Great post by John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts.
Sample:
Child pornography is not about to warp your kids minds or put them at risk – we should prevent it, but not surrender everything about the internet that makes it great, and certainly not everything about our rights that makes this the most peaceful, best educated, healthiest, most survivable period in history in many places in the world, including mine. My predecessors and ancestors fought for those rights. I don’t want to see them restricted because we fear demons.
About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Sam Harris on a science of morality
Introduction
In his recent contribution to The Huffington Post, Sam Harris offers a detailed defence of his proposal for a science of morality, writing in the aftermath of reactions to his TED talk back in March. A great deal of his defence concentrates on answering the latest criticisms from Sean Carroll.
I'm not going to attempt a point-by-point adjudication of claim and counterclaim from Harris and Carroll. That would require at least a full-scale academic article, and even a few relatively quick observations will end up being quite long enough.
I think that Harris still misses the thrust of some of the points made by Carroll, and it's unfortunate that his initial responses to criticism were so impatient (especially referring to them as "stupidity" on Twitter ... for which, to his credit, he apologised). There's room to see good points on both sides, and the policy conclusions needn't differ.
Science?
At the same time, I don't really mind the concept of a "science" of morality. I'll qualify that later, but I don't see any clear boundary between science and philosophy anyway. Back in the eighteenth century the word "scientist" didn't even exist, but David Hume clearly thought he was engaged in a first comprehensive attempt at what we'd now call a science of morality, examining the subject from an empirical perspective - and you know what, he was right! It's not that he conducted experiments, but he laid a theoretical foundation based on the empirical knowledge available, and his foundation is still invaluable for those who want to build on it. Much modern moral philosophy and moral psychology does exactly that (though of course much of it is a program of resistance to Hume).
So, I'm not hung up about words such as "science". Nor am I bothered by the prospect that various kinds of empirical investigation may inform our decisions, including decisions about whether to criticise particular moral systems. What's more, I think we can make rational judgments about whether existing moral systems are "good" in much the way that we can make judgments about whether particular hammers are "good". A hammer is a good one if it's effective/efficient for its purpose. A moral system is good if it does what we want from moral systems as a class. Like hammers, moral systems can be replaced or improved.
Criticising moral systems
It follows that I agree with Harris that we can criticise various cultures' moral systems and their various prescriptions for human behaviour. In doing so, we don't need to find a way to deduce objectively binding "ought" statements from pure "is" statements that make no reference to affective attitudes (such as values and desires) or social institutions (such as codes of ethics). I don't believe that can be done - here I agree with Carroll, if not for precisely the same reasons - and I think Harris got off on the wrong foot at TED in trying to do so (and claiming that certain dubious metaethical claims were "obvious"). Carroll was correct to pull him up on it, and those of us who dissected the specific arguments were similarly justified.
But Harris doesn't actually need to make an unheralded breakthrough in metaethics to establish his main point about the possibility and desirability of criticising moral systems. If those moral systems are harmful to human wellbeing ... then criticise them for it! I think hammers exist to drive nails and that it's approximately correct to say that moral systems exist to conduce to human wellbeing and, to some extent, the wellbeing of other sentient creatures.
To repeat an earlier post, I agree with Harris that:
1. We can criticise the moral codes, cultural practices, etc., of other cultures (or, if it comes to that, our own).
2. When we do so, our criticisms need not be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, or unreasonable. On the contrary, they may be perfectly reasonable, non-arbitrary, and inter-subjectively justifiable.
3. Many people take a contrary view, often reflected in public policy. That's wrong and dangerous.
Some disagreement
Here's a sketch of where I think Harris is still getting things somewhat wrong. He concedes the main point that critics have been making when he says: "Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter." That alone is enough to establish that he's not an extreme objectivist about morality, even if he thinks he is (since he doesn't want to use academic philosophical language, and is rather scornful of it, it's difficult to be sure where he stands on some metaethical points).
But he seems to think this is a relatively trivial problem. It isn't. Our goals when we use a hammer are usually uncontroversial - we (usually) want our hammer to drive nails into wood. By contrast, the goals of morality are much more controversial, the controversy goes very deep, and we have no decision procedure that has any prospect of producing universal convergence among philosophers, let alone all the people who reject a reason-based approach to morality.
In both his TED talk and his new article, Harris says that something similar applies to medicine. I.e., there is no total, final, uncontroversial agreement about what we're trying to achieve when we practice medicine, but we still do so in the real world without any great problem.
Good point. But actually, if Harris were deeply immersed in bioethics he'd realise that it's not so simple. In medicine, there are many marginal cases where deeply contested values come into play and it's not clear what we should do (or how we can ever get unanimity about the relevant values). What can be said about medicine is not that its goals are uncontroversial; its purpose is certainly not as clear-cut and uncontroversial as the purpose of an ordinary tool like a hammer. However, the goals of medicine are much less controversial than those of morality. We can define "health" with enough precision and agreement to get by in most circumstances. There are lurking difficulties for doctors, and they sometimes affect public policy, but surely they're not at issue in the majority of doctor-patient interactions.
Likewise with science. Its purpose, I suppose, is to develop well-evidenced and robust theories about the mechanisms or workings of the natural world - or something of the sort (I'm open to better formulations). This purpose could be contested, however, by someone who considers it futile, or impious, or counterproductive to ... yes ... human wellbeing. What we can say is that there's not all that much dispute about the purpose of science, or about the idea that pursuing it is a good thing to do (even if the "good" here represents a moral evalution, it can be an evaluation from one of the less-contested parts of morality relating to the desirabity of finding out about the world). However, there is some dispute, even if not enough to cause much difficulty with the everyday practice of science. Then again, it causes quite a bit of difficulty in some areas, most notably in biomedical research (which is a different practice from medicine).
What is morality for?
Morality is at the other end of the scale from hammers. There's an enormous amount of disagreement about what we're trying to achieve, and whether we're trying to achieve anything at all beyond, say, applying moral truths revealed by a prophet or a god. We can ask, "What is morality actually for?" ... And we'll get many different answers, including from people who say it's not "for" anything: we just do have an obligation to act in certain ways and not act in others.
There's so much disagreement that most of the intellectually rigorous discussion of morality that's available relates to foundational issues: issues of purposes or goals or definitions. There's certainly a field within philosophy that gets on with proposing the details of what we should be doing, how we should be living our lives, etc. I.e. there's the field of applied ethics. However, morality is far more controversial as a practice than medicine or science, because it's far less clear that the values built into its foundations are acceptable or even roughly agreed. Indeed, people who "do" applied ethics often disagree with each other about fundamentals in a way that is not so much the case with people who practice medicine and carry out scientific research.
Unfortunately, we are nowhere near to having the sort of general agreement as to the goals of, well, moralising, if you will, that we do with practising medicine or science. So it's no use arguing:
P1. The ultimate goals of medicine and science are contestable
P2. We can practice medicine and science with no terrible difficulty.
C. We can, with no terrible difficulty, practice anything whose ultimate goals are contestable.
Hence, we can, with no terrible difficulty, practice a "science of morality".
The correct conclusion, at "C.", is that we can, with no terrible difficulty, practice some things whose ultimate goals are contestable. As far as this argument goes, whether morality is one of those things is left as an open question. It really depends on just how much debate there is about a practice's ultimate goals, and how this pans out in practice. Unfortunately, the ultimate goals of morality are so controversial, and so disputed at such a deep level, that it's not surprising when much of what goes on in moral philosophy relates to trying to get agreement on the ultimate goals.
Conclusion
As it happens, I think that the goals of morality - or at least the point of the practice that we can ascribe to it - relate to a complex of human needs, interests, widespread desires and values, etc. This is pretty vague, but that's the nature of it. Morality evolved with us, biologically and culturally: it's not something we literally and consciously invented, with a clear-cut purpose in mind. But we can ascribe such goals as social survival, amelioration of suffering, providing a framework within which lives can go well (by whatever standards!), and probably other things of that kind. I don't terribly mind these being summed up as "wellbeing" as long as it's acknowledged that that's more a placeholder for a lot of rather vague and contested stuff than a label for something with a meaningful metric. Perhaps there's a meaningful metric for pleasure, but no one seriously thinks that morality is just about pleasure or that this is what "wellbeing" means (none of which is to deprecate pleasure, by the way).
On the other hand, the situation is not so hopeless as to make criticism of existing moral systems impossible or undesirable. If morality has something to do with the sorts of things I identified in the previous para, we can criticise particular moralities that have taken on a life of their own and make a poor contribution to those things - or are even counterproductive to them. Nor is information that science obtains about the natural world (which, importantly, includes us) irrelevant. We can, for example, use that information in our attempts to ameliorate suffering. So, I think Harris's actual conclusions are correct: we can have a science of morality, or, rather, a scientifically-informed practice of morality, as medicine is a scientifically-informed practice; and we can (and should) critique existing moralities. Vulgar cultural relativism is untenable and misleading, and we should put it behind us.
But his program won't be as straightforward as he makes it sound. Its aims and criteria will always be more deeply and pervasively controversial than those of science or medicine.
But again, Harris is mainly an activist, not an academic philosopher. I don't mind if he deals in approximations and simplifications. For that reason, among others, I've supported the broad thrust of what he's saying from the start. On the other hand, he shouldn't get tetchy when others want to question some of the details. Activism is important, and it requires the use of approximations. But intellectually rigorous debate is also important and shouldn't be seen as just a nuisance or a distraction.
In his recent contribution to The Huffington Post, Sam Harris offers a detailed defence of his proposal for a science of morality, writing in the aftermath of reactions to his TED talk back in March. A great deal of his defence concentrates on answering the latest criticisms from Sean Carroll.
I'm not going to attempt a point-by-point adjudication of claim and counterclaim from Harris and Carroll. That would require at least a full-scale academic article, and even a few relatively quick observations will end up being quite long enough.
I think that Harris still misses the thrust of some of the points made by Carroll, and it's unfortunate that his initial responses to criticism were so impatient (especially referring to them as "stupidity" on Twitter ... for which, to his credit, he apologised). There's room to see good points on both sides, and the policy conclusions needn't differ.
Science?
At the same time, I don't really mind the concept of a "science" of morality. I'll qualify that later, but I don't see any clear boundary between science and philosophy anyway. Back in the eighteenth century the word "scientist" didn't even exist, but David Hume clearly thought he was engaged in a first comprehensive attempt at what we'd now call a science of morality, examining the subject from an empirical perspective - and you know what, he was right! It's not that he conducted experiments, but he laid a theoretical foundation based on the empirical knowledge available, and his foundation is still invaluable for those who want to build on it. Much modern moral philosophy and moral psychology does exactly that (though of course much of it is a program of resistance to Hume).
So, I'm not hung up about words such as "science". Nor am I bothered by the prospect that various kinds of empirical investigation may inform our decisions, including decisions about whether to criticise particular moral systems. What's more, I think we can make rational judgments about whether existing moral systems are "good" in much the way that we can make judgments about whether particular hammers are "good". A hammer is a good one if it's effective/efficient for its purpose. A moral system is good if it does what we want from moral systems as a class. Like hammers, moral systems can be replaced or improved.
Criticising moral systems
It follows that I agree with Harris that we can criticise various cultures' moral systems and their various prescriptions for human behaviour. In doing so, we don't need to find a way to deduce objectively binding "ought" statements from pure "is" statements that make no reference to affective attitudes (such as values and desires) or social institutions (such as codes of ethics). I don't believe that can be done - here I agree with Carroll, if not for precisely the same reasons - and I think Harris got off on the wrong foot at TED in trying to do so (and claiming that certain dubious metaethical claims were "obvious"). Carroll was correct to pull him up on it, and those of us who dissected the specific arguments were similarly justified.
But Harris doesn't actually need to make an unheralded breakthrough in metaethics to establish his main point about the possibility and desirability of criticising moral systems. If those moral systems are harmful to human wellbeing ... then criticise them for it! I think hammers exist to drive nails and that it's approximately correct to say that moral systems exist to conduce to human wellbeing and, to some extent, the wellbeing of other sentient creatures.
To repeat an earlier post, I agree with Harris that:
1. We can criticise the moral codes, cultural practices, etc., of other cultures (or, if it comes to that, our own).
2. When we do so, our criticisms need not be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, or unreasonable. On the contrary, they may be perfectly reasonable, non-arbitrary, and inter-subjectively justifiable.
3. Many people take a contrary view, often reflected in public policy. That's wrong and dangerous.
Some disagreement
Here's a sketch of where I think Harris is still getting things somewhat wrong. He concedes the main point that critics have been making when he says: "Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter." That alone is enough to establish that he's not an extreme objectivist about morality, even if he thinks he is (since he doesn't want to use academic philosophical language, and is rather scornful of it, it's difficult to be sure where he stands on some metaethical points).
But he seems to think this is a relatively trivial problem. It isn't. Our goals when we use a hammer are usually uncontroversial - we (usually) want our hammer to drive nails into wood. By contrast, the goals of morality are much more controversial, the controversy goes very deep, and we have no decision procedure that has any prospect of producing universal convergence among philosophers, let alone all the people who reject a reason-based approach to morality.
In both his TED talk and his new article, Harris says that something similar applies to medicine. I.e., there is no total, final, uncontroversial agreement about what we're trying to achieve when we practice medicine, but we still do so in the real world without any great problem.
Good point. But actually, if Harris were deeply immersed in bioethics he'd realise that it's not so simple. In medicine, there are many marginal cases where deeply contested values come into play and it's not clear what we should do (or how we can ever get unanimity about the relevant values). What can be said about medicine is not that its goals are uncontroversial; its purpose is certainly not as clear-cut and uncontroversial as the purpose of an ordinary tool like a hammer. However, the goals of medicine are much less controversial than those of morality. We can define "health" with enough precision and agreement to get by in most circumstances. There are lurking difficulties for doctors, and they sometimes affect public policy, but surely they're not at issue in the majority of doctor-patient interactions.
Likewise with science. Its purpose, I suppose, is to develop well-evidenced and robust theories about the mechanisms or workings of the natural world - or something of the sort (I'm open to better formulations). This purpose could be contested, however, by someone who considers it futile, or impious, or counterproductive to ... yes ... human wellbeing. What we can say is that there's not all that much dispute about the purpose of science, or about the idea that pursuing it is a good thing to do (even if the "good" here represents a moral evalution, it can be an evaluation from one of the less-contested parts of morality relating to the desirabity of finding out about the world). However, there is some dispute, even if not enough to cause much difficulty with the everyday practice of science. Then again, it causes quite a bit of difficulty in some areas, most notably in biomedical research (which is a different practice from medicine).
What is morality for?
Morality is at the other end of the scale from hammers. There's an enormous amount of disagreement about what we're trying to achieve, and whether we're trying to achieve anything at all beyond, say, applying moral truths revealed by a prophet or a god. We can ask, "What is morality actually for?" ... And we'll get many different answers, including from people who say it's not "for" anything: we just do have an obligation to act in certain ways and not act in others.
There's so much disagreement that most of the intellectually rigorous discussion of morality that's available relates to foundational issues: issues of purposes or goals or definitions. There's certainly a field within philosophy that gets on with proposing the details of what we should be doing, how we should be living our lives, etc. I.e. there's the field of applied ethics. However, morality is far more controversial as a practice than medicine or science, because it's far less clear that the values built into its foundations are acceptable or even roughly agreed. Indeed, people who "do" applied ethics often disagree with each other about fundamentals in a way that is not so much the case with people who practice medicine and carry out scientific research.
Unfortunately, we are nowhere near to having the sort of general agreement as to the goals of, well, moralising, if you will, that we do with practising medicine or science. So it's no use arguing:
P1. The ultimate goals of medicine and science are contestable
P2. We can practice medicine and science with no terrible difficulty.
C. We can, with no terrible difficulty, practice anything whose ultimate goals are contestable.
Hence, we can, with no terrible difficulty, practice a "science of morality".
The correct conclusion, at "C.", is that we can, with no terrible difficulty, practice some things whose ultimate goals are contestable. As far as this argument goes, whether morality is one of those things is left as an open question. It really depends on just how much debate there is about a practice's ultimate goals, and how this pans out in practice. Unfortunately, the ultimate goals of morality are so controversial, and so disputed at such a deep level, that it's not surprising when much of what goes on in moral philosophy relates to trying to get agreement on the ultimate goals.
Conclusion
As it happens, I think that the goals of morality - or at least the point of the practice that we can ascribe to it - relate to a complex of human needs, interests, widespread desires and values, etc. This is pretty vague, but that's the nature of it. Morality evolved with us, biologically and culturally: it's not something we literally and consciously invented, with a clear-cut purpose in mind. But we can ascribe such goals as social survival, amelioration of suffering, providing a framework within which lives can go well (by whatever standards!), and probably other things of that kind. I don't terribly mind these being summed up as "wellbeing" as long as it's acknowledged that that's more a placeholder for a lot of rather vague and contested stuff than a label for something with a meaningful metric. Perhaps there's a meaningful metric for pleasure, but no one seriously thinks that morality is just about pleasure or that this is what "wellbeing" means (none of which is to deprecate pleasure, by the way).
On the other hand, the situation is not so hopeless as to make criticism of existing moral systems impossible or undesirable. If morality has something to do with the sorts of things I identified in the previous para, we can criticise particular moralities that have taken on a life of their own and make a poor contribution to those things - or are even counterproductive to them. Nor is information that science obtains about the natural world (which, importantly, includes us) irrelevant. We can, for example, use that information in our attempts to ameliorate suffering. So, I think Harris's actual conclusions are correct: we can have a science of morality, or, rather, a scientifically-informed practice of morality, as medicine is a scientifically-informed practice; and we can (and should) critique existing moralities. Vulgar cultural relativism is untenable and misleading, and we should put it behind us.
But his program won't be as straightforward as he makes it sound. Its aims and criteria will always be more deeply and pervasively controversial than those of science or medicine.
But again, Harris is mainly an activist, not an academic philosopher. I don't mind if he deals in approximations and simplifications. For that reason, among others, I've supported the broad thrust of what he's saying from the start. On the other hand, he shouldn't get tetchy when others want to question some of the details. Activism is important, and it requires the use of approximations. But intellectually rigorous debate is also important and shouldn't be seen as just a nuisance or a distraction.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Death of Ronnie James Dio
Terrible news - Dio had been suffering stomach cancer for some time, but last I'd read it was said to be in remission.
There's another of the gods of rock 'n' roll lost to us, though at least he made it to a, well, sort of reasonable age, 67. Of course, that's still far too young. I was privileged to see him perform live on two occasions, once back in the '80s, when he was touring with his own band, and again very recently when he was fronting the reunited Dio-era version of Black Sabbath (officially known as Heaven and Hell). Even in his sixties, Ronnie James Dio was an exciting performer and still the quintessential heavy metal vocalist. I'm so glad I had the opportunities to attend his performances.
My sympathies to his loved ones.
There's another of the gods of rock 'n' roll lost to us, though at least he made it to a, well, sort of reasonable age, 67. Of course, that's still far too young. I was privileged to see him perform live on two occasions, once back in the '80s, when he was touring with his own band, and again very recently when he was fronting the reunited Dio-era version of Black Sabbath (officially known as Heaven and Hell). Even in his sixties, Ronnie James Dio was an exciting performer and still the quintessential heavy metal vocalist. I'm so glad I had the opportunities to attend his performances.
My sympathies to his loved ones.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Metaethical, neo-Humean limerick
While I'm getting around to a longer, time-consuming post, I'll dig out my famous metaethical, neo-Humean, hypothetical-imperative-explaining limerick:
Though an “is” alone won’t give support
To a value, a norm, or an “ought”,
If you mix on the fire
Both belief and desire,
You’ll get thought of an “ought” of a sort.
Though an “is” alone won’t give support
To a value, a norm, or an “ought”,
If you mix on the fire
Both belief and desire,
You’ll get thought of an “ought” of a sort.
"If I had a hammer ..."
Speaking of nailing things down, say I reach into my toolbox, down in the garage, and produce a hammer, which I offer to my friend X. X needs it to drive nails because, I dunno, maybe she wants to build a table or to hang some stuff on her walls at home. "This is a good hammer," I assure her (maybe her own hammer was broken, or something).
Consider the word good.
Following J.L. Mackie and other philosophers, I'm going to say that this word means something like "effective for the purpose in question between me and my friend". I.e., it's effective for the purpose of driving nails into wood. It gets its effectiveness from such things as the weight and hardness of its head, the sturdiness of its construction (the head won't break off when my friend uses it to strike a nail), maybe something about its balance. Somebody who knows a lot about hammers could doubtless assess mine on the basis of such properties and tell me whether I really have a "good" hammer. There can be an entire science (or at least an engineering discipline) of hammer design.
Still, its goodness as a hammer is ultimately about whether it's effective in doing the job of driving nails.
In other words, we assess whether this is a "good" hammer or a "not so good" hammer relative to a standard: the standard of effectiveness in driving nails. In that innocuous sense, judgments about hammers are relative.
It would be crazy to assess this hammer relative to some other standard, such as its ability to catch mice or mop the floor. (If it were a warhammer, we'd have a different standard.) In the circumstances, my friend and I know what we want from my hammer. The standard we use is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic. And I can't make the hammer a good one just by thinking about it.
However, note this point: the standard we use for judging the goodness of hammers relates to the needs, interests, desires, etc., of beings that possess subjectivity, in this case, all the human beings who need (if they are to fulfil their perfectly understandable goals) tools that are effective in driving nails. In that innocuous sense, goodness-of-hammers talk is subjective.
All of us, always, live in a social world that is awash with the needs, purposes, goals, desires, values - affective attitudes, in short - of human subjects like ourselves. Philosophers' thought experiments about other minds aside, there's nothing odd or mysterious about this. We swim in human society like a fish swims in water. Well, not exactly like that ... but you get my drift.
Notice, though, getting back to the hammer, that it really does have the properties - the hardness, weight, sturdiness, balance, etc. - that make it effective for driving nails. If all human beings suddenly vanished, it would still have those properties. We can be total realists about these properties of hammers, including the functional property "effective for driving nails" (to be even more specific: it is effective for driving nails when used by an adult human being of ordinary strength, not so effective when used by an alligator or an octopus). What we can't do is claim that the "goodness" of the hammer is divorced from all human subjectivity.
And yet, to repeat, our judgments about hammers are typically not arbitrary or idiosyncratic or unreasonable. We can, quite rationally and non-arbitrarily and for reasons that could be provided to others (who'd understand them), decide to discard one particular hammer and choose a different one. Or we could get our existing hammer fixed with a new handle, if that's what's needed. We are not made for hammers; hammers are made for us.
What if someone, let's call him "Y", picks out a strange-looking tool and says, "This is a good tool!"
In reply, I ask, "Good for what? Driving nails? Sawing wood? Drilling holes? Turning screws?"
"No," Y says, "you miss the point. It just is a good tool."
"What?"
"It's a good tool. It has the property of being good."
"Yeah, but for what?"
"It's not good by a standard," he says scornfully. "And its goodness has nothing to do with anyone's goals or needs or desires, or anything like that. It's good in a way that transcends such things. It just is good. All tools should be like this tool, but not because that would make them more effective at filling any need or purpose that anyone might want a tool for."
After a few iterations of this, I am none the wiser about what this tool might be effective for or how its use relates to any human desire or purpose or goal or anything like that. I'm not confident that the damn thing is any use to man, woman, beast, or tentacled alien.
Y keeps insisting that this is all irrelevant. It just is a good tool, he argues. Why don't I "get" it? It has this OBJECTIVE PROPERTY of goodness that has nothing to do with what people might want to use tools for. Its goodness does not relate in any way to any of the stuff I want to talk about.
Frankly, I think Y is deluded. I hope that Sam Harris agrees with me.
Societies' codes of morality (and their individual moral rules), are like hammers. Discuss.
Consider the word good.
Following J.L. Mackie and other philosophers, I'm going to say that this word means something like "effective for the purpose in question between me and my friend". I.e., it's effective for the purpose of driving nails into wood. It gets its effectiveness from such things as the weight and hardness of its head, the sturdiness of its construction (the head won't break off when my friend uses it to strike a nail), maybe something about its balance. Somebody who knows a lot about hammers could doubtless assess mine on the basis of such properties and tell me whether I really have a "good" hammer. There can be an entire science (or at least an engineering discipline) of hammer design.
Still, its goodness as a hammer is ultimately about whether it's effective in doing the job of driving nails.
In other words, we assess whether this is a "good" hammer or a "not so good" hammer relative to a standard: the standard of effectiveness in driving nails. In that innocuous sense, judgments about hammers are relative.
It would be crazy to assess this hammer relative to some other standard, such as its ability to catch mice or mop the floor. (If it were a warhammer, we'd have a different standard.) In the circumstances, my friend and I know what we want from my hammer. The standard we use is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic. And I can't make the hammer a good one just by thinking about it.
However, note this point: the standard we use for judging the goodness of hammers relates to the needs, interests, desires, etc., of beings that possess subjectivity, in this case, all the human beings who need (if they are to fulfil their perfectly understandable goals) tools that are effective in driving nails. In that innocuous sense, goodness-of-hammers talk is subjective.
All of us, always, live in a social world that is awash with the needs, purposes, goals, desires, values - affective attitudes, in short - of human subjects like ourselves. Philosophers' thought experiments about other minds aside, there's nothing odd or mysterious about this. We swim in human society like a fish swims in water. Well, not exactly like that ... but you get my drift.
Notice, though, getting back to the hammer, that it really does have the properties - the hardness, weight, sturdiness, balance, etc. - that make it effective for driving nails. If all human beings suddenly vanished, it would still have those properties. We can be total realists about these properties of hammers, including the functional property "effective for driving nails" (to be even more specific: it is effective for driving nails when used by an adult human being of ordinary strength, not so effective when used by an alligator or an octopus). What we can't do is claim that the "goodness" of the hammer is divorced from all human subjectivity.
And yet, to repeat, our judgments about hammers are typically not arbitrary or idiosyncratic or unreasonable. We can, quite rationally and non-arbitrarily and for reasons that could be provided to others (who'd understand them), decide to discard one particular hammer and choose a different one. Or we could get our existing hammer fixed with a new handle, if that's what's needed. We are not made for hammers; hammers are made for us.
What if someone, let's call him "Y", picks out a strange-looking tool and says, "This is a good tool!"
In reply, I ask, "Good for what? Driving nails? Sawing wood? Drilling holes? Turning screws?"
"No," Y says, "you miss the point. It just is a good tool."
"What?"
"It's a good tool. It has the property of being good."
"Yeah, but for what?"
"It's not good by a standard," he says scornfully. "And its goodness has nothing to do with anyone's goals or needs or desires, or anything like that. It's good in a way that transcends such things. It just is good. All tools should be like this tool, but not because that would make them more effective at filling any need or purpose that anyone might want a tool for."
After a few iterations of this, I am none the wiser about what this tool might be effective for or how its use relates to any human desire or purpose or goal or anything like that. I'm not confident that the damn thing is any use to man, woman, beast, or tentacled alien.
Y keeps insisting that this is all irrelevant. It just is a good tool, he argues. Why don't I "get" it? It has this OBJECTIVE PROPERTY of goodness that has nothing to do with what people might want to use tools for. Its goodness does not relate in any way to any of the stuff I want to talk about.
Frankly, I think Y is deluded. I hope that Sam Harris agrees with me.
Societies' codes of morality (and their individual moral rules), are like hammers. Discuss.
Friday, May 14, 2010
A science of morality?
I've finally read the piece by Sam Harris that appeared nearly a week ago in The Huffington Post. It's complex, difficult, and impossible to discuss properly in a short post. When I get a chance, I'm planning to give as full a response as I can, but I'm thinking of doing so over at Sentient Developments, where I may get a larger audience; the issues are important enough to look for the biggest audience possible. (The only worry is that Sentient Developments seems to be having an hiatus at the moment; so maybe, but maybe not.)
Don't worry, if I post there I'll also link from this blog. Either way, you won't miss it.
I still have a lot of quibbles with Harris, although I think this new piece is an improvement on his earlier presentations of the argument. I should also say that I agree with the main conclusions if they're formulated something like this:
1. We can criticise the moral codes, cultural practices, etc., of other cultures (or, if it comes to that, our own).
2. When we do so, our criticisms need not be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, or unreasonable. On the contrary, they may be perfectly reasonable, non-arbitrary, and inter-subjectively justifiable.
3. Many people take a contrary view, often reflected in public policy. That's wrong and dangerous.
Put another way, the main conclusion is that we should (this can be a "should" of practical rationality if you're worried about moral "shoulds") resist the temptation of various kinds of vulgar moral relativism that have become popular and seem to encourage an undesirable quietism.
Again, I agree with this conclusion if it's put that way. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that disagreement would be irrational. :)
However, all this can be supported with cogent arguments without making grand claims about deriving values solely from facts, oughts solely from is's (with no reference to such things as social institutions or affective attitudes), and so on. Indeed, Harris does exactly that in The End of Faith. He made some wild-sounding claims in his TED talk, but he now seems to have dropped these.
Nonetheless, some of the arguments and formulations in the Huffington Post essay still seem to me to be going down the wrong track. I care - partly because I have a professional interest in this: my PhD thesis, as submitted and approved, does not go into metaethical points, because I ripped all that stuff out as opening too many additional cans of worms; but a lot of my actual research, which found its way into chapters of the initial draft of the thesis involved precisely these sorts of metaethical issues. I've spoken about them at philosophical conferences and seminars in the past, and will do so again at this year's AAP conference. I've also touched on them in published articles.
Apart from my professional interest, I think it's important to get these points right. Even if we all agree with Harris's conclusions - at least the way I've formulated them above - we need to have our arguments in the most precise and cogent form we can find, and to have a clear sense of what the counter-arguments would be. I also think that the approach Harris takes leads him to miss an important conclusion: moralities are made for us, not us for them, and they can be changed to suit our purposes. He probably agrees with this, but if so he never spells it out clearly.
So, I'm going to put in some effort to nail this down further. Soon. Not now, but soon.
Don't worry, if I post there I'll also link from this blog. Either way, you won't miss it.
I still have a lot of quibbles with Harris, although I think this new piece is an improvement on his earlier presentations of the argument. I should also say that I agree with the main conclusions if they're formulated something like this:
1. We can criticise the moral codes, cultural practices, etc., of other cultures (or, if it comes to that, our own).
2. When we do so, our criticisms need not be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, or unreasonable. On the contrary, they may be perfectly reasonable, non-arbitrary, and inter-subjectively justifiable.
3. Many people take a contrary view, often reflected in public policy. That's wrong and dangerous.
Put another way, the main conclusion is that we should (this can be a "should" of practical rationality if you're worried about moral "shoulds") resist the temptation of various kinds of vulgar moral relativism that have become popular and seem to encourage an undesirable quietism.
Again, I agree with this conclusion if it's put that way. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that disagreement would be irrational. :)
However, all this can be supported with cogent arguments without making grand claims about deriving values solely from facts, oughts solely from is's (with no reference to such things as social institutions or affective attitudes), and so on. Indeed, Harris does exactly that in The End of Faith. He made some wild-sounding claims in his TED talk, but he now seems to have dropped these.
Nonetheless, some of the arguments and formulations in the Huffington Post essay still seem to me to be going down the wrong track. I care - partly because I have a professional interest in this: my PhD thesis, as submitted and approved, does not go into metaethical points, because I ripped all that stuff out as opening too many additional cans of worms; but a lot of my actual research, which found its way into chapters of the initial draft of the thesis involved precisely these sorts of metaethical issues. I've spoken about them at philosophical conferences and seminars in the past, and will do so again at this year's AAP conference. I've also touched on them in published articles.
Apart from my professional interest, I think it's important to get these points right. Even if we all agree with Harris's conclusions - at least the way I've formulated them above - we need to have our arguments in the most precise and cogent form we can find, and to have a clear sense of what the counter-arguments would be. I also think that the approach Harris takes leads him to miss an important conclusion: moralities are made for us, not us for them, and they can be changed to suit our purposes. He probably agrees with this, but if so he never spells it out clearly.
So, I'm going to put in some effort to nail this down further. Soon. Not now, but soon.
Steve Zara on banning the burka
This is a nice post on a subject that creates passions on all sides of the argument. Go and have a look, and maybe give Steve your comments. I'm basically in agreement with his points, and I've never favoured banning the burka, much as I dislike it for a whole range of reasons. Also, there's a difference between not banning it and giving it special accommodation in our society: there may well be reasons to be tougher on regulating where it can be worn. For example, nobody should be allowed to give evidence in court in garments that hide their faces or conceal their body language. Nor should anyone expect to get a job interview in such clothing. In these and many other cases, other people absolutely have to be able to judge demeanour.
Anyway, I've posted on this before. It's Steve's turn to provide a forum for the issue.
Anyway, I've posted on this before. It's Steve's turn to provide a forum for the issue.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
For someone who's supposed to be on a blog break ...
... I've been fairly prolific lately. But the (relative) blog break continues. I'm currently working on the first three chapters of the intended book. I got the last of them into reasonably complete form and good shape yesterday. Am now doing layers of revision and work on the scholarly apparatus. I'm also trying to write a completely unrelated paper in my head for the AAP conference, and likewise for a talk (more related to the book) for my impending Sunshine Coast trip. So ... pretty flat out just now.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
"Reason Makes a Difference"
I urge my Australian readers (and others, if interested) to look at the new Reason Makes a Difference site, which attempts to inject a reason-based approach into grassroots political lobbying here in Australia. It's at an early stage yet, but I expect that its campaigns will appeal to many secular people ... and probably to many reasonable religious people as well.
Its first and current campaign relates to the trial of secular ethics classes as an alternative to taxpayer-funded religious education in NSW state primary schools. (In case you're wondering it's in favour of the trial ... while the Sydney churches have come out strongly against it.) You might be persuaded to support this campaign (there's a link to help you email NSW politicians about the issue).
Reason Makes a Difference has chosen as its philosophical basis a declaration made by the International Ethical and Humanist Union back in 2002. I can quibble about almost any such declaration or manifesto, but I have no significant problems with this one, which also has the virtue of brevity ... and it's not like we're being asked to sign our names to it.
Do have a look. This site could provide a great contribution to public debate.
Its first and current campaign relates to the trial of secular ethics classes as an alternative to taxpayer-funded religious education in NSW state primary schools. (In case you're wondering it's in favour of the trial ... while the Sydney churches have come out strongly against it.) You might be persuaded to support this campaign (there's a link to help you email NSW politicians about the issue).
Reason Makes a Difference has chosen as its philosophical basis a declaration made by the International Ethical and Humanist Union back in 2002. I can quibble about almost any such declaration or manifesto, but I have no significant problems with this one, which also has the virtue of brevity ... and it's not like we're being asked to sign our names to it.
Do have a look. This site could provide a great contribution to public debate.
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