In this TED talk Sam Harris tries to show that there is no distinction between matters of scientific fact and matters of ‘right and wrong’.
He is right that being able to understand how the universe operates is useful for working out what actions will help achieve your goals. For example, if you want to survive, knowing that food will keep you alive helps you to satisfy that desire. However, he goes on to claim that we should all necessarily converge on the same (moral) values and that people can be wrong about values in the same way they can be wrong about physical laws. He uses two maneuvers: incredulity that people value different things and the claim that all human moral values ultimately come down to a concern about experiences. Neither is convincing.
The fact that a person finds something astonishing is not sufficient reason to think that it’s wrong. If Sam really thinks that moral and scientific claims are the same, then this should be obvious; the fact that I am incredulous when I hear about quantum physics does not mean that the theory is bad at describing the universe. My incredulity tells you a lot about me, but not much about the laws of physics. And while I wish that all human moral values came down to a concern about the pleasure and suffering conscious beings experience (as mine mostly do), this just doesn’t seem to be true. People clearly do care about things other than conscious experience. I read an example of this thinking in the New Yorker just yesterday:
But let’s imagine, for a moment, that we had enjoyed ourselves for the past fifty years. Surely, trashing the planet is just as wrong if people take pleasure in the process as it is if they don’t. The same holds true for leaving future generations in hock and for exploiting the poor and for shrugging off inequality. Happiness is a good thing; it’s just not the only thing.
Even if we did only care about experiences, a sadist would like the suffering of others rather than dislike it, so that wouldn’t guarantee agreement!
Even if Sam were right that all humans had the same moral preferences, that would not be enough to say that they were ‘right’ in any universal sense. We could always imagine an alien species (or animal species) that valued different things. If the human and alien species met to discuss their moral preferences, it is not clear to what either side could appeal to work out which one of them was right. By contrast, if humans and aliens had different theories of physics, we could indeed find an authority which would satisfy both of us as to who was right; to be truly different the theories would have to make different predictions about some things we could observe in the universe. We could go out and make those observations and see which of the theories matched them most closely.
Sam disparages the analogy between moral preferences (stealing is wrong) and other preferences (food is delicious, this opera sounds good), but unless he can point to some observable authority all conscious beings would necessarily have to accept as the determinant of moral facts, the analogy seems much stronger than his one between scientific and moral claims.
More: Mind Projection Fallacy, Moral Anti-Realism
Tagged: ethics
