is/ought

Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to Sam Harris. I read The End of Faith, and found it to be pretty well thought-out and argued--a useful book.

However, recently he did a TED talk in which he argued that science can answer moral questions, and I must say I find his main argument and especially his responses to critics to be pretty underwhelming. You can read one such response here.

Something especially troubling is his insistence that there really are huge moral stakes attached to this philosophical dispute--so much so that he believes people who he disagrees with should be characterized as amoral monsters who condone the hypothetical blinding of innocent people:

At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree, another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke. This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim:

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?

Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing wellbeing—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

She: But that’s only your opinion.

Me: Okay… Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human wellbeing?

She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”

She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.

Such opinions are not uncommon in the Ivory Tower.

I think Harris is confused here about what function a philosophical argument like this serves--specifically, the sort of skeptical argument offered here by his interloqueter (in this case, skepticism about universal morality/grounding for cross-cultural moral claims). The point of a skeptical argument isn't to argue that such skepticism is justified or that we should walk around actually believing it; rather, it's to draw attention to an inconsistency or lack of explanation in our way of thinking about things. One of my favorite philosophers, Barry Stroud, likened it to Meno's paradox: the point isn't to seriously contend that two objects can never touch (since the closing distance needs to be infinitely halved), but rather to draw attention to an apparent contradiction--or at least bit of weirdness--in our conceptions of numbers, distance, etc. Here Harris being horrified at his interlocutor's skepticism regarding the ability to morally condemn his hypothetical cruel society would be like someone responding to Meno by saying, "I refute it thus", and knocking two rocks together--in both cases, they are missing the point of the exercise.

(Indeed, I think proof that Harris did not understand the point of his interlocutor's questioning is given by the fact that he doesn't include enough of the conversation to understand what the interlocutor was getting at. Rather than turn on his heel, Harris' next question should have been: but that is a counter-intuitive answer; you would think you would be able to make a moral condemnation of the society in such an extreme case. Explain to me why you find such a condemnation is problematic. I will be charitable and assume that you do indeed substantively believe it is wrong to blind people for no good reason.)

I find it hard to believe that Harris' interlocutor is truly a "moral relativist"--that she gives an uncomplicated shrug of the shoulders to cruelties perpetrated by foreign cultures. I also find it hard to believe that Sam Harris truly believes his interlocutor has such a set of beliefs--which makes his pretensions of horror and outrage so tiresome. The truth is, there is quite a lot of distance between someone's avowed philosophical beliefs on a relatively esoteric point in analytic philosophy and someone's actual substantive positions on the various political and moral questions of the day. I'm sure there is someone out there who considers themself to be a proud "moral relativist" or something along those lines, but who nevertheless has a substantive set of beliefs that are not very different from Harris'--I would not call this person any less moral for staking out that philosophical position. Nor would I consider someone who naively doesn't think at all about the validity of their moral claims less moral than someone who thinks a lot about it, all else being equal. Harris is caught up in the melodrama of his own intellectual quest, and is forgetting that real actions and political beliefs make moral monsters, not esoteric philosophical claims.

Of course, Harris' intent seems precisely to infuse his project to science-ize morality with a fierce moral urgency--he wants results, dammit! There are women forced to wear sacks in Afghanistan! All true enough. But if he really cares about those substantive issues--and they are of course serious issues to think about and take action on--then he must know that arguing for a philosophical grounding of morality in science has to be the most ineffective, roundabout way of addressing them of all time. It's not like on Monday you come up with a knock-down argument of Hume's is/ought distinction, submit it to Philosophy Today on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the US government is meticulously implementing your program. Philosophy in general is an ivory tower activity. Thinking it's not is exactly the sort of thing that someone in an ivory tower would think. So Harris' fierce moral urgency shtick is truly misplaced.

I acknowledge this hasn't been a substantive critique of Harris' main argument so much as griping about the way he has conducted himself. But I do think there is something very much awry when someone comes away from a philosophical tiff believing that the person they just spoke to was History's Greatest Monster, when in fact it was probably just a nice lady with lots of advanced degrees.

PS: I'm sure Sam Harris is very smart and all, but I'm also sure that David Hume was probably about a hundred times smarter. And unlike scientific fields such as physics, philosophy doesn't "advance" in a Kuhnian way that renders important conclusions quaint and invalidated years later. It's not like Hume was theorizing about humors in the body or something that a school child could refute today; his epistemological arguments are actually alive and kicking still, and difficult to get a full and complete understanding of, even for dedicated scholars. Philosophy is hard! And yet from this obnoxious passage, you would think that philsophy was a relatively straightforward exercise, and Hume some sort of obscure crank:

Many of my critics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time. Indeed, Carroll appears to think that Hume’s lazy analysis of facts and values is so compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:

Attempts to derive ought from is [values from facts] 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.

This is an amazingly wrongheaded response coming from a very smart scientist. I wonder how Carroll would react if I breezily dismissed his physics with a reference to something Robert Oppenheimer once wrote, on the assumption that it was now an unmovable object around which all future human thought must flow. Happily, that’s not how physics works. But neither is it how philosophy works. Frankly, it’s not how anything that works, works.

And:

I must say, the vehemence and condescension with which the is/ought objection has been thrown in my face astounds me. And it confirms my sense that this bit of bad philosophy has done tremendous harm to the thinking of smart (and not so smart) people. The categorical distinction between facts and values helped open a sinkhole beneath liberalism long ago—leading to moral relativism and to masochistic depths of political correctness.

Look Sam Harris: it's obviously just fine to challenge arguments made by great thinkers. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do. But have some effing respect. "This bit of bad philosophy"? And when you launch a big argument about how science can be a grounding for morality, and you don't call your argument, "My Controversial Argument Against Hume's Is/Ought Distinction", shouldn't you expect the first words out of everyone's mouth to be, "what about Hume's is/ought distinction"?