The Moral Landscape Challenge

This is my entry to Sam Harris's Moral Landscape Challenge. Needless to say, it didn't win, but I'm reasonably happy with it nonetheless.

The Moral Landscape (TML) is engagingly written and cleverly argued. Harris starts with the assumption that morality concerns maximising the well-being of conscious creatures (let’s call this Harris’s axiom). Much of what follows is laudable, but there are unavoidable philosophical problems with the notion that science can determine human values. Yes, science can in principle give us answers we can use to improve the human condition. Fully embracing Harris’s axiom, this is the application of science to standard consequentialism and subject to all the same philosophical criticisms.

It is also a relatively trivial idea, and hardly new. If we are to take TML seriously, we must assume it makes a more profound claim: that there are usually objectively correct answers to moral dilemmas and that science can find them.

And another thing!

Before leaving the subject of The Moral Landscape completely, I want to write a post specifically to defend Harris's idea against one particularly bad criticism.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was quite annoyed by a howler of an error made by William Lane Craig in a debate he had with Sam Harris on the topic of whether there could be an objective basis for morality without God.

What was even more annoying was that Dr. Craig was convinced that he had unambiguously proved his argument with this ridiculous misunderstanding. Unbelievably, Harris never bothered to challenge this, resolutely ignoring Dr. Craig and evidently concentrating on all the points he had scripted for himself well in advance of the debate.

After the jump, Dr. Craig's bogus argument and why it's so wrong.

The Moral Landscape: conclusions

For all the reasons I've outlined, I don't think it's correct to say that Sam Harris has justified his claim that science can in principle give us objective moral values.

However, that doesn't mean that moral values are completely subjective either. Moral systems can be inconsistent, and moral values can be effective or ineffective at achieving more profound moral goals. For those who agree that well-being is of primary concern, various moral decisions can be evaluated objectively with regard to how well they promote it.

Should we value a parent's right to corporally punish a child, or value the child's right to be spared deliberate physical pain? Well, if we wish to promote good character, then an objective decision should be possible given enough data. Unfortunately most of us make these decisions subjectively based on our own upbringing and capacity for empathy.

I suspect that Harris's true position is not that different from my own, and that perhaps our disagreement is more a matter of semantics than incompatible world views.

The conscious beneficiaries of morality

To whom do we have a moral duty? Sam Harris identifies "conscious beings" as the beneficiaries of our morality.

This is a very broad category, and perhaps Harris is correct. The momentum of history appears to be with him, in that our moral circle is ever-expanding. We first felt this duty only to our kin, then later to our nation, our race, our species.

In the present day, many are concerned with the well-being of members of other species. The future may bring yet more expansion of this moral circle, perhaps even bringing artificially intelligent constructs into the fold. 

Harris seems to include certain animals in his circle of morality, which will please animal rights advocates. On the other hand, pro-life campaigners will be disappointed that Harris seems to exclude human embryos. That some people may reasonably disagree with him calls the objectivity of his axiom into question, however this is the topic of an earlier post.

Let's assume Harris has correctly identified the correct description for moral beneficiaries. In this post, I discuss the problem of deciding objectively who fits it.

The subjectivity of well-being

In keeping with the theme of attacking the objectivity of Harris's moral axiom, this post will address whether the concept of well-being itself has objective meaning.

I don't have a lot to say about it other than to claim that it doesn't.

The possibility of other moral systems

In my last post, I discussed some potential problems with the axiom chosen by Sam Harris as the basis of his system of morality. I showed why I believed this axiom was not sufficient to explain our intuitive sense of morality, and I explained why I believe Harris would need to show that such a simple axiom is possible in order for his argument for the objective reality of morality to hold together.

In this post, I suggest that even if we did manage to patch the problems with Harris's axiom, it would be hard to accept it as an objective basis for morality because it may contradict moral views held by various significant subsets of the human population. If Harris derives his axiom from human moral intuition, as I believe he does, then it seems problematic to claim it as objective when such differences of opinion exist.

An unimpeachable moral foundation

Sam Harris claims that a science of morality may be considered objective because if it is founded on a premise that no reasonable person could disagree with. The premise or axiom proposed by Harris is that moral good is that which tends to improve the aggregate well-being of conscious creatures, while moral evil is the converse. He maintains that this is so obviously correct that were anybody to disagree, we would not take them seriously.

I do think Harris's choice of moral axiom is a good one, and may be among the best we can come up with. However it may not be sufficient to provide a basis for all of our common moral intuitions, indicating that perhaps this axiom is not a perfect basis for morality after all. Our moral intuitions are important, because these are the only justification that Harris can offer for this axiom in the first place. There can be no other reason to suppose that it is correct. 

In this post, I intend to argue that there are grounds to disagree with this axiom.

Objective conclusions, subjective premises

Continuing the discussion of Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, I have a problem with the notion of claiming to derive an entirely objective system of morality from an arbitrary premise, no matter how reasonable that premise may appear to be.

While I find Harris's arguments to be compelling and interesting, I feel in some ways he overstates his point, opening him to criticism and distracting from the central message.

The subtitle of The Moral Landscape is How Science Can Determine Human Values, and I think this is a problem because I'm not convinced it can. The problem is that the axiom Harris has chosen as the basis of his morality is itself a value which is not determined by science. Harris states that this axiom is uncontroversial - anyone who sought to decrease well-being for all conscious creatures would surely be considered evil by any reasonable person, whereas anyone who sought to increase universal well-being would be considered good. I agree with this point, however, the reasonableness of Harris's grounding value is not the issue, the issue is that the very title of the book claims that science can determine values, whereas his basic foundational value is not derived from anything but what reasonable people will usually agree.

In one way, I don't think this is a big problem. I agree with a lot of Harris says, and I agree with his goal to base morality in science and reason rather than appeals to a higher power. As such, the claim that moral values can be truly objective is a red herring which distracts the reader from what I feel should be the central message of the book. It may well be true that given some foundational axioms we may be able to derive a number of higher-level values as conclusions with an objectively valid chain of logical reasoning. However I feel that Harris is wrong to claim that the resulting values are then objectively true.

Perhaps How Science Can Determine Human Values Given the Assumption That We Seek To Improve the Well-Being of Conscious Creatures just wasn't as catchy? Even How Science Can Help to Determine Human Values would be more accurate.

After the jump, Harris defends his reasoning using an analogy to health and medicine.

Harris's Moral Axiom

In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris argues for the reality of moral truths and maintains that they can in principle be discovered by science. As such, Harris is a moral realist, however he cannot base the reality of his morality on the dictates of a God in whom he does not believe. Instead, he declares that we can choose another basis for a system of objective morality.

As Harris points out, any philosophical, scientific or mathematical pursuit must start out with some basic assumptions which we hold to be self-evident. In formal systems of logic, these are usually called axioms.

All logical systems must have foundational axioms. For the familiar Euclidean geometry, it turns out we need five axioms (other forms of geometry have been discovered by altering these axioms). Arithmetic depends on a set of axioms known as the Peano axioms, without which we cannot prove that 1 + 1 = 2.

But even informally, if we wish to engage in logic at all, we must value reason and consistency just as we must reject contradictions. For the pursuit of scientific research, we must assume the axiom that beliefs should be based on evidence and not guesswork and that the behaviour of objects in the universe is not random and unpredictable but governed by a system of laws waiting to be discovered.

For any mode of reasoning, thinking or philosophy, there must be some foundational assumptions. These axioms are not derived from anything, they are simple statements which usually appear to be intuitively obvious and upon which we can base our reasoning.

After the jump, Harris attempts to found an objective system of morality upon a simple axiom.

Is there an objective basis for morality?

I've been following Sam Harris for a while and have recently read The Moral Landscape in which he attempts to answer this question. As an atheist, my own view is that there can be no objective basis to morality and so morality must be a function of culture and convention only, however Harris valiantly argues against this popular point of view in his book.

Reading Sam Harris has been illuminating - while I still don't really believe in the fundamental objectivity of morality, his arguments help to explain how one might apply science, logic and reason to compare alternative moral values and determine which are to be preferred.

Before delving into Harris's view of morality, and my own, I'll be taking a look at some alternative views of morality, starting with the basic question of whether morality has any independent existence at all.