godspeaker
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- Mar 22, 2011
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- #61
At this point, I'm seeing a lot of comments about how morality is entirely subjective, therefore there can be no universal thruths to say about what is right and what is wrong. Here is how Harris replies (emphasizes are mine):
And the necessity of grounding moral truth in things that people actually value, or desire, or care about also misses the point. People often act against their deeper preferencesor live in ignorance of what their preferences would be if they had more experience and information What if we could change Alices preference themselves? Should we? Obviously we cant answer this question by relying on the very preferences we would change. Contrary to Blackfords assertion, Im not simply claiming that morality is fully determined by an objective reality, independent of peoples actual values and desires. I am claiming that peoples actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of thisindeed, we mustin order to talk about what is actually good. This becomes clear the moment we ask whether it would be good to alter people values and desires.
Consider how we would view a situation in which all of us miraculously began to behave so as to maximize our collective well-being. Imagine that on the basis of remarkable breakthroughs in technology, economics, and politic skill, we create a genuine utopia on earth. Needless to say, this wouldnt be boring, because we will have wisely avoided all the boring utopias. Rather, we will have created a global civilization of astonishing creativity, security, and happiness.
However, some people were not ready for this earthly paradise once it arrived. Some were psychopaths who, despite enjoying the general change in quality of life, were nevertheless eager to break into their neighbors homes and torture them from time to time. A few had preferences that were incompatible with the flourishing of whole societies: Try as he might, Kim Jong Il just couldnt shake the feeling that his cognac didnt taste as sweet without millions of people starving beyond his palace gates. Given our advances in science, however, we were able to alter preferences of this kind. In fact, we painlessly delivered a firmware update to everyone. Now the entirety of the species is fit to live in a global civilization that is as safe, and as fun, and as interesting, and as filled with love as it can be.
It seems to me that this scenario cuts through the worry that the concept of well-being might leave out something that is worth caring about: for if you care about something that is not compatible with a peak of human flourishinggiven the requisite changes in your brain, you would recognize that you were wrong to care about this thing in the first place. Wrong in what sense? Wrong in the sense that you didnt know what you were missing. This is the core of my argument: I am claiming that there must be frontiers of human well-being that await our discoveryand certain interests and preferences surely blind us to them.
So, as far as I understand, Sam is saying here that well-being, a peak of human flourishing is an universal goal of morality. If you have moral standards which don't result to a peak of human flourishing, you are simply wrong. Wrong as your morals don't result to a peak of human flourishing therefore your morals are measurable inferior to morals which do.
So it is not all for grabs, Taliban are wrong - fundamentally measurably wrong as the human well being in their society is not good.
At this point most of you pop a question: how to measure well-being? (emphasizes are mine)
The Value Problem
My critics have been especially exercised over the subtitle of my book, how science can determine human values. The charge is that I havent actually used science to determine the foundational value (well-being) upon which my proffered science of morality would rest. Rather, I have just assumed that well-being is a value, and this move is both unscientific and question-begging. Here is Blackford:
If we presuppose the well-being of conscious creatures as a fundamental value, much else may fall into place, but that initial presupposition does not come from science. It is not an empirical finding Harris is highly critical of the claim, associated with Hume, that we cannot derive an ought solely from an is - without starting with peoples actual values and desires. He is, however, no more successful in deriving ought from is than anyone else has ever been. The whole intellectual system of The Moral Landscape depends on an ought being built into its foundations.
Again, the same can be said about medicine, or science as a whole. As I point out in my book, science is based on values that must be presupposedlike the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesnt share these values cannot do science. But nor can he attack the presuppositions of science in a way that anyone should find compelling. Scientists need not apologize for presupposing the value of evidence, nor does this presupposition render science unscientific. In my book, I argue that the value of well-beingspecifically the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyoneis on the same footing. There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it. To say that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad is, on my account, like saying that an argument that contradicts itself is illogical. Our spade is turned. Anyone who says it isnt simply isnt making sense. The fatal flaw that Blackford claims to have found in my view of morality could just as well be located in science as a wholeor reason generally. Our oughts are built right into the foundations. We need not apologize for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps in this way. It is far better than pulling ourselves down by them.
Blackford raises another issue with regard to the concept of well-being:
[There could be situations where the question of which course of action might maximize well-being has no determinate answer, and not merely because well-being is difficult to measure in practice but because there is some room for rational disagreement about exactly what it is. If its shorthand for the summation of various even deeper values, there could be room for legitimate disagreement on exactly what these are, and certainly on how they are to be weighted. But if that is so, there could end up being legitimate disagreement on what is to be done, with no answer that is objectively binding on all the disagreeing parties.
Couldnt the same be said about human health? What if there are trade-offs with respect to human performance that we just cant get aroundwhat if, for instance, an ability to jump high always comes at the cost of flexibility? Will there be disagreements between orthopedists who specialize in basketball and those who specialize in yoga? Sure. So what? We will still be talking about very small deviations from a common standard of healthone which does not include anencephaly or a raging case of smallpox.
[Harris] acknowledges the theoretical possibility that two courses of action, or, say, two different systems of customs and laws could be equal in the amount of well-being that they generate. In such cases, the objectively correct and determinate answer to the question of which is morally better would be: They are equal. However, he is not prepared to accept a situation where two people who have knowledge of all the facts could legitimately disagree on what ought to be done. The closest they could come to that would be agreement that two (or more) courses of action are equally preferable, so either could be pursued with the same moral legitimacy as the other.
This is not quite true. My model of the moral landscape does allow for multiple peaksmany different modes of flourishing, admitting of irreconcilable goals. Thus, if you want to move society toward peak 19746X, while I fancy 74397J, we may have disagreements that simply cant be worked out. This is akin to trying to get me to follow you to the summit of Everest while I want to drag you up the slopes of K2. Such disagreements do not land us back in moral relativism, however: because there will be right and wrong ways to move toward one peak or the other; there will be many more low spots on the moral landscape than peaks (i.e. truly wrong answers to moral questions); and for all but the loftiest goals and the most disparate forms of conscious experience, moral disagreements will not be between sides of equal merit. Which is to say that for most moral controversies, we need not agree to disagree; rather, we should do our best to determine which side is actually right.
In any case, I suspect that radically disjoint peaks are unlikely to exist for human beings. We are far too similar to one another to be that different. If we each could sample all possible states of human experience, and were endowed with perfect memories so that we could sort our preferences, I think we would converge on similar judgments of what is good, what is better, and what is best. Differences of opinion might still be possible, and would themselves be explicable in terms of differences at the level of our brains. Consequently, even such disagreements would not be a problem for my account, because to talk about what is truly good, we must also include the possibility (in principle, if not in practice) of changing peoples desires, preferences, and intuitions as a means of moving across the moral landscape. I will discuss the implications of this below.
Generally speaking, I think that the problem of disagreement and indeterminacy that Blackford raises is a product of incomplete information (we will never be able to know all the consequences of an action, estimate all the relevant probabilities, or compare counterfactual states of the world) combined with the inevitable looseness with which certain terms must be defined. Once again, I do not see this as a problem for my view.
The whole "response to critics" can be found here.
Everyone ignores God to please themselves and their own ideas. That's why God is going to destroy everything.
