Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer explores Sam Harris’s logical fallacies and dogmatic atheism.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shamus Popery. I’m Joe. Hes Meyer. If you’re not familiar with the channel, big think on YouTube. They’ve got 7.43 million subscribers and they explore big important topics and I am happy that their YouTube channel is doing this and not just playing obnoxious children’s music or comedy skits. One of the recent videos from last week already has as of the time of recording 550,000 views. I’m sure by the time you watch this, it’ll have even more than that and it’s called Sam Harris, the Great Problem of Our Time. Now I know what you’re thinking. That’s pretty harsh. He’s not the greatest problem. Surely there are bigger problems than Sam Harris, but don’t worry, it turns out the colon there means Sam Harris is describing the great problem of our time, not that he isn’t. In any case, the problem Sam Harris describes actually has a lot of merit.
I think he’s right on the money in certain things that he says. Namely this number one belief is incredibly important, not just religious belief, any belief about the world because belief is a motivator for action. And we live in a world in which we increasingly, even though we have this age that allegedly was going to draw us all together, has created echo chambers and safe spaces and ideological bubbles and ways in which the way we view the world has become increasingly self-segregated so that you can go your entire life without really having your points of view challenged. That creates certain problems for collective action, for just how we understand the world and it creates things like the spectra of violence. All of this, and I largely agree on this thesis, but Sam Harris wouldn’t be Sam Harris if he didn’t take the opportunity to make completely unnecessary potshots against religion.
But along the way, I think he reveals something that I want to speak to it for two reasons. One, because he’s just said this to hundreds of thousands of people, and two, because I think he is the avatar of a popular kind of low hanging, sort of atheist worldview that views just science, facts, logic, reason on the one hand, and then religion, faith, dogma, blind belief on the other, and they have this very simple bifurcated view of reality and that view of reality is itself unwittingly a pretty naive dogma. But I’m going to let Sam Harris lay out his case and then we’re going to do a little deep dive in a couple of his books and try to show why he’s talking about ideas that he’s not really grappling very well with and he’s taken a pretty intellectually lazy approach to this. But to get there, let’s start with letting the man speak for himself. So for context here, he’s talking about very much the thesis that I just described, that belief is this driver of reality. And the problem is we each have these stories that we tell, these set of beliefs we have about the world, and those may or may not reflect reality itself.
CLIP:
And if you’re rational, those reasons can be explained. If your beliefs are not falsifiable, if there’s no scenario that could convince you that your most cherished opinions are in error, well then that’s proof that you didn’t get them by being in contact with reality.
Joe:
Now, I think if you stop and think about that claim seriously for a moment you’ll realize it sounds really good, but it’s not obviously true. So you can imagine a belief so fundamental, something like two plus two is four that you cannot imagine any amount of evidence that would convince you it’s falsity because it’s been verified. You understand the logical relationship to the ideas, and so it’s not a speculative probabilistic sort of claim in any measurable sort of way. So what experiment is going to prove to you that two plus two isn’t for? And if you can’t come up with that, does that mean that your belief that two and two is four isn’t based on knowledge of reality? On the contrary, maybe your belief is that rock solid because it has been so abundantly proofed or as is in the case of mathematics as we’re going to see because it’s not the kind of thing that’s testable by empirical processes in quite the same way.
We’ll get to that for now. I just want to highlight that Sam is playing from his greatest hits album very much like this is part of his thesis in the End of Faith where he contrasts faith with reason and maybe a little prematurely announces that faith is reaching its end. In that book, which I want to say is about 20 years old now, and I’m someone who read it when it was pretty new off the presses, so I’m dating myself as well as the book here. In that book, he makes the argument that on the one hand, faithful people do care about verification evidence. This is evidence that proves you’re right. And the danger is if you only want evidence that proves you’re right, that you can fall under what’s called confirmation bias. You just want opinions that agree with yours and then you filter out ones that disagree and we’re all prone to that.
We’re all prone to looking at the evidence that reinforces our view of reality and rejecting the stuff that doesn’t. That’s true regardless of your position on religion, this is part of just psychological hard wiring and something we have to actively work against because it can be this limiting filter in terms of our experience of authentic reality. But in Harris’s view, he views this as kind of a hypocrisy on the part of religious people. He says, if a little supportive evidence emerges, however the faithful proof as attentive to data as the damned, this demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence, be it the day of judgment or some other downpour of corroboration. It is a search for knowledge on the installment plan. Believe now live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day and you will discover that you were right.
Now the first thing I’d say is that’s got an aura of truth, but it’s certainly not a completely fair presentation of religion. By that I mean as a religious person, I’ll acknowledge some of the claims being made from a Christian perspective about for instance, the afterlife are things that we cannot presently verify in any sort of beyond a reasonable doubt sort of way. I can’t tell you, and even to take a biblical example, St Paul’s description of heaven is I has not seen here is not heard, but God is ready for those who love him. So we aren’t claiming here is the here and now demonstration of what all these future events are going to be like, but religion is not actually alone in that, whether it’s the economist predicting where the economy’s going to go, the weather forecast, you’re describing what next week’s weather’s going to be or the scientists talking about the heat death of the universe and X number of billions of years, people regularly use the evidence that they have now to make predictive claims about the future.
That’s not inherently an irrational enterprise. That’s not just knowledge on an installment plan or if you want to call it that, then you’d have to say that all of our knowledge comes to us on an installment plan. None of us just have the entire world of knowledge beamed into our brains now, and anyone serious about the scientific process as we’re going to see, has to accept the fact that the way that the empirical sciences work is by constantly seeking falsification. So there is this constant belief that, okay, you can believe the state of the science right now, but you also have to know that it’s not something to hold on too tightly to because elements of it are being constantly questioned. And so details might change in our understanding. So as I say at the beginning, but Harris is going to go on to suggest that no, actually this is something weird about religion.
I don’t think it is, but he’s going to argue in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that everyone insists upon cashing this side of the grave. The engineer says the bridge will hold. The doctor says the infection is resistant to penicillin. These people have defeasible reasons for their claims about the way the world is. Okay. The first thing I’d say is this is demonstrably untrue. When someone talks about universal heat death or when a historian predicts happened to the United States of America a hundred years from now, say, or an economist talks about what’s going to happen in the decades to come, they are in many cases making predictive claims about the state of things after they die.
So he’s just factually wrong on the claim that this is unique to religion. Now, if by this side of the grave, he doesn’t mean temporally, but metaphysically meaning all of us make claims or all of us who make claims about the future, make claims about things that could happen after the time of our death. But if it’s things that happen to us after the time of our death and involve the state of our soul, then yeah, obviously a religious and philosophical claims are going to be ones that relate to those matters. But that’s not a particularly interesting claim. If the field of say economics doesn’t deal with heaven, that doesn’t tell us anything about the rationality or irrationality of heaven. It just means it’s a different subject matter. So it seems to be this idea that, oh, religion’s like a Ponzi scheme or something. You’re paying into it now with this hope of getting a payout later, but that payout may never come.
And all I would say is that’s kind of true of any claim about the future. You can make that objection to use his own example, the engineer who says the bridge will hold, may be responsible for building the bridge may get paid and may or may not be there if and when the bridge is ever stress tested. That doesn’t disprove anything about the quality of the engineering. But Harris’ claim is that the mole of the priest and the rabbi are quite unlike the doctor or the engineer, and he claims this, nothing could change about this world or about the world of their experience that would demonstrate the falsity of many of their core beliefs. This proves that these beliefs are not born of any examination of the world or of the world of their experience. They are in Karl popper’s sense.
So there’s two things to note first here. Again, he’s just making a claim that is factually untrue. You can look at rates of conversion and clearly religious people do in fact change their mind about religious claims. Those changes are presumably coming from an encounter with some kind of evidence, something like a majority of slightly over 50% of adult protestants have switched from at least one denomination to another, if not wholesale from one religion to another. You have people coming into and going out of Christianity. Those moves, even if you only think the moves in the direction you like are evidentiary in their basis. I think that’s a silly kind of dogmatic belief itself that people are responding to the evidence and experience that they’re receiving in a way that makes sense to them. And we have to say that even for people who are making what, maybe both Sam Harris and I would regard as wrong decisions, but to say that nobody ever changes their views based on the evidence is absurdly false.
But nevertheless, here’s the argument in a nutshell. Number one, faith is bad. It’s not rooted in evidence. Number two, no amount of evidence will cause a religious person to change his or her mind. And number three, religious beliefs are non falsifiable in the sense meant by Carl Popper. And so I cannot help but light up a little bit because hearing Sam Harris in big think he doesn’t mention popper, but clearly using falsification as the standard to determine true from false beliefs and beliefs that are in harmony with experience of reality and ones that are just detached from reality. It kind of makes my heart maybe not glow, but it at least gives me a little bit of an amusement because Carl Popper was in no small part warning against people like Sam Harris. And so to see that you have to actually read Carl Popper because he’s one of those figures who gets really widely misrepresented.
So I’m going to let the man speak for himself, but the book in question is his 1959 book. The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Popper is trying to solve a question, what makes science different from other modes of knowledge and other modes of exploring the world? Because science isn’t a lot of things. Science isn’t pseudoscience, science isn’t metaphysics. Science also isn’t mathematics or logic. What is it that makes science distinct? And Popper is a philosopher of science. So this question matters a lot to him. And prior to his time, a lot of the answer to that had been certain fields like math and logic largely worked deductively. You start with these universal laws and from that you draw particular conclusions. And so the argument went well, the sciences work the opposite direction. They work what’s called inductively, they make individual observations, and from that they universalize to general rules.
But that argument had been coming under a lot of fire from philosophers who pointed out that you can’t drive reliable universal rules from particular instances. And so this was calling in question the whole question of whether we were getting anything reliable about the world from science. So it’s a big deal as you might imagine. So Popper famously talks about falsification as opposed to verification. And there’s a famous example involving black swans. He’s associated with a little bit of context. The Romans, I believe it was juvenile, there was an axiom that something was as rare as a black swan, which meant that it didn’t happen because in Europe all swans are white. And so they had this universal rule to be a swan is to be a white bird. And then crazy enough, one of the many creatures in Australia, one of the seemingly few that doesn’t actively try to kill you, they found black swans.
And so this expression became kind of ironic that a black swan was something that goes against kind of the expected predicted way that you view the world. And so if you want to put this in a scientific kind of way of thinking about it, if scientists said, okay, all swans are white, they could find as popper points out, any number of confirming examples of this, all of the swans that are out there, what is the ultimate test case is finding even one black swan? Because finding 2 million white swans doesn’t prove all swans are white. True finding one black swan does prove it false. So that’s why falsification works differently than verification because with falsification, you only need one example with verification. There’s not really any limit to the number of examples you would need unless you were able to somehow show that you had every swan that ever existed.
So you’d need seemingly an infinite number of examples. So how does that apply here? Popper puts it like this. He explains that his role is to distinguish the empirical sciences on the one hand and math and logic and metaphysics on the other, and he calls this a problem of demarcation. Now, the first thing to note there is popper is not saying one way is logical and rational, and the other way is irrational. He’s not knocking math logic metaphysics. He thinks there’s just different ways that we rationally understand the universe and he wants to know what is it unique or specific about the empirical sciences that we would say demarcates it. And he acknowledges in the course of the book that this is a matter of agreement or convention. He’s drawing a line because we have to say when we’re talking about sciences, what do we mean by this?
And at the time in the 1950s that he’s writing, this is a live question because Marxist, for instance, claimed to have a scientific understanding of the world, and yet Popper who was an ex Marxist, argued, well, there was no way of disproving Marxist’s theory when his claims about class warfare don’t come true. Then there’s just the explanation. Well, that’s because of false consciousness, and so no set of events falsified. And so why are we calling that science? It seems like we’re doing whether that’s true or false, whether the Marxists are right or not. What they’re doing seems to be fundamentally different from say, a scientist in the lab. And so he acknowledges what he’s trying to do here is just clean up the vocab, right? What is it that makes the empirical sciences different, unique, special, identifiable, and we could draw the line somewhere else.
It’s a matter to some extent of an agreement or convention, but we can largely say the sciences are organized around some kind of purpose, although even there you have to go beyond rational argument. He says to say, what is the purpose of science? He doesn’t think you can rationally answer that. Certainly you can’t answer that in a scientific sort of way at the level of what makes science special or unique. He argues that it’s not going to be verification for the reason that I explained a second ago that there is no limit to the number of verifying instances that you would need.
The fact that maybe every Swedish person you’ve met is extremely friendly does not mean you can draw a universal law that all Swedes are friendly. What would have to happen is you’d have to have one case disproving that for your whole theory to be scuttled. But then he says, from a logical point of view, it’s not clear that we’re justified in arriving at universal statements from singular ones no matter how numerous, okay, so maybe you’ve met five nice Swedish people. What if you met 500? What if you met 5,000? Is there a limit? And he’s going to say it’s not clear logically how you would ever be able to derive at that conclusion. If there’s even one Swedish person or potential Swedish person out there who’s maybe really not nice, can you make that kind of universal law? So that gets of course directly to the white swans because that’s exactly what we had there.
But then there’s something at a deeper level that Hopper does that I think is really cool because he gets into what’s sometimes called the theory laden nature of observation. Like, okay, so that’s the problem with saying a universal law. All swans are white. What if you say this one is white? Well, his argument isn’t that you can’t say that you clearly can. His argument is that even here, you’re not just relying on sense data, you’re not just relying on experience because to do that, yes, you are directly seeing whiteness, but it’s hard to say you’re directly seeing swan. So even to be able to say, this swan here is white, you’re drawing on some worldview, some conceptual vision of reality that involves this category of creatures called swans. And I think that’s an important thing. Now that might seem so trivial, you say, what’s the big deal?
Lemme give you a different example. Marco Polo, when he arrives in what’s now Indonesia claims to have discovered a unicorn and that they were quite different, much uglier than he’d read about in European books. Now today, we think he probably discovered the rhinoceros or met a rhinoceros, but because he had this frame for unicorn and did not have a frame for rhinoceros, he interpreted his sins data in a certain way. So likewise, when we say all swans are white or all swans are black or swans are neither all white or all black, we’re not just drawing off of what our eyes see, but also what we know in these other ways, this set of beliefs we have about the universe, a set of beliefs that might be true or false, that’s an important point that he’s making that people like Sam Harris imagine that if we would all just look at the data, we’d all come to the same conclusions about the world.
And the problem is this, we have to have good conversation and persuasion and look at the same clean data together. And popper’s point is that is not true as he puts it. There is no sharp dividing line between empirical language and theoretical language. We are theorizing all the time, even when we make the most trivial singular statement just to say that swan over there is S White is making a claim about reality that goes beyond what you’re getting just with your senses. You’re making a theoretical sort of claim. Now, that might sound very nerdy, but let’s make it very concrete. How might or how would Carl Popper respond to Sam Harris? Now remember, he’s writing in 1959. This is now 2024. I don’t know when it is when you’re watching.
How would he answer this? Well, it turns out we don’t have to speculate because he directly answered the people making Harris’s argument before he was, Sam Harris is a popularizer of a lot of old bad ideas and popper called out these old bad ideas. In this case, the old bad ideas of what’s called naturalistic positivism. Here’s how Poper explains it. Remember the context is this. So-called problem of demarcation. What is it that makes science different from other ways of knowing the world? And he says, positiv is usually interpret the problem of demarcation in a naturalistic way. They interpret it as if it were a problem of natural science. Remember popper’s argument is this is a matter of convention. We drew the line here, we could have drawn it elsewhere. We consider astronomy as silence. We don’t consider astrology because we drew that line, but there’s no natural science that proves astronomy and not astrology as this one gets to be and this one doesn’t.
And if that’s too controversial of a point, consider something like string theory, the claims it’s making about reality rooted largely in mathematics. Does that get to count as science? Is it physics? Is it math? Is it just a non-scientific theory about the world? Those kinds of questions which are hotly debated if you’re familiar, for instance with the book not even wrong, the argument is string theory doesn’t get to count as a science because it’s not falsifiable. So notice there’s a line drawing going on there. So Popper says, yeah, the Sam Harris is of his day. They don’t understand that that’s the nature of the problem. They think this is just like another science problem to sort out. It’s just a problem of the natural sciences, and instead of taking it as their task to propose a suitable convention, they believe they have to discover a difference exist in the nature of things, as it were, between empirical science on the one hand and metaphysics on the other.
They’re constantly trying to prove that metaphysics by very nature is nothing but nonsensical twaddle, soft sophistry and illusion as Hume says, which we should commit to the flames. So notice here, Hume is this major figure in the history of philosophy and one that seems to have left a major mark on Sam Harris’s view of the world, and he had no patience for metaphysics, and Popper is calling this out that this is a pretty common kind of response on these naturalist positivists, the positive. He says, excuse me, the positivist dislikes the idea that there should be meaningful problems outside the field of positive empirical science problems be dealt with by a genuine philosophical theory. He dislikes the idea that there should be a genuine theory of knowledge, an epistemology or a methodology. In other words, there’s a type of person, Sam Harris is absolutely one of them who thinks all the world’s problems can be solved if we just use science.
Well, and Harris does this a lot as we’re going to see, and it turns out people like this do not want to be told. Yeah, actually not every problem in the world is science. There’s some things science can’t solve because they’re not scientific problems. They could be, for instance, epistemic problems. How do we know the nature of reality? Neuroscience can’t replace epistemology or they could be methodological problems. What do we consider an acceptable margin of error? Or they could be philosophical problems. Papa goes on to say that the positivist wishes to see in the alleged philosophical problems, mere pseudo problems or puzzles. Now, this wish of his, which by the way he does not express as a wish or a proposal, but rather as a statement of fact, can always be gratified for nothing is easier than to unmask a problem as meaningless or pseudo.
All you have to do is fix upon a conveniently narrow meaning for meaning, and you will soon be bound to say if any inconvenient question that you’re unable to detect any meaning in it. Now, I like these words because they strike me as prophetic when other people who fall into very much the viewpoint that pop is critiquing. For instance, Stephen Hawkins and Leonard Malad, now they write an entire book about how the universe could arise from nothing, and then they just shrug off the fact that when they say nothing, they mean quantum states and by nothing they just mean no matter, not actually nothing. And so critics were like, okay, but philosophically speaking, if you’ve got quantum states you don’t have nothing, you might not have matter, but that’s not nothing. They just treated that as a non-pro. No one’s objecting to the idea that if you have the right starting conditions, you could get a universe.
The question is how do you have the right starting conditions? Well, likewise here, Sam Harris has just run headlong into these problems of saying, oh, we disagree about the nature of the world, but everybody besides me is a dogmatist. It’s like, no, no, you’re shrugging off the actual difficult problems of, for instance, how do we know things about the world? That’s a problem of epistemology. You’re not going to solve that using the natural sciences. You’re not going to solve that with falsification. That’s not how that works. So I can say I think Popper is pretty prophetic here of seeing all of the intellectual blind spots and just kind of the silly banality of new atheism of its unwillingness to ask deep and meaningful questions about anything that goes beyond the bounds of the natural sciences. As Popper says, moreover, if you admit is meaningful, none accept problems in natural science.
Any debate about the concept of meaning will also turn out to be meaningless. The dogma of meaning once enthroned is elevated forever above the battle, it can no longer be attacked. So if you say nothing is meaningful, unless it’s some sort of measurable, quantifiable thing that the natural sciences can discover. For instance, if say you’re Sam Harris and argue that it’s okay to make predictions about the future, if it’s about a bridge but not about a soul, well then you’ve already settled on your answer and you’ve made your answer the judge of the dispute. You’ve enthroned your dogma, and that puts it above the level of the battle. But notice as popper’s pointing out, this is blind dogmatism and it’s a dogmatism that is not actually open to falsification because it’s not open to any kind of logical attack. This is the great irony of Sam Harris citing to Carl Popper as this great example of the demarcation between irrational and an irrational view of the world is that popper’s argument is the viewpoint of people like Sam Harris is irrational going on.
He says The controversial question whether philosophy exists or has any right to exist is almost as old as philosophy itself. Time and time again, an entirely new philosophical movement arises which finally unmasks the old philosophical problems as pseudo problems, and which confronts the wicked nonsense of philosophy with the good sense of meaningful, positive empirical science. So notice what he’s doing there. Remember, popper, by the way, is a philosopher of science, so he understands science deeply. He also understands philosophy. And his point here is there’s this wave after wave of kind of the freshman undergrad philosophy student who’s convinced science is all you need, or maybe the freshman undergrad science student who’s convinced that’s all you need and just kind of waves the away philosophy is having nothing to say. If you’ve ever seen the infamous Bill Nye video where he argues about the uselessness of philosophy, it’s exactly what Popper is talking about.
Every generation you get a new crop of people who emerge on the scene are convinced they can just wave away philosophy. And then as he says, time and time again, the despised defenders of traditional philosophy try to explain to the leaders of the latest positivistic assault that the main problem of philosophy is the critical analysis of the appeal to the authority of experience precisely that experience, which every latest discover of positivism is has ever artlessly taken for granted. Meaning when you say that your experience of reality is going to be the arbitrary, you’re assuming certain theoretical things about your relationship to reality, Sam Harris does that. In the clip we saw that the distinction between the dogmatist and the rational person is the rational person is in contact with reality. Well, that’s assuming a whole philosophical worldview about the modes of our perception and their relationship to reality.
These are hotly debated issues that he’s artlessly taking for granted to such objections. However, the positivist only replies with the shrug. They mean nothing to him since they do not belong to empirical science, which alone is meaningful. Thus, he concludes, I reject the naturalistic view. It is uncritical. It’s upholders failed to notice that whenever they believe themselves to have discovered a fact, they’ve only proposed a convention. Hence, the convention is liable to turn into a dogma. Put it another way, Harris isn’t showing to you. You accurately understand reality, but only if you use falsification. He’s assuming that and assuming that in a way the guy who pioneered falsification says is blindly, dogmatic, unaware that it’s dogmatize where it should be critical. So the weird thing about Sam Harris isn’t that he’s too critical is that he’s not nearly critical enough. That becomes even more clear a little later on in the video where he talks about his optimism that if we just all work together, we can solve all the world’s problems, including using science to solve the problems of morality.
CLIP:
You need sufficient cooperation to implement that knowledge. All the progress we’ve made to arrive at anything like a universal conception of human flourishing and scientific rationality, all of that has been a matter of getting rid of dogma and having an open-ended and intellectually honest conversation based on facts and arguments.
Joe:
Here again, Sam Harris is playing from his greatest fifth album in this case from his book The Moral Landscape with the subtitle How Science Can Determine Human Values. He was convinced when he wrote it that he discovered this way that science could actually lead to this universal theory of human flourishing and could tell us how to get there, and the book was universally lambasted by people who actually understood philosophy because he once again kind of waded into an area he didn’t understand well and treated trivially really controversial sort of problems. So for instance, the what is he? Latvian Norwegian philosopher Jonas Chica who I believe is a Marxist. I mean we’re not approaching this question from the same angle at all, had this to say as part of his pretty scathing, pretty fun to watch review of Harris’s book.
CLIP:
I’m sorry for being so negative here, but after reading the entirety of this book and seeing the complete lack of respect Harris has for moral philosophy and the astonishing overestimation he has of his own reasoning, I must say that I have never read a work on ethics. So messy Harris’s definitions become so vague that they can’t even serve as a guide to ethical questions, let alone a new science, and he still manages to contradict himself. Some of the arguments he makes can be refuted with just the basic grasp of istic reasoning, and many of the claims don’t even involve arguments at all
Joe:
If that seems hyperbolic. Let me give you a few examples from the book. The book turns on the fact that science can tell us how we ought to behave morally because as Harris claims, sure, philosophers have long debated. How you get from is claims. Here’s how the nature of reality is to ought claims. Here’s how we ought to behave. Facts are on the inside and the theory goes, values are on the T side. There’s a lot of ways to try to resolve that. Harris’ is to say, well, there’s at least three reasons. We know that this is only an illusion. Notice how much he’s falling into popper’s description of the person who’s kind of wandered into the field, oh, this is just an illusory problem. This is a pseudo problem, and he claims that the divide is illusory and his first reason is whatever can be known about maximizing the wellbeing of conscious creatures, which is, I will argue, the only thing we can reasonably value.
So let’s pause on that. We’re going to return to that. Underlying his claim is this idea that the only thing morality could possibly be concerned about rationally is maximizing the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Now, several things flow from this. Number one, he acknowledges, this means consequentialism, the view that the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Now, the consequentialist has to say, there’s no such thing as an absolute moral law. You can’t say lying is always wrong, but neither can you say murder is always wrong, even say the execution of the innocent. If that could somehow lead to greater wellbeing, maybe the crime rate goes down to zero. So if you just kill one innocent person, a lot of other people end up not getting killed by criminals because everyone is so afraid of the place you’ve set up and that increases wellbeing. So according to Harris, the only rational way you could possibly think about morality is maximizing wellbeing for all conscious creatures, and therefore we have to accept consequentialism.
Now, it should at least be noted consequentialism in this scheme of moral philosophies, a relative newcomer to the game, going back to people like Jeremy Bentham, it’s Posten enlightenment. It’s not some 5,000 year old sort of way of understanding the world, and so Harris seems to realize that he’s wandered into an area where he’s claiming very authoritatively this is all there is, and people who are actual experts in the area saying, no, it’s not. He says this. He says, many people seem to think that the universal conception of morality requires that we find moral principles that admit of no exceptions. If for instance, it is truly wrong to lie, it must always be wrong to lie, and if one can find a single exception, any notion of moral truth must be abandoned. Now, that’s not how that logic works, but fine. In other words, some people think moral claims should be falsifiable.
You can look for, well, are there any cases in which it’s okay to lie any case where it’s okay to murder? Because if so, we can’t make a universal law. In other words, some people approach morality in much more a falsification sort of way, if you want to put it that way. And he says, nah, maybe it’s like chess where you don’t normally want to lose your queen, but you might sacrifice your queen in the right situation. The problem with that claim again is that the sacrificing of the queen might be telling a white lie or it might be torturing and killing an innocent person because you’ve decided the situation requires that. And it’s not that you couldn’t find a philosopher to defend this, it’s that Harris seems to think that only people who would defend this are even doing philosophy or only people doing this are even doing morality more fundamentally acknowledging his critics.
He says, many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. He gives two reasons why he hasn’t done this first. While he claims to have read a fair amount of this literature, I would love to know what he considers a fair amount of literature. I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers. I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. That should be a red flag. Like look, almost any field you don’t know well, seems easy, right? I watched a video recently of a college student who was, I think he was a kinesiology student who was convinced it was easy to kick a field goal and he would get really mad field goal kickers, and so they had him try to kick a field goal and he did terribly twice, but it’s like this with academic disciplines as well.
So take cartography like the maps and all of this, presenting a 3D globe on a two dimensional map is a notoriously hard project, but equally notoriously, people think it’s really easy until they actually try to do it, which is how you end up with the meador projection where it’s wildly distorted. That’s because those are simple answers to hard problems. Harris is doing the equivalent of this. He’s like, oh, yeah, I’m writing an entire book on moral philosophy, but I didn’t come to my conclusions by actually reading moral philosophers, just thinking real hard about science of mind. That should be a red flag. But then his second reason is maybe more embarrassing. He says, second, I’m convinced that every appearance of terms like meta ethics, et cetera, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. So you decided to write a book on moral philosophy while being too bored to seriously grapple with moral philosophy.
This is in that review the Sheika talks about just like the arrogant and dismissive way that Sam Harris treats moral philosophy. That’s the kind of thing he’s talking about. But I want to go back to the claim. Remember, key to his whole idea that we’re moving forward because we’re using reason alone to an advanced idea of human flourishing, is this underlying philosophical belief that maximizing the wellbeing of conscious creatures is the only thing that we can reasonably value. That’s his argument. Conscious creatures. Now, there are huge debates about consciousness. So for instance, you’ve got scientists who claim that insects and other animals have consciousness. Okay, let’s, I guess actually grapple with one of the questions that Harris just kind of B blindly assumes. If you believe that mosquitoes have consciousness, are you allowed to kill them when they suck your blood or if they’re possibly transmitting malaria, how many mosquitoes lives equal one human life?
How do we measure that in this value of wellbeing? It’s an absurd thing to just claim that. Yeah, of course, morality is all about maximizing the wellbeing, not just of your self or your family or even your species, but of all conscious creatures. You have to also believe morality is about maximizing the wellbeing of insects and animals that may or may not have consciousness. Now, if you ask, well, why should we do that? One answer would be, well, that maximizes the most wellbeing. But of course, that answer is completely circular kind of reasoning. You can’t just say, the only thing we need to do is work on maximizing wellbeing. Why? Because that’ll maximize wellbeing, because that is, of course, a logical circle. It’s not an actual reason why we should do your project. Harris gives some other examples. He takes the worst and the best possible world and is like, well, everyone can agree that the worst suffering would be an obviously worse world than the best possible pleasure, which is just a failure to grasp the nature of the arguments over consequentialism.
So for instance, I could say everyone would agree, A world in which everyone lives by Christian values is obviously better in a world in which everyone lives by the total antithesis of them, and I think even the most hardened atheists would have to agree a world in which everyone purposely violated all of the 10 commandments, and without murdering everyone would be a worse world than a world in which everyone was devoutly Christian and got along great and turned the other cheek and et cetera. And even if you want to say, what about religious words? Well, in this ridiculous hypothetical, there are no religious wars because there are no different religions. We’ve solved even that. Now, that would be a silly way of trying to prove Christianity, but that is very much the thing he tries to do In proving Consequentialism in this book argues from the best and worst world from a consequential standpoint and is like, so the best one is better.
That’s silliness, but that’s not even the worst. I’m going to go back to the line once again because remember, his argument is that the divide between facts and values is only an illusion, and the first way we can notice an illusion is because the only thing we could reasonably value is maximizing the wellbeing of conscious creatures. That’s the only thing we could reasonably value, not that’s his favorite value, not it’s the value that he thinks we should put above others. It is the only value we could reasonably have in the next breath, not even the next sentence, literally just the next part of the same sentence. He says that the very idea of objective knowledge, that is knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning has values built into it. What values you say are the values in science inherently the wellbeing of conscious creatures? No, they’re not.
He says there are things like logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parson, et cetera. So the guy goes in the course of a sentence from saying, there’s only one possible value to science as these three other values. Now, the problem there is you might notice something could be logically consistent and not good for wellbeing or vice versa. For instance, should we lie to patients and engage in the placebo effect? It might be helpful for wellbeing. It’s not really good for logical consistency. According to Harris, the only value we could have is the value that isn’t in the values of science. So in trying to prove that science can achieve morality, he ends up in this bizarre way arguing that his dogma that the only thing we can care about is consequentialism. We should take that because it’s not the same as the internal values that he says science has. This is a mess. I want to go back to Chico’s review because I think this captures the heart of what he gets wrong and what I’m calling this kind of intellectually lazy dogmatism.
CLIP:
I think the entirety of the philosophical argumentation in this book can be shortened down to his statement on page 45. To say that enact is morally necessary or evil or blameless, is to make tacit claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures, whether actual or potential. I am unaware of any interesting exceptions to this rule. That’s it. Those right there are the two keywords when it comes to theories that strongly challenge Harris’s claims, he’s either unaware or uninterested.
Joe:
And this of course brings us squarely back to Carl Popper. Remember his claim that the positive is when confronted with objections to his worldview will just reply with a shrug because they don’t mean anything to him because they don’t make sense in his dogmatic worldview. Since they don’t belong to empirical science, they don’t have meaning for him because according to this throne enthronement of science alone, as where meaning lies, nothing else counts. And so this is why I find this whole argument he makes in the big think piece, and then in his books ironic, particularly when he looks to people like Carl Popper, because Popper warns against the lazy dogmatism of people like Sam Harris. You aren’t going to solve the problem of political polarization by just demanding everyone read the same article or look at the same data. And if you think that you don’t understand the nature of epistemology or the way we come to know facts about the world, it is not as simple as people like Sam Harris may be leading you to believe. This is why we need things like moral philosophy. This is why we need things like metaphysics. This is why we need things like epistemology. This is why in short, what the new atheists offered a generation or two of Western Christians as they drew them out of Christianity was vapid and intellectually shallow for Seamus. Joe, hes, God bless you.