart people (sometimes, especially smart people), seem to very easily go off track when it comes to sorting out values even though they probably aren't having representative difficulties in practice sorting out their own moral lives. 

Can we figure out what the general goal of human flourishing ought to be?  Sure, why not?  If not, I feel sorry for the reader, since you apparently have no idea how not to live a horrible life.  Does it entirely depend on the facts of the world?  Um...yeah.  Last time I checked.  Things that don't have to do with the facts of the world aren't a part of the world...  Are there better ways than not of achieving that end?  Uh, duh.  I can't suddenly choose my way into happiness via the infinite grab bag of methodologies.  Is there more than one way to be well off in the world?  Yeah, I think we already know that or we wouldn't be asking the question.  Do we have to worry about the amoral opinions of sociopaths in order to have sufficient motivation to get this general human initiative off the ground?  I think not.  I shed endless "crocodile tears" over their broken non-existent hearts.  Can science help us push the envelope of moral discernment deeper and wider than ever before?  Obviously.  Is there a better game in town?  [**supernatural crickets are *not* heard chirping**] It seems to me though that Harris' book (which is a delightful 6 hour long lecture in audio form) only seems particularly brilliant in light of the competition.  In reality, this is (or should be considered) 101 material.  Yes, we are that far behind, but a collaborative effort like this has to start on the ground floor.

I don't share the fear of a totalitarian science that dictates evil Darwinian moral truth to the masses, but I do at least somewhat fear the stereotypical scientists who lack the personal growth and  the self-awareness necessary to tackle the many complexities required to square their understanding with the facts of the world and also keep it meaningful and potent for average folk.  Many scientists who may be great at their job are simply horrible philosophers.  Some people can have high IQ's but rather low EQ's (emotional intelligence).  And of course, not every version of intelligence in either category is born equal.  It is very easy for smart people to have amazing blindsides when it comes to articulating a conceptual ideology about values, since most ordinary people are far more busy living their values rather than specializing in how to describe what they are doing and why.  I'm sure there's some way to work through it and surely our brightest scientific moral philosophers will rise to the challenge in a self-selecting kind of way (in addition to those who mistakenly believe that's who they are), but I await that well-researched and soundly established moral textbook to land on my desk with a pleasantly satisfying thud.

Otherwise, I'm not worried about science coming back with some moral conclusion that I do not approve of though I'm sure it will.  Perhaps wearing the male burqa will turn out to be the best way to go!  D'oh!  If it has done its job, it will have correct conclusions and I will be the one who needs to change his mind.  If there is something I don't like, well then I'd better have reasons that map onto the real world and presumably those would already have been taken into account.  And if I don't have those reasons what is my basis for disapproval beyond some arbitrary preference or prejudice?  Isn't that my problem?  Besides, people have a long history of not listening to moral authorities as it is.  What's one more, no matter how qualified? 

Harris makes frequent use of physical health analogies to bypass most of the objections people throw his way and rightly so.  He has to avoid the perils of loaded terminology and erroneous existential expectations.  Further complicating things is that we are being asked to discern objective relational principles from the realm of human desires when we would like to hastily toss out that domain of content as arbitrary as a rule.  Humans are also most likely to get defensive and therefore irrational when fundamental values are challenged intellectually and yet that's exactly what any serious conversation about getting morality correct has to be about.  Unfortunately morality is just abstract enough to get people confused and lost in a mental space they can't see.  Yet at the same time it is indispensable enough not to vanish entirely from our interests (I consider morality the security software necessary for maintaining our most important interests).  It's why we can have a really good sense of what good is, but be almost entirely unable to spell out all of the stipulations of what that is (One would have to write many volumes on how to fully supplement the loopholes in the golden rule to the extent a robot could be programmed to follow it without messing up horribly).  This tension (or lack thereof) allows the appearance of vast differences in moral lifestyles to seem irresolvable to the core, it allows many philosophers to get endlessly lost in trivial obstructions, and it enables many religious people to be baffled just enough to never connect morality to the real world.  This is frustrating, because there are many times where I run across complex moral questions that simply can't be resolved without the rigor of a scientific investigation I can't possibly sponsor myself.  Only collective and focused efforts could hope to evaluate the facts and without enough support, we'll just be stuck in the dark ages on some questions. 

Even our own values change over time, from moment to moment, and we are constantly navigating the perils of self-contradiction, personal ignorance, and our own immaturity when engaging the world of value differences.  There's not even such a thing as a genuine cultural baseline inside of one culture for relativism to latch onto.  If you are doing any effective moralizing for yourself or your own not-so-static culture or any trouble-shooting whatsoever, you do in fact have all the tools you need to sort the entire world out whether you recognize that or not.  And if you are unable to do so, that's probably just a practical problem for yo brains and not representative of a genuine ideological impasse.  Humans just aren't that different than each other and I've never met a set of cultural values where I could not discern the basic spectrum of appeal.  Finding common denominators is the basis for solving the cultural relativism equation and this is a skill that can be learned.  If one isn't a stick in the mud and are willing to engage the differences with the attitude that you could be wrong about how best to pimp out the human condition despite your upbringing and other influences, then differences in cultures are just mutual mountains to scale.  Not inaccessible parallel universes.  Difficult perhaps on occasion, but certainly not impossible.

So yeah, science should go about the project of exploring all of the non-destructive maximum capacities of human psychology and how to go about making that happen (such as:  joy, love, self respect, good friendships, security/trust, contentment, peace/tranquility, self-improving behavior, sense of purpose/self worth, positive social climate and not: misery, loneliness, self-loathing, bad friendships, fear/paranoia, discontentment, anxiety/stress, neurosis, depression, self-destructive behavior, purposeless/worthlessness, negative social climate for general orientation in case you were really that clueless).  In a hundred years perhaps it can approach us with such a salient and complete account of all that entails.  All the basics?  Go for it (It's not like we aren't already well on our way with common sense as well as the field of clinical psychology).  A complete account of naturalistic mysticism in the way Harris seems to describe?  Awesome.  Let's make all of the mystical traditions that are tied down to one bogus ideology or another deeply envious of our cumulative, inclusive, and impartial progress on that front (assuming someone out there hasn't already started championing that goal).  I want to know all about what the human brain can do and who is doing it better.  Who wouldn't?  The folly of the argument in rejection of this will amount to:  I am an ordinary human who does not want what science has proven that ordinary humans would in fact most want if they knew any better.  Good luck with that. 

Outro:

I'm hopeful that enough people aren't philosophical snobs, that enough aren't so relativistic as to fail to recognize that we have plenty of common ground to work with across the spectrum of humanity, and that enough religious people are saturated enough with reality that Harris will be persuasive.  I have just seen way too many ridiculous and unnecessary hurdles thrown in the way that I'm a bit cynical.  They just keep coming, even from the smart people, like a large troll is going to come bash us all on the head if we dare get something slightly wrong.  *sigh*

There were a few tidbits in Harris' book I think I could quibble about, but this books gets a greater than 95% approval rating from me...and that's rather hard to come by (for what that's worth).  On a side note, if Harris is successful in moving the ball forward on this note in the scientific community, this would be such a fitting legacy for the "new atheist" movement.  It would forgive many of their sins and help lead the world of skeptics, nonbelievers, and staunch anti-religion contrarians into a positive project with potentially genuinely lasting results.     

I went ahead and posted this as my review on Amazon.

Ben

Intro: 

This series is an atheist's review of an important anthology critical of Christian beliefs called, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD), that has been popularly discussed across the web.  I'll be reviewing the book in light of just about every other response to TCD on the web (pros and cons) and responding to new Christian objections as I find them.  I think this will be educational and perhaps the best that I personally can contribute to improving the online dialogue between Christians and non-believers on popular battleground issues.

But before we get into the issue of scholarly authority and bias and the details of atheist, Paul Tobin's chapter, a surprising number of Christian reviewers seem relatively okay with an errant word of the Christian god.  Let's take a look.

Looney said this:

I assumed Looney was an inerrantist, but perhaps not.  It seems he is of the opinion at least that inerrancy is optional.

Diglotting said this:

Jayman777 said this:

I'm not clear on what Diglotting and jayman777's views on inspiration are (and I recall that jayman777 doesn't have his views 100% crystallized yet).  Presumably they are fine with their god's word being as generally true and reliable as other human works.  One wonders why a most excellent god aimed so low in terms of quality control, but okay.  The expectations of fundamentalists seem more philosophically justified at face value.

Randal Rauser said this:

Rauser's view of inspiration is the most unsettling since the Christian god can appropriate literally anything that he wants to.  Perhaps mythicism is true and Christianity started out as a mystery cult with a cosmic Jesus who never even existed.  Why couldn't this god just use the urban legend style gospels as "authoritative" and divinely insist the church take historicity seriously?  Maybe Rauser wouldn't have a problem with that, or with my proof that the character of god in the Old Testament lies to Abraham.  I don't know.  But we have to admit here that modern Christians have some extremely lax standards of "inspiration" as far as truth goes and then still manage to be confounded when outsiders looking in have an eyebrow raised.  The only thing left to grant errant documents divine authority is Rauser's flimsy "god perception evidence" and perhaps the "unfair cultural mystique" of the Bible that was discussed in Jason Long's chapter 3.

Each of these Christian folk are willing to defend Biblical contradictions when they think skeptics have gone too far, but ultimately inerrancy (or at least Tobin's standard of inerrancy) isn't an issue for them.  That's a slight majority of Christian reviewers.  The three Triabloggers in The Infidel Delusion will presumably not be giving ground. 

This situation might be inspiring if I thought that the more liberal Christian reviewers were necessarily going to compromise on some of the more important errors in the Bible (as in, something that might help the Christian population get along with the modern world) rather than just covering the Christian god's behind and maintaining the general status quo of mere self-satisfying belief.  I'm not familiar enough with any of their stances on various modern issues to know for sure.

Ben