Sam Harris: "Science can answer moral questions"

[DeSwiss]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww">Sam Harris: "Science can answer moral questions" (VIDEO)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww">

TEDtalksDirector — March 22, 2010 — http://www.ted.com Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww">LINK

- Listening to a mellifluous delivery of logic is like one's intellect is having a cerebral orgasm. When it is over, all you can say is Whew!!! DAMN!.....
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DeSwiss


http://www.atheisttoolbox.com/">The Atheist Toolbox


"Human Diversity @ 3AM"



The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning. ~ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

[sakabatou]

1. That girl looks like she walked out of an anime/video game

[ZombieHorde]

3. That is exactly what I was thinking. She's awesome. nt

[Mojambo]

2. These TED talks are amazing, and well worth ANYONE'S time. n/t

[DeSwiss]

14. I agree wholeheartedly!

[GodlessBiker]

4. He denies his own freedom to define the very moral values he takes for granted.

It's a lazy man's morality. What is Good is given to us, all we need to do is use science to figure out how to bring it about.

And yet, he admits that science cannot answer the question, "Should I have another child?"

He is a social scientist, with ideas on what makes a society flourish and a desire to use science as a tool to bring it about. But that isn't a discussion about morality. That's political science, sociology, etc.

[DeSwiss]

5. Thank you for another opinion.....

...from a single brain-celled organism.

- Bye-bye.......

[tama]

6. Hume's guillotine:

"No should from is" - in other words value judgements cannot be logically derived fron descriptive theories.

From descriptive buddhist theories 'life is suffering' and 'it is possible to liberate from suffering, this how' it does not follow that anyone should choose liberation from suffering.

If a psychopathic sadist enjoys making others suffer, from that 'is' it does not logically follow that he 'shouldn't'.

And of course from the fact of Hume's guillotine it does not follow that anyone should take it seriously... ;)

[struggle4progress]

7. We've had "great" episodes of "moral science" in the American past that seem in retrospect to be not

exactly bright-cities-on-the-hill:

7-07-03
The Frightening Agenda of the American Eugenics Movement
By Tony Platt
... Since the spring 2002, state governments in Virginia, Oregon, and South Carolina, have published statements of apology to tens of thousands of patients, mostly poor women, who were sterilized against their will in state hospitals between the 1900s and 1960s. In March 2003, Governor Davis and Attorney General Lockyer added their regrets for the injustices committed in the name of "race betterment." Now, the California Senate is considering a resolution, authored by Senator Dede Alpert (D-San Diego), which "expresses profound regret over the state's past role in the eugenics movement" and "urges every citizen of the state to become familiar with the history of the eugenics movement, in the hope that a more educated and tolerant populace will reject any similar abhorrent pseudoscientific movement should it arise in the future" ... http://hnn.us/articles/1551.html

Remembering Tuskegee
Syphilis Study Still Provokes Disbelief, Sadness
July 25, 2002 --Thirty years ago today, the Washington Evening Star newspaper ran this headline on its front page: "Syphilis Patients Died Untreated." With those words, one of America's most notorious medical studies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, became public. "For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, not given proper treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects," Associated Press reporter Jean Heller wrote on July 25, 1972. "The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body" ... The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue ...
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/

Human Radiation Experiments Associated with the U.S. Department of Energy and Its Predecessors
http://www.hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/experiments/index.html#Contents

[darkstar3]

8. Which does absolutely nothing to negate the point of the OP.

Science is a method, a tool for use in the exploration of that which we do not know. It has no dogma, guiding principles, or "golden rule", only a set of parameters that help guarantee repeatable results. It can be used for great evil, like the atomic bomb, and it can also be used for great good, like ridding the world of certain nasty communicable diseases. Science can be used to find, define, or support morality, just as easily as it can be used to help perform immoral acts.

You see, (not to put words in DeSwiss's mouth but I think he'd agree with me) the whole point of posting this OP is that too many people think that science can't fill the supposed "morality gap" left behind by religion's absence. They think this precisely because they allow themselves to see only the evil science has been used for in the past. It is an incredible form of selective memory.

[tama]

22. Filling the morality gap

by replacing Catholic Pope with Scientific Pope as highest authority of moral expertice sounds like... I wanna be the Caliph in Caliph's place.

For some peculiar reason the very idea filling the hierarchic morality gap left behind by Pope's assholyness by some other hierarchic authority sounds highly unethical to me.

[darkstar3]

31. The whole point is that the "morality gap" is a false assumption. n/t

[tama]

34. Agreed

But what has been quoted and admired by some posters from the OP video is all about filling the false assumption of "morality gap" with a new hierarchy of scientific morality to replace the old hierarchy of organized religion.

Seems like some people just cant imagine living without some hierarchic authority telling them how to behave and how to not. But such is life. As is.

[darkstar3]

36. Um, no.

The only people I see quoting Harris here are the ones disagreeing with him and taking issue with certain things he has to say. I don't see any admiration of the idea of filling a false morality gap. Maybe I'm missing something.

[tama]

37. This quote:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=214&topic_id=241305&mesg_id=241398

by the OP.

[darkstar3]

40. And you consider this admiration?

Further, do you think that Sam Harris or the OPer that quoted him believe that religion would leave behind a morality gap and that science should fill it?

I don't. I think Harris' point is that morality can be and often is areligious, that science can inform (not create) that morality, and that it is foolish to believe that anyone still living in the scientific dark ages (like the taliban) has any high ground or superior standing on the subject of morality.

YMMV.

[beam me up scottie]

17. Please, there is no such thing as "moral" science. Science didn't protect priests who raped children

But guess who did and still does?

[Jim__]

9. Yes, if we want to know does this man love his daughter, ...

... we can scan his brain and see.

Yes, I want this guy deciding whether or not I'm moral, or if my morality is "real." Yeah, of course I do.

[darkstar3]

10. You disagree with his statement? In what way? n/t

[Jim__]

11. In what way? In the "way" that it is not his place to go around deciding ...

... whether fathers love their daughters or not. And, if we would like another culture to change, I can't imagine a worse way than by going around scanning people's brains. What comes after that? If we decide they don't love their daughters, do we fix it? If not, why bother scanning in the first place. If so, how do we fix it? The modern equivalent of a frontal lobotomy?

I can't believe anyone can listen to this guy and take him seriously.

[darkstar3]

12. I'm quite sure he never claimed that it WAS his place to determine

who does and who does not love their daughter(s). However, it IS possible to determine emotion from a brainscan.

Furthermore, does anyone NOW go around attempting to determine if fathers love their daughters?

I think you stepped on top of the slippery slope slide, and went wee-wee-wee all the way down.

[Jim__]

19. "At a certain point, we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved ...

... and actually interrogate them. I mean, do people love their daughters just as much in these systems and I think there are clearly right answers to that."

[DeSwiss]

15. And yet.....

...there are many brains we shouldn't scan. Because it'd just be a waste of resources.

- Because I also know that some of you will never get this. Which is probably for the best.....

[beam me up scottie]

18. !

:D

[Jim__]

24. See post #20. You don't even seem to realize that in his talk ...

Harris doesn't even address serious, controversial moral issues. He brings up a few issues that the west, in general, already agrees on, and then acts like he's made some kind of demonstration of his claim. What is pathetic is how easily you appear to be fooled by a little flim-flam.

[Odin2005]

13. Unfortunately I have to disagree with Harris on this.

David Hume established over 200 years ago that normative statements, "what ought to be", can NEVER be logically derived from factual knowledge, "what is". Trying to justify ethical stances in such a way leads to an infinite regress.

[DeSwiss]

16. I disagree.

As Harris points out there are a number of examples where normative statements are highly impractical such as defining what "good health" is. It's all relative, but it doesn't mean we can't ascribed a value to what we know NOW.

- Hume's position is no more sacrosanct than Issac Newton's were. And whose principles (Newton's) were later found wanting as well and needed "refinement."

Whenever we are talking about facts, certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it is to have a domain of expertise. That is what it is for knowledge to count. How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there's no such thing as moral expertise? Or moral talent? Or moral genius? How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count? How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering? Does the Taliban have an opinion on physics that is worth considering? No? Then how is their ignorance any less obvious, on the subject of human well-being? So this is what I think the world needs now. It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing. And that morality relates to that domain of facts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww">~ Sam Harris "Science Can Answer Moral Questions"

[Jim__]

20. It's fine to say that Hume's position is not sacrosanct; but you don't point out where he is wrong.

As to the quote from Harris: It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing. And that morality relates to that domain of facts.

Hume never said that morality doesn't relate to the domain to facts. Nor did he deny that given an end, reason can't tell us how to reach that end. What Hume said is that reason can't tell us what our ultimate goals should be. Harris never even comes close to addressing this issue. Harris talks and talks, but never gets around to any serious moral questions. Yes, we can all agree that you shouldn't throw cholera in the drinking water. He implicitly condemns suicide bombing; but never raises any questions about bombing cities. Essentially Harris condemns Islamic culture in this talk; but never addresses any questions of western morality. His understanding of moral issues is undermined by his failure to address any serious moral issues in his talk. He addresses cultural issues that most westermners already agree on; he didn't have one example of where science can help us with a serious, controversial issue. He failed to show us where science can be useful in this area.

Hume was a far more serious thinker.

[Odin2005]

25. Exactly. I run into exactly that problem when discussing abortion.

For every fact I state the anti-choice person could simply ask WHY that justifies the legality of abortion, it results in going in circles without a logical conclusion.

IMO attempts to logically justify normative statements are just a form of rationalization, all ethical beliefs are ultimately based in irrational value judgments and instinctive gut feelings, or at least that is the feeling I got from reading Moral Minds by Marc Hauser, an excellent book on the psychology and neuroscience of ethical judgments.

[tama]

27. To my knowledge

Ayn Rand is one of the very few that have seriously tried to refute Hume's guillotine:

http://www.debate.org/debates/Objectivism-fails-to-describe-an-adequate-meta-ethical-answer-for-the-is-ought-problem./1/

I wouldn't accept Ayn Rand's objectivism as the papal authority on moral expertise anymore than His Assholyness in Rome.

[Silent3]

42. I prefer the word "non-rational" for such value choices

Choosing to value "the greater good", or "alleviation of suffering", etc., is not an irrational choice in the sense of running counter to any established logic, these choices do not lead to logical contradictions, they are merely not inherently derivable from pure logic.

I consider such choices to be candidates for postulates in moral systems that can be derived from such ideas as starting points. Like postulates of Euclidean geometry (parallel lines never meet, the sum of the angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees) they are not necessary, but they aren't completely arbitrary either -- they derive from common experience, or at least idealizations thereof.

While it would never be unquestionable or inescapable, I think we can derive a satisfying and consistent moral system from social norms and principles of our evolutionary biology, looking for the simplest set of widely-accepted principles, compatible with survival of our species, from which you can extrapolate a consistent logic of morality.

[Odin2005]

45. Interesting thoughts, thanks!

[DeSwiss]

28. Well, that's easy to explain.....

...I didn't dig David Hume up and he is not whom I posted about.

- But it was a nice try.....

[Jim__]

35. From your post #13: "Hume's position is no more sacrosanct than Issac Newton's were."

Without knowing what Hume said, you can hardly claim that Harris has a more valid position. He doesn't. We generally know what are good health practices, an "is". Hume noted that there are "is" statements that pertain to attaining moral goals. Harris doesn't even seem to be aware of that. Harris is clearly not a philosopher, and his putting incorrect words in philosophers' mouths in that presentation was a sure sign of his ignorance.

[tama]

38. As said

Hume's position is not sacrosanct. From the 'is' of Hume's guillotine it does not logically follow that it should be followed. From the fact of logic it does not follow that one should be logical.

"No should from is" is logical on one way and "No is from should" is not its logical implication.

Did Harris mention Hume, and if so, what did he say?

[Jim__]

41. He begins the discussion with the is-ought problem. - n/t

[tama]

21. Very slippery

"How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there's no such thing as moral expertise? Or moral talent? Or moral genius? How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count?"

Yeah, by all means lets trust the infallible moral expertise of the Pope (but of Science, not Church!) instead of listening to our own voice of conscience.

Vestigia terrent.

[GliderGuider]

26. "It needs people like ourselves..."

That gives me the fucking shivers. The arrogance and absolutism in the posted quote is simply breathtaking. I see very little difference between Harris' position and that of the Taliban he decries. I will grant moral technocracy no space in my life. No way. I'll make up my own mind about my own morality, thank you very much.

[DeSwiss]

29. If you're shivering....

...you should wear more clothes. And if you scare that easy, then at least it's easier for me to understand why you're a religionist. Religionist are full of FEAR

- In fact, FEAR is what made them and keeps them religious.....

[GliderGuider]

30. Why did you think it was fear?

It was actually a mix of outrage and the recognition that humans have a historical propensity for stepping onto slippery slopes like that with disastrous results. Since you didn't ask me what it was, any other assumption is just a projection.

I'm not sure why you would feel the need to try and invalidate my reaction. My objection is strong, but it's not exactly threatening.

[DeSwiss]

32. Because the whole basis....

...of religion is FEAR.

- Always has been, always will be. It's all they got.

[tama]

33. Fear is the mind killer

The objectivist ethics of Ayn Rand refuting Hume's guillotine is based on supposedly universal fact of fear of death and preserving individual life or ego-continuity.

A fellow DUer of atheist and objectivist inclination tried to convince me to refute quantum wierdness that 'anything can happen' and accept predictable objectivism on the basis that 'anything can happen' must be too frightening to accept.



There's nothing to fear but fear itself. Denial of fears and inability to recognize them and meet them leads to feelings of insecurity and attempts to compensate insecurity with aggressive behaviour etc.

[GliderGuider]

39. So you assume I'm religious?

What gives you that impression? I'm a spiritual atheist, and I have no contact at all with the fear-based social control mechanisms of religious institutions. Even my spirituality extends only as far as deep feelings about the fundamental interconnectedness of the universe. Fear might be all "they" got, it sure as hell ain't what "I" got.

[Christa]

23. K & R

Tumbling the dominoes of religion, one at a time.

OMG - he is so good looking as well!~ :evilgrin:

[Jim__]

43. Another opinion: The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate

A critique of Sam Harris's assertions:

Harris is doing exactly what Hume warned against, in a move that is at least as old as Plato: he’s noticing that most people are, as a matter of empirical fact, more concerned about the fate of primates than the fate of insects, and taking that as evidence that we ought to be more concerned about them; that it is morally correct to have those feelings. But that’s a non sequitur. After all, not everyone is all that concerned about the happiness and suffering of primates, or even of other human beings; some people take pleasure in torturing them. And even if they didn’t, again, so what? We are simply stating facts about how human beings feel, from which we have no warrant whatsoever to conclude things about how they should feel.

Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake. Or, to choose a different mathematical analogy, any particular judgment about right and wrong is like Euclid’s parallel postulate in geometry; there is not a unique choice that is compatible with the other axioms, and different choices could in principle give different interesting moral philosophies.

A big part of the temptation to insist that moral judgments are objectively true is that we would like to have justification for arguing against what we see as moral outrages when they occur. But there’s no reason why we can’t be judgmental and firm in our personal convictions, even if we are honest that those convictions don’t have the same status as objective laws of nature. In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected — and indeed, may even be hindered — by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true. In the end, we will always be appealing to their own moral senses, which may or may not coincide with ours.

The unfortunate part of this is that Harris says a lot of true and interesting things, and threatens to undermine the power of his argument by insisting on the objectivity of moral judgments. There are not objective moral truths (where “objective” means “existing independently of human invention”), but there are real human beings with complex sets of preferences. What we call “morality” is an outgrowth of the interplay of those preferences with the world around us, and in particular with other human beings. The project of moral philosophy is to make sense of our preferences, to try to make them logically consistent, to reconcile them with the preferences of others and the realities of our environments, and to discover how to fulfill them most efficiently. Science can be extremely helpful, even crucial, in that task. We live in a universe governed by natural laws, and it makes all the sense in the world to think that a clear understanding of those laws will be useful in helping us live our lives — for example, when it comes to abortion or gay marriage. When Harris talks about how people can reach different states of happiness, or how societies can become more successful, the relevance of science to these goals is absolutely real and worth stressing.

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[Odin2005]

44. Good blog post!

[Jim__]

46. A thoughtful response that links to a number of other responses.

...

Set that aside, though, and consider the question of whether, if we had an agreed-upon definition of wellbeing, such wellbeing would actually tell us right from wrong in any scientifically testable way. In particular, note that we lack any clear way to know what it would mean to empirically test whether a moral value is right. The claim that wellbeing is linked to moral merit is also a value claim, and lacks any obvious testable basis. Harris surely believes it true, but does the claim make any testable prediction? I can conceive of none, and thus conclude that several steps in Harris's logic are dependent on untestable value judgments. He's built a grand theory, but it seems to amount to turtles-all-the-way-down logic. In short, Harris's logical positivist effort (for that's what it is) is running into the problem that logical positivism always hits.

This is why moral consensus, whether it exists or not, does not tell us the truth. Scientific consensus is a weathervane pointing to an invisible but measurable wind. But the question of whether there is any such measurable phenomena underlying morals and values is not something subject to objective testing. As Harris notes:

Everyone has an intuitive “physics,” but much of our intuitive physics is wrong (with respect to the goal of describing the behavior of matter), and only physicists have a deep understanding of the laws that govern the behavior of matter in our universe. Everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much intuitive morality is wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective wellbeing) and only genuine moral experts would have a deep understanding of the causes and conditions of human and animal wellbeing..

But who counts as a "genuine moral expert"? In physics, we judge genuine expertise based on training and command of testable knowledge, and ideally the ability to formulate novel, testable, and correct predictions about as-yet unseen circumstances. What is the testable knowledge on which we judge the expertise of a purported moral expert? Each person possesses comparable experience exercising moral judgment, and while society may freely hold certain of those people to have made poor choices – even to be sociopaths with diminished or absent moral capacity – there's no obvious scientific basis for that judgment. Harris replies to this objection in turn. He cites Sean Carroll's query "Who decides what is a successful life?" and replies:

Well, who decides what is coherent argument? Who decides what constitutes empirical evidence? Who decides when our memories can be trusted? The answer is, “we do.” And if you are not satisfied with this answer, you have just wiped out all of science, mathematics, history, journalism, and every other human effort to make sense of reality..

This is the sort of logic that Alan Sokal so brutally skewered in his 1996 hoax paper for Social Text. The issue is that, while certain aspects of science are indeed socially constructed, the enterprise itself is structured in a way that depends on a correspondence between claims and empirical reality. It is not that "we do" decide that memories are trustworthy (indeed, much research shows that memory is profoundly unreliable), nor can it be said that "we do" declare by fiat what counts as evidence. Science today is not what it was in Newton's time in part because it was found that certain sorts of evidence and certain sorts of arguments work better at formulating claims which correspond with reality.

Harris claims that rejecting the above-quoted passage means I've "wiped out all science, mathematics, history, journalism, and every other human effort to make sense of reality." I propose that his understanding of science is badly flawed, flawed as that of any crank with a new unified theory. To preserve his theory, he'd do what creationists and other denialists always try with their forms of crankery always do, redefine science to fit their preferences, turn science into a popularity contest rather than a system for testing claims against empirical reality, and take shelter in solipsism if anyone tries to challenge his views.


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