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Home » Feature » Art and Culture
New look at morality
By Kwame Anthony Appiah |
October 3, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
SAM Harris heads the youth wing of the New Atheists. "The End of Faith," his blistering take-no-prisoners attack on the irrationality of religions, found him many fans and, not surprisingly, a great body of detractors.
In? "Letter to a Christian Nation," a follow-up prompted by the responses of Christians unhappy with his first book, he set out, he said, "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms," and so acquired, no doubt, more friends and more enemies. Certainly both books have had a wide and animated readership.
His new book, "The Moral Landscape," aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific world view he favors has nothing to say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have "non-overlapping magisteria." The authority of science and the authority of religion cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each are inappropriate for the study of the other's problems. Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls "meaning, morality and life's larger purpose," questions that have no scientific answers.
Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, disagrees. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That's because truths about morality and meaning must "relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures," and science alone - especially neuroscience, his field - can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life?
Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science? the right values being ones that promote well-being. °?"Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health," he writes, "it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being."
But wait: how do we know the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science revealed that? If it hasn't, then Harris's all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.
In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what's wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?
It's not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.
That's the case even with something as basic as what's meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an important value. So does it count against your well-being if your happiness is based on an illusion, say, the false belief that your wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come down. But if he thinks well-being has an objective component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact.
The most compelling strand in "The Moral Landscape" is its diatribe against relativism. Harris insists that there are correct answers to all questions of right and wrong, regardless of anyone's culture or religion. And, though some questions may escape our inquiries, many can be answered by science; none, he appears to think, can be answered without it.
Still, there's plenty of interest in "The Moral Landscape." Harris draws our attention to the fact that "science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning."
Still, I found myself wishing for less of the polemic against religion, which recurs often and takes up one entire chapter, and I wanted more of the illumination that comes from our increasing understanding of neuroscience.
In? "Letter to a Christian Nation," a follow-up prompted by the responses of Christians unhappy with his first book, he set out, he said, "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms," and so acquired, no doubt, more friends and more enemies. Certainly both books have had a wide and animated readership.
His new book, "The Moral Landscape," aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific world view he favors has nothing to say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have "non-overlapping magisteria." The authority of science and the authority of religion cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each are inappropriate for the study of the other's problems. Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls "meaning, morality and life's larger purpose," questions that have no scientific answers.
Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, disagrees. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That's because truths about morality and meaning must "relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures," and science alone - especially neuroscience, his field - can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life?
Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science? the right values being ones that promote well-being. °?"Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health," he writes, "it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being."
But wait: how do we know the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science revealed that? If it hasn't, then Harris's all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.
In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what's wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?
It's not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.
That's the case even with something as basic as what's meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an important value. So does it count against your well-being if your happiness is based on an illusion, say, the false belief that your wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come down. But if he thinks well-being has an objective component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact.
The most compelling strand in "The Moral Landscape" is its diatribe against relativism. Harris insists that there are correct answers to all questions of right and wrong, regardless of anyone's culture or religion. And, though some questions may escape our inquiries, many can be answered by science; none, he appears to think, can be answered without it.
Still, there's plenty of interest in "The Moral Landscape." Harris draws our attention to the fact that "science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning."
Still, I found myself wishing for less of the polemic against religion, which recurs often and takes up one entire chapter, and I wanted more of the illumination that comes from our increasing understanding of neuroscience.
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