The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

Sam Harris (2010)

In a paragraph

Questions about values are about the welfare of conscious creatures. We should use reason to decide what to do, developing a science of morality rather than relying on divine authority or accepting moral relativism. 

Key points

• Questions about values — about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose — are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

• Knowing what God believes about right and wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at almost any cost; not knowing what is right — or that anything can ever be truly right — often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands. We must cut a third path through this wilderness.

• Both sides believe that reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life. How a person perceives the gulf between facts and values seems to influence his views on almost every issue of social importance.

• Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

• Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals. A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.

• The divide between facts and values is illusory because well-being is all that matters, and well-being depends on facts in the world. Also, knowledge starts from values, and beliefs about facts and values have similar brain processes.

• The concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable. While this leaves the question of what constitutes well-being genuinely open, there is every reason to think that this question has a finite range of answers. Given that change in the well-being of conscious creatures is bound to be a product of natural laws, we must expect that this space of possibilities — the moral landscape — will increasingly be illuminated by science.

• Our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution. Anyone who wears glasses or uses sunscreen has confessed his disinclination to live the life that his genes have made for him. The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one’s long-term well-being.

• The moral landscape as the space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. The difference between the worst and best imaginable lives, the Bad Life and the Good Life. Most of what we do is predicated on there being nothing more important than the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life.

• Every society that has ever existed has had to channel and subdue certain aspects of human nature through social mechanisms and institutions. It would be a miracle if all societies had done this equally well. And yet the prevailing bias of cultural relativism assumes that such a miracle has occurred not just once, but always.

• Some believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions. Many assert that, while they can get along just fine without an imaginary friend, most human beings will always need to believe in God. People holding this opinion never seem to notice how condescending, unimaginative, and pessimistic a view it is of the rest of humanity — and of generations to come.

• People tend not to speak honestly about the nature of religious belief, about the invidious gulf between science and religion as modes of thought, or about the real sources of moral progress.

• Before we can make any progress toward a science of morality, we will have to clear some philosophical brush. I will attempt to do this within the limits of what I imagine to be most readers’ tolerance for such projects. It seems to me that most educated secular people believe that there is no such thing as moral truth — only moral preference, moral opinion, and emotional reactions.

• I think we can know, through reason alone, that consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value. What is the alternative? I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the (actual or potential) experience of conscious beings. Something kept in a box totally independent of anyone’s experience would not be of value. My further claim is that the concept of “well-being” captures all that we can intelligibly value. And “morality”—whatever people’s associations with this term happen to be—really relates to the intentions and behaviours that affect the well-being of conscious creatures.

• Well-being has a subjective component, but it, and its causes can be studied objectively. Moral questions often cannot be answered in practice but can be answered in principle. The demand for radical justification levelled by the moral sceptic could not be met by any branch of science. Much of our intuitive physics is wrong; similarly, everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong.

• This notion of “ought” is an artificial and needlessly confusing way to think about moral choice. In fact, it seems to be another dismal product of Abrahamic religion—which, strangely enough, now constrains the thinking of even atheists. If this notion of “ought” means anything we can possibly care about, it must translate into a concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious beings (either in this life or in some other). For instance, to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do. What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “evil,” and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others?

• We should not confuse three distinct projects: explaining moral behaviour, deciding how to act and persuading people to live better. Moral persuasion is a difficult business, but it is especially difficult if we haven’t figured out in what sense moral truths exist.

• The problem of human cooperation seems almost the only problem worth thinking about. “Ethics” and “morality” (I use these terms interchangeably) are the names we give to our deliberate thinking on these matters.

• Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc.—all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act 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 exception to this rule. If one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behaviour. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values.

• Despite our perennial bad behaviour, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

• We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress. The belief that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, and not a mere product of culture, suggests that progress is possible.

• Anything of value must be valuable to someone. A source of value that has nothing to do with the well-being of conscious creatures (in this life or a life to come) could be of no possible interest to anyone.

• This book was written in the hope that as science develops, we will recognize its application to the most pressing questions of human existence. For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools. Few people seem to recognize the dangers posed by thinking that there are no true answers to moral questions.

• “Science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality.

• Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this 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. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.

Comments

Harris’s outlook is similar to mine: deciding what to do matters greatly, is ultimately about welfare, and it should be approached using reason and science.   He employs fluent rhetoric and develops helpful arguments in support of our shared view, yet there are substantial elements with which I don’t agree. I will set out his main claims and how they compare with my views.

Well-being is the only ultimate value

Harris considers that all value concerns sentient well-being.

His central concept is well-being rather than happiness, and Harris explicitly takes well-being as vague but meaningful, similar to our concept of good health.  This is an effective strategy and avoids detailed discussions of happiness that would distract from the main arguments.

I strongly agree with Harris that well-being is central to value and am also inclined to agree that well-being is the only ultimate value. I would support these views with Sidgwick-style arguments that everything else we value relates to well-being and stops being valued when it detracts from well-being.  I would also argue that we are directly aware of the value of our experience in a unique way.

Harris argues that well-being is the only ultimate value as something has to be experienced by someone to matter – something kept in a box totally independent of anyone’s experience would not be of value.  I think his argument adds to the case that well-being is the sole value.

Levels of well-being give a gradient of value

Harris presents the metaphor of the Moral Landscape – that there is a terrain with peaks and valleys representing different levels of well-being.  We can think of a Bad Life of maximum suffering and a Good Life of maximum happiness.

I have found this a very helpful metaphor.  I find it useful to think of levels of welfare providing a general gradient of values, and I find extreme positive and negative values clear.  Within utilitarian thinking, the metaphor can be used to consider the extent to which we can compare different levels away from the extremes. 

Science and reason should be used to increase welfare

Harris argues that morality should be approached scientifically to try to increase welfare, and this can be done as well-being relates in a law-like way to the world.  I strongly agree.

Harris could be read as saying that morality should be purely a matter for sciences, particularly neuroscience.  But by science Harris means all rational procedures for improving understanding, and he is careful to say that although we can aim to improve our moral knowledge, uncertainties will remain. 

Harris describes moral reasoning as something we need to improve for the future.  In fact, improved practical reasoning has greatly improved human life, as set out emphatically in Better Angels.  The line should be that improved practical reasoning has helped make us what we are and there is much more we can do to continue to improve it and produce further great benefits.

Harris also could have referred to the arguments from Singer and Greene that many moral instincts can be debunked to leave just utilitarian-style reasoning.  Harris refers to Greene but may have misunderstood the significance of his work.

The is-ought distinction is illusory

Harris argues that the is-ought distinction is illusory, mainly on the grounds that what we value is clearly welfare.  His supporting arguments are that all knowledge starts from value commitments and that value and factual judgements include similar brain processes.

Harris is clearly wrong here, and his stubborn refusal to admit it risks discrediting the rest of his work.  A normative judgment is distinct from a factual judgement, being an end-relational judgement and involving the distinctive normative vocabulary.

Why does he hold this view?  He thinks that not to say an extreme Good Life is better than an extreme Bad Life is to misunderstand the meaning of good.  My response is that there may be consensus and scientific arguments that the Good Life is better, but it is a separate thing to conclude that it actually is normatively better.

Moral reasoning is similar to theoretical reasoning

Harris notes that moral reasoning seems similar to theoretical reasoning but doesn’t seem to understand why. Stephen Finlay’s end-relational theory would answer Harris’ question, and also show the way in which moral reasoning is distinct.

The term ‘moral’ is not helpful

In passing, Harris suggests that we may do better without the term ‘moral.’  He may be sympathetic to a ‘Practical Reason First’ approach, although he doesn’t develop it.  Elsewhere, he has spoken of the need to navigate in the world, so he may also be sympathetic to my view of the ubiquitous primacy of choosing what to do.

Morality should be based on reason, but instead it is either based on religious authority or is considered to be purely a relative matter.

I share Harris’ passion for reason and distaste for religious authority and moral relativism and enjoyed his rhetoric.  Fortunately, the situation may be somewhat less grim than Harris suggested as witnessed by the improvements in morality which seem to have been based on reason.  The religious may have used reasoning and common sense more, and moral relativism and emotivism may not have been taken too seriously. 

Yet, it is unsatisfactory that religious and relativistic/emotivistic views are widely held and like Harris I feel passionate about getting a reason-based view of practical reason more thoroughly grounded and more widely accepted.   

Moral philosophy is boring and unhelpful

Harris is dismissive of the output of moral philosophy.  He has been accused of being anti-scientific in pursuing his hobby-horses without having fully studied what others have thought.

I have some sympathy though.  For me much moral philosophy is devalued because it goes off in the wrong direction in trying to fill in our concept of moral, while I see this as a flawed and secondary concept.

NOTES

Introduction: The Moral Landscape

Questions about values — about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose — are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

People who draw their worldview from religion generally believe that moral truth exists, but only because God has woven it into the very fabric of reality; while those who lack such faith tend to think that notions of “good” and “evil” must be the products of evolutionary pressure and cultural invention. On the first account, to speak of “moral truth” is, of necessity, to invoke God; on the second, it is merely to give voice to one’s apish urges, cultural biases, and philosophical confusion.

Opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.

Mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle

When talking about values, we are actually talking about an interdependent world of facts.

Morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.

Both sides believe that reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life. And how a person perceives the gulf between facts and values seems to influence his views on almost every issue of social importance.

rupture in our thinking

values must come from a voice in a whirlwind.

tolerance even of intolerance

Knowing what the Creator of the Universe believes about right and wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at almost any cost; not knowing what is right — or that anything can ever be truly right — often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands.

Stephen J. Gould’s doomed notion of “nonoverlapping magisteria”

Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures — and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

Faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.

Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals. A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.

“The moral landscape” — a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well – being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering.

No one would argue that there must be one right food to eat. And yet there is still an objective difference between healthy food and poison. The world’s profusion of foods never tempts us to say that there are no facts to be known about human nutrition or that all culinary styles must be equally healthy in principle.

Primacy of neuroscience and the other sciences of mind on questions of human experience

vasopressin and oxytocin

Human knowledge and human values can no longer be kept apart. The world of measurement and the world of meaning must eventually be reconciled.

And science and religion — being antithetical ways of thinking about the same reality — will never come to terms. As with all matters of fact, differences of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they do not oblige us to respect a diversity of views indefinitely.

“open question argument.”

The divide between facts and values is illusory in at least three senses: (1) whatever can be known about maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures—which is, I will argue, the only thing we can reasonably value—must at some point translate into facts about brains and their interaction with the world at large; (2) the very idea of “objective” knowledge (i.e., knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.); (3) beliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain: it appears that we have a common system for judging truth and falsity in both domains.

The concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable.

viewing aging as an engineering problem that admits of a full solution,

being able to walk a mile on your hundredth birthday will not always constitute “health.”

While this leaves the question of what constitutes well-being genuinely open, there is every reason to think that this question has a finite range of answers. Given that change in the well-being of conscious creatures is bound to be a product of natural laws, we must expect that this space of possibilities — the moral landscape — will increasingly be illuminated by science.

Anyone who wears eyeglasses or uses sunscreen has confessed his disinclination to live the life that his genes have made for him.

The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one’s long-term well-being.

Our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution.

Factual beliefs like “water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen” and ethical beliefs like “cruelty is wrong” are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe either proposition is also to believe that you have accepted it for legitimate reasons.

One need only grant two points: (1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences relate, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world.

The Bad Life. The Good Life.

Most of what we do with our lives is predicated on there being nothing more important, than the difference between the Bad Life and the Good Life.

In any domain of knowledge, we are free to say that certain opinions do not count. In fact, we must say this for knowledge or expertise to count at all.

The disparity between how we think about physical health and mental / societal health reveals a bizarre double standard: one that is predicated on our not knowing — or, rather, on our pretending not to know — anything at all about human well-being.

An ignorant and isolated people might undermine their psychological well-being or their social institutions could become engines of pointless cruelty, despair, and superstition.

Every society that has ever existed has had to channel and subdue certain aspects of human nature — envy, territorial violence, avarice, deceit, laziness, cheating, etc. — through social mechanisms and institutions. It would be a miracle if all societies — irrespective of size, geographical location, their place in history, or the genomes of their members — had done this equally well. And yet the prevailing bias of cultural relativism assumes that such a miracle has occurred not just once, but always.

It is possible for a person to value the wrong things

Dogmatism is still granted remarkable scope on questions of both truth and goodness

Do not split the difference between intellectual integrity and the fantasies of a prior age.

Some believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions. Many assert that, while they can get along just fine without an imaginary friend, most human beings will always need to believe in God. In my experience, people holding this opinion never seem to notice how condescending, unimaginative, and pessimistic a view it is of the rest of humanity — and of generations to come.

People tend not to speak honestly about the nature of belief, about the invidious gulf between science and religion as modes of thought, or about the real sources of moral progress.

Chapter 1: Moral Truth

Liberals defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, after announcing that moral relativism does nothing to diminish a person’s commitment to making the world a better place.

Before we can make any progress toward a science of morality, we will have to clear some philosophical brush. In this chapter, I attempt to do this within the limits of what I imagine to be most readers’ tolerance for such projects.

My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics,

[Too optimistic. Methodology of using reason is right but will be limits to what we can establish. For example, political disagreements won’t end. Could hope for growing consensus on ultimate ends which would represent progress.]

As we come to understand how human beings can best collaborate and thrive in this world, science can help us find a path leading away from the lowest depths of misery and toward the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people. [Science is a confusing word to use, “reasoning” would be better.]

It seems to me that most educated secular people believe that there is no such thing as moral truth — only moral preference, moral opinion, and emotional reactions

Science simply represents our best effort to understand what is going on in this universe, and the boundary between it and the rest of rational thought cannot always be drawn. There are many tools one must get in hand to think scientifically — ideas about cause and effect, respect for evidence and logical coherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty, the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc

John Searle. Two very different senses of the term’s “objective” and “subjective.” Studying subjective (i.e.., first – person) facts “objectively.”  Tinnitus is a subjective fact about me, but in stating this fact, I am being entirely objective.  Well-being has subjective component, but it, and its causes can be studied objectively.

Answers in practice v answers in principle

A double standard when thinking about consensus: most people take scientific consensus to mean that scientific truths exist, and they consider scientific controversy to be merely a sign that further work remains to be done; and yet many of these same people believe that moral controversy proves that there can be no such thing as moral truth, while moral consensus shows only that human beings often harbour the same biases.

Consensus is a guide to discovering what is going on in the world, but that is all that it is. Its presence or absence in no way constrains what may or may not be true.

I think we can know, through reason alone, that consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value. What is the alternative? I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the (actual or potential) experience of conscious beings.

Something else in a box kept independent of anyone’s experience would not be of value.

My further claim is that the concept of “well-being” captures all that we can intelligibly value. And “morality”—whatever people’s associations with this term happen to be—really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures. [Too much assertion, not enough argument.]

What about following God’s law, “for its own sake”?

Religious are concerned about post-death well-being

The concept of “well-being,” like the concept of “health,” is truly open for revision and discovery.

The double standard in place regarding the significance of consensus: those who do not share our scientific goals have no influence on scientific discourse whatsoever; but, for some reason, people who do not share our moral goals render us incapable of even speaking about moral truth.

How have we convinced ourselves that, on the most important questions in human life, all views must count equally?

The Church is grotesquely confused about which things in this world are worth paying attention to.

Disagrees that concepts like “morality” and “well-being” must be defined with reference to specific goals and other criteria — and nothing prevents people from disagreeing about these definitions.

The truths of science are also “relative to the time and place in which they appear,”

Much of our intuitive physics is wrong.  Similarly, everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong.

The demand for radical justification levelled by the moral sceptic could not be met by any branch of science.

Many moral sceptics 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 the world.

This notion of “ought” is an artificial and needlessly confusing way to think about moral choice. In fact, it seems to be another dismal product of Abrahamic religion—which, strangely enough, now constrains the thinking of even atheists. If this notion of “ought” means anything we can possibly care about, it must translate into a concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious beings (either in this life or in some other). For instance, to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do.

The God of Abraham never told us to treat children with kindness, but He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). And yet everyone finds this “moral” imperative perfectly insane. Which is to say that no one—not even fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews—can so fully ignore the link between morality and human well-being as to be truly bound by God’s law.

A universal morality can be defined with reference to the negative end of the spectrum of conscious experience: I refer to this extreme as “the worst possible misery for everyone.”

Adam and Eve. How these two people might maximize their well-being. Are there wrong answers to this question? Of course. (Wrong answer number 1: smash each other in the face with a large rock.) The best solutions will not be zero-sum.

The fact that it could be difficult or impossible to know exactly how to maximize human well-being does not mean that there are no right or wrong ways to do this — nor does it mean that we cannot exclude certain answers as obviously bad.

Fanciers of Hume’s is/ought distinction never seem to realize what the stakes are, and they do not see how abject failures of compassion are enabled by this intellectual “tolerance” of moral difference.

Surely a culture would be wrong if it blinded every third person. Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.” [Or human sacrifice.]

While human beings have different moral codes, each competing view presumes its own universality. This seems to be true even of moral relativism.

The most basic facts about human flourishing must transcend culture, just as most other facts do.

The purpose of this book is to help cut a third path through this wilderness.

E. O. Wilson: “morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends,”

Nor does it mean that our notion of “morality” cannot grow deeper and more refined as our understanding of ourselves develops.

There are facts about well-being that await our discovery

Three distinct and independently worthy endeavours that we should not confuse:

• explain why people tend to follow certain patterns of thought and behaviour in the name of “morality.”
• determine which patterns of thought and behaviour we should follow
• convince people who are committed to silly and harmful patterns of thought and behaviour in the name of “morality” to break these commitments and to live better lives.

Project 3 is the most important task.  Of course, moral persuasion is a difficult business, but it strikes me as especially difficult if we haven’t figured out in what sense moral truths exist. Hence, my main focus is on project 2.

Applied eloquently to jealousy about man talking to wife at gym.

The challenge is for us to begin speaking sensibly about right and wrong, and good and evil, given what we already know about our world.

Chapter 2: Good and Evil

The problem of human cooperation seems almost the only problem worth thinking about.  “Ethics” and “morality” (I use these terms interchangeably) are the names we give to our deliberate thinking on these matters.

As we better understand the brain, we will increasingly understand all of the forces

Because moral virtue is attractive to both sexes, it might function as a kind of peacock’s tail.

Adam Smith China Earthquake: If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

We are powerfully absorbed by selfish desires almost every moment of our lives; our attention to our own pains and pleasures could scarcely be more acute. But when we consciously reflect on what we should do, an angel of beneficence and impartiality seems to spread its wings within us

Dobu islanders. Malicious sorcery.

Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health, it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.

Moral realism and consequentialism

Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc.—all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act 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 exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behaviour. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values.

It seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book. The fact that would-be martyrs are almost surely wrong about the consequences of their behaviour is precisely what renders it such an astounding and immoral misuse of human life.

This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm.

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “evil,” and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others?

Joshua Greene moral anti-realist [but he criticises morality and praises utilitarianism – has Harris not seen the second part?]

Moral view A is truer than moral view B, if A entails a more accurate understanding of the connections between human thoughts / intentions / behaviour and human well-being.

So well adapted to making moral judgments that our making them is, from our point of view, rather easy, a part of “common sense.”

Feels to us like a perceptual ability. This false belief serves an important biological purpose.

Moral realism is a mistake we were born to make.

Our logical, mathematical, and physical intuitions have not been designed by natural

selection to track the Truth.

It means the conversation must continue

Many people are simply wrong about morality.

Sun Yaoting,

We cannot always determine whether the effects of an action will be bad or good.

even in retrospect.

“the Three Mile Island Effect.”  Perhaps caused more good by increasing nuclear safety.

Patricia Churchland: “no one has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of five million against the broken legs of two, or the needs of one’s own two children against the needs of a hundred unrelated brain-damaged children in Serbia.”

population ethics governs the most important decisions societies ever make.

Paul Slavic

We intuitively care most about a single, identifiable human life, less about two, and we grow more callous as the body count rises. “psychic numbing” failures of our moral intuition. “identifiable victim effect.”

Create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions. Build our better selves into our laws, tax codes, and institutions.

“It’s so sad to eat baby lambies,”  “It’s not good. But I can’t stop eating them if they are keeping killing them.”

This is a frequent source of confusion: consequentialism is less a method of answering moral questions than it is a claim about the status of moral truth.

The especially low-hanging fruit of conservative Islam: we already know enough about the human condition to know that killing cartoonists for blasphemy does not lead anywhere worth going on the moral landscape.

“the endowment effect”:

Loss aversion

lost

enhancement

sins of commission and sins of omission.

“peak / end rule.”

Science allows us to investigate the world, and our place within it, in ways that get behind first appearances.

Expect that kindness, compassion, fairness, and other classically “good” traits will be vindicated neuroscientifically

I am neither as moral, nor as happy, as I could be.

I am generally not moved to do what I believe will make me happier than I now am.

The architecture of my mind

Will we develop an antidote to grief?

Jonathan Haidt  “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,”  “wag-the-other-dog’s-tail.”  Human beings tend to make moral decisions on the basis of emotion, justify these decisions with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their reasoning demonstrably fails.

Monty Hall Problem

It seems abundantly clear that many people are simply wrong about morality — just as many people are wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding.

If morality is a system of thinking about (and maximizing) the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people’s moral concerns must be immoral.

Just as people are often less than rational when claiming to be rational, they can be less than moral when claiming to be moral.

According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief. Are these people “morally motivated,” in Haidt’s sense, or just morally confused?

“genuine altruism” seems to be the special province of human beings.

eusocial insects

“warm glow”

“psychopaths”

While anxiety and fear are emotions that most of us would prefer to live without, they serve as anchors to social and moral norms.

fearful children have been shown to display greater moral understanding.

pathological arousal and reward.

unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness

existence of psychopaths predicted by game theory.

Chimps are far more aggressive than humans are within a group (by a factor of about 200)

Human beings have grown steadily less violent.

There is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us. Cancer is perfectly natural, and yet its eradication is a primary goal

Evolution may have selected for territorial violence, rape, and other patently unethical behaviours as strategies to propagate one’s genes — but our collective well-being clearly depends on our opposing such natural tendencies.

“out-group” hostility and “in-group” altruism

It is generally argued that our sense of free will presents a compelling mystery: on the one hand, it is impossible to make sense of it in causal terms; on the other, there is a powerful subjective sense that we are the authors of our own actions.  We are mistaken about the nature of our experience.  We do not feel as free as we think we feel. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found,

Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Chapter 3: Belief

Belief: mental acceptance of a proposition.

The human brain is characterised by massive interconnectivity: it is mostly talking to itself.

Subjects judged statements to be “true” more quickly than they judged them to be “false” or “undecidable.”

Mathematical belief showed a similar pattern of activity to ethical belief

Physiology of belief may be the same regardless of a proposition’s content. It also suggests that the division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function.

The norms of reasoning seem to apply equally to beliefs about facts and to beliefs about values. [Harris sees that factual and normative judgements are similar.  End relational theory would explain the similarity and how they differ.]

Wishful thinking, self-serving bias, in-group loyalties, and frank self-deception can lead to monstrous departures from the norms of rationality.

Scientists are normally humble. In my experience, arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.

To reason effectively, we must have a feeling for the truth. “feeling of knowing”

belief in magic is now in disrepute

religion and witchcraft

bias: a reliable pattern of error.

beliefs are intrinsically epistemic: they purport to represent the world as it is.

the presence of the sane among the mentally ill was not detected.

Chapter 4: Religion

The poor tend to be more religious

belief precedes ritual

religious practices are the direct consequence of what people believe to be true

Religions are more precise than just relaxing the usual principles of sound reasoning.

Certain doctrines fit

Likening religion to language acquisition: we come into the world able to pick up the local language and religion

Religion is largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality.

There is no reason to believe that any of them suffer from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

Any naïve conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind’s obvious dependency upon the brain. Damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities. Does the soul of a person suffering from total loss of language still speak and think fluently?

The soul doctrine suffers further upheaval in light of the fatal resemblance of the human brain to the brains of other animals. Human uniqueness.

Just how many scientific laws would be violated by this scheme?

Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself — conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc.

Chapter 5: The Future of Happiness

Despite our perennial bad behaviour, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

The belief that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, and not a mere product of culture, suggests that progress is possible.

Throughout this book, I have argued that the split between facts and values—and, therefore, between science and morality—is an illusion.

Anything of value must be valuable to someone (whether actually or potentially) — and, therefore, its value should be attributable to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

It is quite possible that your “experiencing self” would be much happier in Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of Rome one year hence.

Kahneman, the vast majority of our experiences in life never get recalled,

Most of the research done on happiness suggests that people actually become less happy when they have children and do not begin to approach their prior level of happiness until their children leave home.  One of the most reliable ways to diminish a person’s contributions to society is for that person to start a family.

The claim that science could have something important to say about values (because values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures) is an argument made on first principles. As such, it doesn’t rest on any specific empirical results. That does not mean that this claim couldn’t be falsified, however. Clearly, if there is a more important source of value that has nothing to do with the well-being of conscious creatures (in this life or a life to come), my thesis would be disproved. As I have said, however, I cannot conceive of what such a source of value could be: for if someone claimed to have found it somewhere, it could be of no possible interest to anyone, by definition.

This book was written in the hope that as science develops, we will recognize its application to the most pressing questions of human existence. For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools. Few people seem to recognize the dangers posed by thinking that there are no true answers to moral questions.

Notes

“science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality.

Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this 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. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.

We collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people. I suspect that this is a very good thing.

Asking why we “ought” to value well-being makes even less sense than asking why we “ought” to be rational or scientific.