Sam Harris’s Terrifying Philosophy

Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Sam Harris was one of the original four horsemen of the new atheism. He followed in the footsteps of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in considering religion not just misguided, but dangerous. He wrote his book, The End of Faith, after the 9/11 terrorist Attacks, and he cites those attacks as proof that religion is a dangerous part of society that needs to be replaced with a more enlightened rationalism.

But Harris’s primary critique of religion, that it justifies violence done in the name of God, also applies to his same secular philosophy, which as you’ll see, justifies any violence that can be done in the name of the greater good. But before I talk about that, let me say that I don’t want you to do anything bad in the name of promoting this channel. All I’d love for you to do is to like this video. If you enjoy it, subscribe to our channel to help it grow. If we can make a hundred thousand subscribers by 2024, I’d be very happy, and become a premium subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. That’s also really helpful.

Okay, so in 2010, Harris published a book on morality called The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Part of Harris’ goal was to answer the claim that atheists cannot ground morality apart from God, but the book was widely panned. Because even if you argue against God being the foundation of morality, that’s different than proving science can ground objective morality. Many philosophers criticize Harris’s book, saying he was mistaken in trying to use science to answer basic moral questions, like what is the good or how should we live? Using science to ground moral truths is like using a yardstick to weigh a chicken. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

Science tells us the way things are, not the way they ought to be. Harris’s book is basically a defense of utilitarianism because he defines goodness as increasing the wellbeing of conscious creatures, and says that since science shows us how to do that, we can use science to objectively ground morality. In that respect, Harris treats morality like medicine, and says that if we can use science to objectively make people healthier, why can’t we use science to objectively make people more moral? In other words, Harris says that it’s just obvious morality is about maximizing wellbeing, and anyone who says otherwise is as idiotic as someone who says medicine is not about making us healthier or live longer.

Here’s a panel discussion where Harris discusses this with an actual philosopher, Peter Singer, who is an atheistic utilitarian like Harris, but at least Singer understands how ethics is a philosophical issue. It’s not a scientific one, and these important questions about human life can’t be answered from science alone.

Those value premises that you mentioned, but obviously not everybody does.

But Peter, why can’t you do the same thing? Why can’t you attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine in the same way? If you’re continually vomiting, “You should go to the doctor, and get X, Y, and Z,” but that just assumes you don’t want to continually vomit.

Yeah, it does, exactly.

What about the person who wants to continually vomit?

But that’s an assumption. I mean, your example was if I want to live longer, then I should do it, but not everybody does want to live longer.

That’s shorthand for a whole suite of concerns that everyone recognizes are the only intelligible discussion about human health. If we can find one person who says, “Listen, I like vomiting, I like continuous pain, and I’d like to die tomorrow,” he’s not offering an alternate medical health-based worldview that we have to take seriously. He just doesn’t get invited back to the conference about medicine. And so it could be with the conference on morality, that’s all.

But look, I do spend time at conferences where we discuss the technological imperative. The fact that you now have more recruitment that can prolong people’s lives, should you use it? I mean, that’s an ethical question that medicine doesn’t really help you answer.

Okay, but that’s a false use of my analogy. I’m not saying medicine can answer these things. I’m saying that question of whether we should use medicine in this way is intelligible in a larger space where we talk about human wellbeing.

It’s intelligible, but it’s not answered.

Just because science can do something like increase our lifespan, it doesn’t follow that we have a moral duty to do what science lets us do, such as increasing lifespans or that it’s good to do that. Some people would rather accept death after a life well lived into their nineties instead of prolonging the inevitable. Or what if science could keep us alive forever, but our brains would be stimulated to think they’re in something like the Matrix? Would that promote our wellbeing? Once again, that’s a moral question science can’t answer.

Here’s part of the moral landscape that echoes what Harris said to Peter Singer: I wonder if anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like, “What about all the people who don’t share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is healthy? What makes you think that you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that they were not as healthy as you are?” Yet these are precisely the kinds of questions I face when I speak of morality in terms of human and animal wellbeing, end quote.I like the philosopher Ben Burgis’s criticism of Harris, because Burgis shares Harris’s liberal views on sexuality, but he says Harris misunderstands that medicine is often driven by non-scientific moral opinions rather than just scientific data.

Here’s what Burgis writes: Replace fatal gangrene with gender dysphoria in Harris’s last hypothetical question, and you have a far more controversial case. Not so long ago the question of whether same-sex attraction should be classified as a mental disorder was similarly controversial. Homosexuality was removed from the diagnostic and statistic manual of mental disorders, DSM, not primarily because of new scientific information about the causes of same-sex attraction coming to light. In fact, science hasn’t progressed very far on that front, but because this was one of many successive battles won by the Gay Liberation Movement on the normative front, end quote.

To ask a similar question, does cutting off someone’s genitals or other body parts because he or she has a mistaken sense of identity improve his or her wellbeing? That’s not a scientific question. We can’t get a scientific answer for it. Instead, we need good philosophy rooted in a correct understanding of the human person to tell us what is and isn’t in accord with our human nature. Now, while I disagree though with Harris a lot, I do agree that his view of the human person is correct if he is correct about the nature of reality. If atheism is true and the universe is ultimately governed by physics and chemistry, then it seems like all of our actions have been determined by previous causes. They could not have been any other way because you can’t change the past causes. That leads Harris to believe that not only are we determined, but this determinism is incompatible with free will. Because we have been determined by past causes in the realms of physics and chemistry, Harris says, “We do not have free will, then. Free will is an illusion.”

The free will people think they have is, “Damn, I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have done that. I could have done otherwise. I should have done otherwise.” If you think about something that you deeply regret doing, right? Or, that you hold someone else responsible for because they really are the upstream agent in your mind of what they did. That’s an awful thing that that person did, and they shouldn’t have done it. There is this illusion, and it has to be an illusion because there’s no picture of causation that would make sense of it. There’s this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago, it could have played out differently. The only way it could have played out differently is if there’s randomness added to that, but randomness isn’t what people feel would give them free will.

Now, some philosophers called compatibilists claim that free will and determinism are compatible. You can have both. They’ll say, “You have free will because you do what you want to do. No one forces you to do things you don’t want to do,” but Harris says this is not the kind of free will people typically believe in, like what he discussed in the previous clip. He says that the kind of free will people want to have is as mythical as the kingdom of Atlantis, and that modern philosophers like Daniel Dennet only succeed in defending free will by redefining it to make it something that barely resembles the real free will that people believe in, like their redefinition being that you’re free if you can do what you want. He says, in the same way, this is defending the existence of the kingdom of Atlantis by radically redefining what Atlantis is and losing the point entirely.

The disagreement between Dan and myself is essentially this: It’s like, we’re living in a world where most people believe in Atlantis, and they believe in the underwater kingdom. They read Plato closely trying to figure out where it was. I want to say Atlantis doesn’t exist, it didn’t exist. People are confused about Atlantis. Dan wants to say that Atlantis is really Sicily, and he’ll give a whole argument about why Sicily answers to many of the claims that people are making about Atlantis. I want to say, “No, but they’re still talking about being underwater. Now, Sicily doesn’t do that.” He says, “But Sicily is a great place, and there’s reasons to visit. Let’s talk about Sicily.” When he and I argue about this, he begins to respond to me as though I’m saying Sicily doesn’t exist. There’s a fair amount of talking past one another in these kinds of debates. Of course Sicily exists, but the people who are talking about an underwater kingdom are at the very least confused, and that’s the situation we’re in with free will.

I appreciate that Harris is willing to take the uncomfortable view that because we are determined, according to him, that means we do not have free will. He also admits that because we don’t have free will, we do not have moral responsibility for our actions in the traditional sense of that word. Because of that, Harris says we should structure society in very different and very disconcerting ways. For example, Harris claims traditional notions of punishment aren’t justifiable because we can’t choose to not do what we might be punished for. Instead of punishing people because they chose to do wrong, since you can’t really choose anything, Harris says we have to treat human harms like every other harm in the universe since they’re all equally the product of physical forces.

He writes the following in his book on free will: Viewing human beings as natural phenomena need not damage our system of criminal justice. If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. It may be that a sham form of retribution would still be moral, even necessary, if it led people to behave better than they otherwise would. Whether it is useful to emphasize the punishment of certain criminals rather than their containment or rehabilitation is a question for social and psychological science. Punishing people purely for pragmatic reasons would be very different from the approach that we currently take. Of course, if punishing bacteria and viruses would prevent the emergence of pandemic diseases, we would mete out justice to them as well, end quote.

Of course, no one cares if we treat bacteria unfairly. If we develop a drug that kills both benign and lethal versions of a bacteria to protect human beings, no one considers it a crime against the benign bacteria. But, what happens when we treat human beings like bacteria? In his book The Problem of Punishment, the philosopher David Boonin points out how this consequentialist defense of punishment that Harris proposes leads to absurd conclusions. For example, it can justify punishing innocent people if that deters criminals.

Boonin writes: Examples designed to establish the soundness of the punishing the innocent objection to consequentialist theories of punishment are ubiquitous in the literature on punishment. One can imagine, for example, cases in which the state must deliberately punish an innocent person who is widely believed to be guilty in order to prevent a riot from occurring if he is acquitted. There can be cases in which the state frames an innocent person and punishes her for a particular offense in order to deter others from committing that offense.

A state might determine that punishing both an offender and his children or other relatives would more effectively deter others from committing such offenses in the future than would merely punishing the offender himself. The authorities might frame and punish an innocent person for a particular offense to tempt the actual perpetrators to become less cautious and to be caught in the future and so on. There seems to be no shortage of scenarios in which the state could, on the whole, do more good by punishing an innocent person than by not punishing him. It can also justify not punishing guilty people if society is better off, or if it maximizes more wellbeing by doing that.

Once again, here’s Boonin: One can imagine, to begin with, cases where the offender is so widely beloved that the anguish caused to all those who would hate to see him suffer would outweigh the benefits that would accrue from punishing him, or one can imagine cases in which a particular offender could contribute more to the overall good in other ways than by being punished. By agreeing to leave his medically unique body to science, bequeathing his money to worthy causes, et cetera. One can imagine cases in which the state could achieve all the deterrent benefits of punishment by pretending to punish him. In all of these cases, the defender of punishment is committed to the view that is permissible for the state to punish the offender, but in none of them can the act utilitarian solution provide a justification for this claim, end quote.

Notice how Harris’s notion of sham retribution can fit in here? Instead of pretending that punishment is for retribution when it’s really for deterrence, we could just administer fake punishments since the deterrence is all that matters. Here’s Harris saying that punishment is basically for the purpose of deterrence alone.

I mean, punishment makes sense not because people really, really deserve at bottom whatever their punishments are. It doesn’t make sense in a retributive paradigm. It makes sense if it’s the best tool to discourage dangerous behavior, and it works.

But why stop at punishment? If we can be dishonest or unfair when it comes to punishment if doing so promoted wellbeing overall, why not be dishonest or unfair in every aspect of life, provided that your actions were promoting some concept of overall wellbeing? For example, Harris once said President Trump was more dangerous than Osama bin Laden, and he justified the media lying and covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Now, that doesn’t answer the people who say it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way, and to have shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account. That’s a left wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely, it was. Absolutely, right? But I think it was warranted.

You’re saying you contempt with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically reelected as president.

Well, no, [inaudible 00:16:35]. The thing is, it’s just not left wing, right? Liz Cheney is not left wing right? Liz Cheney [inaudible 00:16:41].

[inaudible 00:16:41] conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratic?

[inaudible 00:16:45] conspiracy. It was a conspiracy out in the open, but it doesn’t matter if it was. It doesn’t matter what part’s conspiracy, what part is out in the open. I mean, I think it’s like, if people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon. If there was an asteroid hurdling toward earth, and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right? Is that a conspiracy? What can you do with your own biases to get the outcome you think is actually better? Not just for yourself personally, but for the world?

Notice that sharing a true story about someone that could alter an election is an example of something that, in Harris’s mind, lowers overall wellbeing. That means in this case the truth would be evil because goodness is what maximizes wellbeing. But if the truth can be suppressed because it might be bad for society’s overall wellbeing, what’s next? Could people be suppressed if they refuse to go along with Harris’s version of what constitutes wellbeing?

In The End of Faith, Harris writes the following: Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherence beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people if they cannot be captured, and they often cannot. Otherwise, tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. End quote.

In a follow-up article, Harris said, “Nowhere in my work do I suggest that we kill harmless people for thought crimes.” True, Harris doesn’t believe in punishing harmless thought crimes as long as your thoughts cohere with his particular worldview. But if your thoughts lead to less overall wellbeing, then he believes that the state and other actors should be able to silence you, censor you, imprison you, and maybe as a last resort, kill you to promote wellbeing. Ultimately, Harris believes any action could be appropriate if it served the goal of producing overall wellbeing. Killing innocent people may be generally wrong, but if killing a homeless man who has no family frees up five organs to save five productive people, then you can only come up with weak practical reasons why that’s not a great idea instead of a strong principled reason like, “It is wrong to murder innocent people, and that should never be done.”

The basic problem is that under Harris’s moral system, the ultimate good that we pursue is not rooted in persons. It’s rooted in a faulty principle. The goal is to achieve overall wellbeing, and the role of every conscious creature in the pursuit of that goal is to just be a dependable cog in the great machine of society. If a cog is acting up regardless of whether it’s guilty or innocent, since we don’t have free will those terms are meaningless, it can be disposed of in order to serve the larger machine. But, people are not cogs in a machine. They have intrinsic value and dignity. They are ends, not means, and the basis of our moral system should lie in their intrinsic dignity and ultimate good. What’s ironic is that in The Moral Landscape, Harris reveals at the end of this book that his main thesis is actually incorrect. The good we all ought to pursue is not the same thing as improving the wellbeing of conscious creatures. They may overlap, but they’re not identical, so goodness is not just a matter of using science to promote nebulous ideas of wellbeing.

Here’s what Harris writes: It is also conceivable that a science of human flourishing could be possible, and yet people could be made equally happy by very different moral impulses. Perhaps there is no connection between being good and feeling good, and therefore no connection between moral behavior, as generally conceived, and subjective wellbeing. In this case, rapists, liars and thieves would experience the same depth of happiness as saints. It would no longer be an especially moral landscape. Rather it would be a continuum of wellbeing upon which saints and sinners would occupy equivalent peaks. End quote.

If Harris is trying to prove that goodness and increasing wellbeing are the same thing, or that they’re identical, he has really undermined his own case with this concession. That’s because if two things are identical, there is no possible world where they’re not the same thing. Two plus two is always identical to four. In any world that is conceivable, they are always the same thing. That’s what is meant by them being identical. But when Harris describes a possible world where evil people are the happiest overall, he’s proven wellbeing and moral goodness are not identical, and if they aren’t identical, they aren’t the same thing. Therefore, increasing wellbeing is not what makes goodness good. Instead, a deeper framework that recognizes God as the highest good and our status as creatures, that helps us better understand morality. We can see from natural law reasoning, or from divine revelation, for example, that there are some acts that are evil by their very nature, and so we ought not perform them even to achieve some good consequence.

That’s why St. Paul says in Romans 3:8, “It’s slanderous to accuse Christians of believing we can do evil that good may come.” A religious perspective also explains why we should favor the wellbeing of humans over other conscious creatures. Since humans, even disabled or immature ones, have a special value bestowed by God that is not found in other creatures, which is a topic actually explored in a previous video if you want to check that out. Finally, some atheists might object that religious ethics fair no better than Harris’s consequentialism because God could arbitrarily command us to do evil, or he allegedly commanded people to do evil in the Old Testament. That’s an important topic that deserves its own treatment. I plan to address it in future episodes.

For now, I would just say that grounding morality as flowing from God’s all good nature in virtue of the fact that God is perfect being or perfect goodness itself is the best hope we have to establish moral truths like intrinsic human dignity and intrinsic evils, even as we work out difficult aspects of revelation like the literal and non-literal nature of the dark passages of scripture. That’s better than subscribing to a secular moral system that is false because it contradicts clear moral intuitions we have about human value and moral conduct. If you have any ideas of topics related to God and morality you’d like to see addressed here on the podcast, please leave those suggestions in the comments below. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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