Sam Harris talks to Michael Shermer about morality, or meta-morality. They’re both experts in the subject, so the combination must be super-expert.
Shermer: The criterion I use—inspired by your starting point in The Moral Landscape of “the well-being of conscious creatures”—is “the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.”
He says that as if the idea originated with Sam Harris. It didn’t.
Today we no longer accept the witch theory of causality because science debunked it. In its stead science created natural and more accurate explanations for such phenomena as weather and diseases. Science has also debunked other superstitious beliefs, such as demon possession; the need for animal and human sacrifice to appease God; that Jews caused the Black Death; that African Americans are an inferior race; that women are the weaker gender…
Wait.
Science has debunked the superstitious belief that women are the weaker gender…but not the superstitious belief that being intellectually active is more of a guy thing?
Why? Why the one and not the other? Aren’t they linked? Aren’t they variations on a single theme? Aren’t both equally stupid?
I think the answer to all those questions is Yes. Given that, I would love to know why Shermer got in such a rage at me for criticizing him for making that claim.
It’s because most women scientists don’t have wives to take care of everything outside of work. Must be – what other explanation is there??
Because criticism is a narcissistic injury to Shermer.
From the link:
Here we have it, what led Shermer to Ophelia-ranting. He did not like the effect of being reigned in at a primary base of operations.
Like the typo, #3, “reigned in” vs. “reined in.” Who’s to tell the King what to do, anyhow??
Lest anyone be led by this to believe that they’re both vegans, they’re not. Despite the fact that neither can muster any rational argument for not being vegan by their own criteria and in fact both acknowledge, like Dawkins, that being consistent would mean becoming vegan. Their pitiful attempt at justification is simply to say that it’s difficult or less pleasurable for them to do. Here’s Shermer in response to Peter Singer:
This is of course an all too common attitude, but it acquires an extra creepiness in Shermer’s case. A nonhuman animal’s interest in not being tortured or killed is consciously balanced against his interest in enjoying eating meat and feeling leather, and found wanting, to the extent that he sweeps aside all rational moral argument. A parallel comes to mind with, say, a man’s interest in having sex with a woman vs. her interest in not having sex unless she actively wants to…
Quite the Global Moral Expert Thought Leaders.
Argh. This should have been my first link above.
Christ on a bike! I suspect they were examples, and not an exhaustive list. For example where is the debunking of “vaccinations cause autism”?
You’d think that Shermer would be a little more cautious about coming across this way, given the real blows to his reputation in recent memory. But no, instead he chooses to double down.
@7: I think you’re missing context. Ophelia didn’t pull that out of the air. It’s something Shermer actually claimed and dug in on, even though he’s claiming something very similar is debunked.
Oh thanks Ophelia, I just snorted coffee out my nose.
😉
The reason that particular example was chosen was because it recently came out of Shermer’s mouth.
The criticism is not that he didn’t present an exhaustive list, but that he appears to be failing to include his own half-assed, superstitious sounding excuses that were really just another facet of the “women are the weaker sex” stereotype.
As an aside, the fact that he even phrased it as “women are the weaker sex” is irritating. It’s sounds like he’s saying “science proved women are just as strong as men!” *wink wink*
As if the argument for gender equality has anything to do with equality of strength. To be fair I also seriously hate “strong woman” as a compliment. I know people mean well when they say it, but I still really, really hate it. Probably for similar reasons that black people hate being called “articulate”.
I think this might be apropos for Shermer (especially the name of the poem):
Robert Burns, Poem “To a Louse” – verse 8
karmacat @2
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
Well, from his responses*, it was the pitchforks, the flaming torches, the howling mob, the river dunkings, the sittings of the House of Un-American Activities, and the show trials that bothered him. If all you’d done was, say, mildly criticize him in passing in a magazine article that would have been fine.
😉
* The second one was even more over the top. Unfortunately, it’s hidden now.
^ Which is why I didn’t link to it. I wanted to link to that rather than the eSkeptic one.
@ 15 Ophelia Benson
Yeah. What is it with comfortable white guys who totally lose their shit over the mildest slight? There was Shermer and then there was Dawkins’ dystopian visions of an Orwellian future where “Dogma is King, and Emotion is Queen”. (Because a lot of people criticized some of his ill-thought, insensitive tweets.)
You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of that guy who went ballistic because he was allegedly overcharged four bucks. It’s the same dynamic. It’s, “Hey! I’m on the top of the heap here! You’ve got to show me respect, little person!”.
Well, I could explain it to you, but it’s clear you wouldn’t understand the grand concepts of … thinkiness … behind the … thinking … that is done by great (all male) thinkers.
Wouldn’t you rather go shopping for shoes instead?
/s
Science did not debunk witchcraft because nobody ever performed a proper experiment on the subject. What destroyed the idea of witchcraft was the Enlightenment and the subsequent refusal of law enforcement to pursue what was clearly a ridiculous, unjust, and inflammatory mindset. Nobody ever thought “gee there are two hypotheses to explain weather, witchcraft vs. air pressure changes, I wonder how to test them empirically?”
[meta]
chrislawson:
But that’s not true about the idea that wives lawfully owed their husbands sexual compliance, is it?
“Science has also debunked…….that African Americans are an inferior race”
Not neccesarily in line with Harris’ ideas on race and intelligence.
http://www.project-reason.org/archive/item/the_strange_case_of_francis_collins2
I have never read anything so self-congratulating and self-concerned as the Harris-Shermer interview. Experts?! These guys don’t know the first thing about ethics. And for Shermer to say, “I believe that the moral progress we have made is real and lasting,” is about as myopic as you can possibly get. He should read some history. They come off like a couple of schoolboys trying to show off their smarts (they don’t have any). That they should pass for experts beggars imagination!
Appreciate, therefore, the ironic title of the piece. Unfortunately the church became ossified in the centuries intervening between its origins and today, but for a good appreciation of genuine moral progress, the development of the early church is a good place to start. And one of the first things you notice is that morality is not about individuals as such and their flourishing, but the flourishing of societies in which individual flourishing is a possibility. To divorce the individual from the society in the way that both Shermer and Harris do is completely to misunderstand the context of ethics.
Rights talk didn’t start with individuals. for example. It started with the moral requirements for a flourishing society, within which individuals might be able to flourish, and where moral limits defined the legitimate scope of the flourishing of moral individuals. So there will inevitably be limits. That the church contemporarily puts those limits in some of the wrong places, is a sign that the church has become ossified by dogma, but at some point the social limits of individual expression must be addressed in any society in which it will be possible for individuals to flourish. The more I hear from Harris (I know very little about Shermer, and care to know less), the less competent he seems in practically every area in which he has undertaken “close” study. I am afraid his presuppositions (and his early and quite undeserved respect as an expert) have made genuinely close study (since he keeps repeating the same old ideas again and again, without any sign that he has deepened his understanding) an impossibility for him.
Eric MacDonald:
Well, like you, he has hopes that there is a spiritual aspect to reality, and gives much significance to the numinous.
So, there’s that.
That, John, is not where Harris’s assumption of expertise goes so very wrong. He knows next to nothing about ethics, says that he finds metaethics boring, and so ignores it, without a single word of justification; he thinks that science can determine values (rejecting Hume’s caveats about “ises” and “oughts” — as, of course, does the Roman Catholic Church) without showing any indication that he understands that this is what he has actually done. Indeed, he includes a value premise, unacknowledged, in his supposedly scientific morality. It’s a bit of a mess, philosophically, which seems to show that he slept through his philosophy courses, seminars, etc. As to Harris’s Buddhist commitments, I have nothing to say, finding most of what he writes pointless. If you want someone who was paying attention, and speaks more naturalistic sense about ethics, read Kitcher’s The Ethical Project. There is also the same author’s Life after Faith, which I have not yet read. One of the things that the contemporary pull of disoriented young people towards Islam tells us, I think, is that we dispense with the spiritual dimension of life at our peril. Buddhist passivism, however, doesn’t seem to me enough to do the trick.
I want to read Kitcher’s The Ethical Project. My stupid public library doesn’t carry it and didn’t comply with my purchase request. Goddam philistines.
@SC (Salty Current) in 5
One could make an argument that vegetarianism is enough under these standards. I don’t think it’s blindingly obvious that you need to go all the way to veganism.
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@Al in 20
Your assertion seems to be that Sam Harris argues that black people are less intelligent and this is genetic, and simultaneously he argues that science has demonstrated that black people are not less intelligent.
Your cited article does not support your assertion. Sam clearly points out that this question is a scientific question, and he points out that there has to be some difference on some unknown components somewhere. I would prefer if he explicitly added “but none of this contradicts the available evidence which strongly indicates that the genetic component of blacks is on average the same as any other race (within the statistical bounds of the available evidence)”, but that is strongly implied.
I am currently unaware of other published texts by Sam Harris which would support that particular assertion.
…
@Eric in 23
It depends on how you read Sam Harris. I’ve tried discussing this issue in email with him long ago, and I’ve tried to explain what the correct phrasing of his position is, but he didn’t get it. (To be fair, not many people do.) In many of his lectures in the Q&A section, I have seen countless questions on this topic handled, and handled badly.
On the charitable reading, Sam Harris is entirely right. The charitable reading is that (scientific) facts do not exist except in a particular value framework. You have to value honesty, reason, logic, conforming your beliefs to the evidence, skepticism, inductive reasoning / Bayesian reasoning, falsifiability, etc. If one do not hold those values, and they are values, then one cannot have (scientific) fact beliefs. In that sense, values are antecedent to facts. In this sense, it is a fiction that facts are value-free.
In the same charitable reading, Sam Harris does agree with Hume’s is-ought distinction in the following sense: Facts and values are different beasts, and one cannot derive proscriptive (value) statements from mere fact statements, and one cannot derive fact statements from any assortment of value statements. However, it is true that we do derive fact statements from value statements (and evidence).
I’ve seen one talk by Sam Harris in particular where he makes clear that this is his position. It was one of his earlier ones IIRC. In it, he very clearly states that for his position to follow, you do need to grant one axiom – the axiom that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. Alternatively, he sometimes tries to go with the weaker axiom that the hypothetical universe where every creature suffers as much as possible and as long as possible is bad, and then derive the assertion that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
Harris says that whilst Wilson’s view that people of African descent appear to be innately less intelligent than white Europeans is unpleasant, it nevertheless has a “scientific basis” in truth which must not be denounced.
Then, he goes full blown imbecile
“Given the genetic consequences of a population living in isolation for tens of thousands of years it would, in fact, be very surprising if there were no differences between racial or ethnic groups waiting to be discovered.”
WTF!
Ophelia @24, there’s a lengthy précis available.
@Al in 26
Harris didn’t say that in the article you provided.
http://www.project-reason.org/archive/item/the_strange_case_of_francis_collins2
I think the relevant snippet is:
Harris is not using the word “unscientific” in the sense of true or false. Rather, Harris talking about the demarcation problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
In essence, Harris is saying that Watson’s claim is subject to the scrutiny of science, and it is couched in the language of science. However, Harris also makes it decently clear that this claim is false. I think he could have done better to avoid a little ambiguity, and I suggested the phrasing above which he could have used to accomplish this.
Harris is pointing out the difference of working within the scientific mindset and world view, but having atrociously wrong positions, vs working outside of the scientific mindset and world view, where all statements are not right nor wrong – they are not even wrong.
Harris is not saying that there is any scientific basis to Watson’s statement. It is simply not a reasonable reading of the text.
Quoting Al (who quotes Sam Harris):
Uhh, I think you missed a memo. There are statistical differences of some physical attributes between racial and ethnic groups, and we have good reason to think that there are more statistical differences waiting to be discovered. I think the classic example is lactose tolerance vs intolerance for many racial and ethnic groups. A strikingly obvious example is skin color. I also recall that certain ethnicities experience diseases like heart disease at varying rates, and that it has a genetic component.
When some people say “race is a social construct”, they don’t really mean that there are absolutely zero real world attributes which constitute race. What they mean to say is that the collection of real world attributes which often distinguish races have absolutely no scientific significance whatsoever. It’s like distinguishing between people with brown hair vs blond hair, or based on height, etc. Why would you do that?
Recognizing these obvious facts does not entail that you believe that there is a significant difference between “the races” on intelligence, physical ability (excepting perhaps abilities based on raw body size and height), etc. Further, even if there was a statistically significant difference of intelligent, strength, etc., the overlap of the population of “the races” is necessarily quite large based on available evidence. Further, even if there was a statistically significant difference of of intelligent, strength, etc., it does not follow that people of different “races” should be treated differently. Rather, because of the high overlap, even if there was statistically significant differences, the only sound policy is to measure each individual by their own merits rather than relying on the necessarily bad and unreliable stereotypes of the person’s “race”.
PS: Sam Harris may be a racist asshat, perhaps slightly unconsciously so, as evidenced by his shenanigans over airport security. However, not everything Sam Harris ever writes needs to be racist.
Thank you, John.
Ah, Churchland’s braintrust is in the references. I got a lot from that book.
“One” could only make that argument if one were willfully ignorant about the suffering and death that attend the production of dairy and eggs (millions of male chicks ground up alive or tossed in the trash to die, mothers having their calves torn away from them shortly after birth to suffer to be turned into veal or to themselves be enslaved as dairy cows until they’re also “spent” and sold for beef,…). This information is readily available to anyone interested (in books like Eating Animals, for example, but also across the internet), and people using the criteria described certainly have the moral responsibility to educate themselves at this most basic level.
I didn’t claim that it was “blindingly obvious” even to the ignorant. It is blindingly obvious, though, that it’s immoral to claim that basis for your morality and remain that ignorant about suffering to which you’re contributing. It wasn’t obvious to me for most of my life, but after taking steps to inform myself about what’s entailed I realize that I was immorally hiding from the reality.
In any case, I’ve seen you in action enough to have your number and have zero interest in engaging with you further. I expect your responses to continue to be inane and ill-informed, and will proceed to ignore you.
@SC
Harsh.
PS: Nothing you say is wrong, but it’s also not an indictment against any and all possible use of farm animals.
[OT]
Not just farm animals: Idracowra Station cattleman pleads guilty, cops $7,500 fine after muster leaves 50 animals dead.
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Anyway, I you miss SC’s most basic point: we are indisputably all animals who can suffer — you, her, me, Ophelia, cattle, pigs, hens* — and so moral considerations based on the prevention of preventable suffering should apply to all beings that can suffer.
Granted, some such beings are not sapient, but they all as sure as hell feel pain and hunger and frustration, and to deny that they suffer when experiencing these things is to deny what should be evident to anyone who has interacted with non-human animals.
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* Not really an Orwellian reference.
“There may very well be detectable differences in intelligence between races. Given the genetic consequences of a population living in isolation for tens of thousands of years it would, in fact, be very surprising if there were no differences between racial or ethnic groups waiting to be discovered.”
There is no such population, and even if there was, the differences could consist in anything so singling out intelligence is unnecessary. Just take a look at this article in Nature to see the latest paper in a long line. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7518/full/nature13673.html
This is the kind of abstract philosophical meandering only an armchair theorist with no self awareness could make.
Watson’s idea is not scientific; it is pseudoscience. The supporting data Harris claims to show “detectable differences in intelligence between races” is lifted straight from the discredited racist tract The Bell Curve which has been debunked extensively by geneticists, most notably Steven Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man.
Ophelia, as you say,
This is a very charitable reading, for Harris does not seem to see that everything we do is, in fact, soaked in values, which are always, in some sense, antecedent to the facts, since the are presupposed as the fundamental ordering of what we do (or at least ought to be). But this is not what The Moral Landscape sets out to demonstrate. Perhaps it is hidden in the verbiage — Harris is not the clearest of writers (which is why he keeps getting targeted by those who take him at his word, and he has to spend so much time clarifying what he meant to say), but the bluster about science and values, pretending that science can, in fact, qua science, determine values, is just bluster. Now that I look back at his ouvre, one has to say that it was terribly over-valued. The same goes, I’m afraid, for Richard Dawkins. They were a publishing phenomenon of the moment, but simply do not have staying power. The problem is that Harris is fighting well above his weight, and, when it comes right down to it, as Edward Wilson says, Dawkins is not, despite his popularising science books (which are certainly a genuine achievement), a scientist, but a science journalist. That is why his work on religion is so terribly confused, for, despite everything, he is really a science journalist. Get him out of his comfort zone, and he really is incompetent, as his many disastrous tweets have demonstrated so clearly. Apparently he recently tweeted about fighting Islamism with porn!! (A bit like sending a prostitute to subvert Aquinas’ decision to become a Dominican.) Has he not been paying attention?
Eric, that passage you quote isn’t from me, it’s from Enlightenment Liberal @ 25.
@John Morales
Uhh. No idea how you could possibly take that away from what I wrote. I am in complete agreement. I still don’t think this necessarily rules out all possible uses of farm animals.
@Al
Yes there is. There are many genetic differences between the “races” and ethnic backgrounds. Again, such as lactose intolerance rates.
Again, citations please where Harris says that the data supports a detectable average difference in the intelligence of the races and that this has a genetic component. In the earlier article you linked to, Harris said no such thing. He actually said the opposite.
I ask for citations because I would like to know, so I can add it to the list of outrages I have regarding Harris. At this point, my opinion of his thinking processes is low enough that I wouldn’t be surprised.
EnlightenmentLiberal @27:
But that’s the point!
No, not to any greater degree than it necessarily rules out all possible uses of non-human animals — but the point is not about specific strictures, it’s about consistence.
@John Morales
Again, agreed (I think).
EnlightenmentLiberal @39, shall we confirm our possible agreement?
When SC wrote…
… do you not think she was making an epistemic moral claim?
@John
I think she was making a moral claim. I don’t know what else you might call it. Depending on exactly what she meant, the claim is also wrong. Not all possible uses of farm animals entails anything like the horrors she describes. I agree that it is standard practice today, but it is not necessary practice.