Specter of Reason

The more I read Sam Harris on morality, the more annoyed I get. There has been a lot of good discussion in the blogosphere ( 1 , 2 , and 3 , for example), and I've written about this twice already, but there is more to say. I want to make two basic points here. First, Harris fails to offer a cogent response to the main criticisms leveled against him. In one case, he ends up embracing a view which contradicts his own: While Harris claims that moral facts are scientific facts, he accepts that justification ultimately lies outside the boundaries of science (see point 7 below). This completely undermines his proposed view of morality. Second, while Harris sets moral relativism up as the bogeyman in the debate over science and religion, his vision of a scientific morality is nothing other than a variety of moral relativism (see point 4 below). In sum, Harris' position is a self-contradictory mess. If this wasn't clear from his TED talk , it is blatantly apparent in his ...

There is a popular misconception that, if you are not a moral realist, you are a moral relativist. Yet, most non-theistic professional philosophers may be neither. As I'll explain, I prefer a variety of anti-realism called moral noncognitivism. First, I want to discuss the moral realism/moral relativism myth. Moral realists believe in objective truths about right and wrong, whereas moral relativists believe that moral truths are subjective, or limited by the beliefs and values of particular communities and cultures. Moral relativists are people who say, for example, that genital mutilation isn't absolutely or universally wrong--it's just wrong for some people. Moral realists respond, "No, genital mutilation really is [or, perhaps, really isn't] wrong, for all people and all times--all things being equal." This is usually how the issue is framed in popular culture, particularly in debates over atheism and the role of religion in society. It is not uncommo...

In February, popular writer and atheist Sam Harris gave a talk about science and morality, which you can watch here: He recently defended his views at The Huffington Post , where he spends a good deal of time responding to physicist and pop science writer, Sean Carroll. I'm not going to address the Carroll-Harris debate. I just want to look at some strengths and weaknesses of Harris' original argument. The first point to mention is that Harris makes a serious error in his original presentation, and which he does not correct in his Huff Post entry: According to Harris, the only people (other than himself) who believe there are objective moral facts are religious demagogues. Yet, according to the preliminary results of a recent PhilPapers survey , slightly more than half of the professionals and PhD's surveyed accept or lean towards moral realism--they believe there are objective moral facts--while only sixteen percent accept or lean towards theism. Moral realism remains a...

Peter Mandik sent me a draft of a paper in which he addresses one aspect of my criticism of Swamp Deviants. The issue, which I discussed here a couple of days ago ( Deviant Phenomenal Knowledge ) and elaborated upon earlier today ( Can Swampkinds Be Deviants? ), is this: Can a Swampkind have deviant phenomenal knowledge--that is, can they know what it is like to see red without first seeing, imagining, or hallucinating the color red? A Swamp Deviant is a Swampkind who knows what it is like to see red without having ever seen, imagined, or hallucinated the color red. One objection to the idea of Swamp Deviants is the argument that Swampkinds cannot know anything at all, because they cannot have any intentional states. To have an intentional state which is about red, for example, you must have a causal history which connects your state to the color red. Knowledge supervenes over causal histories, and not simply over neurological states. Since Swampkinds have no causal histories at a...

In my last post , I challenged philosophical appeals to deviants. Deviants are beings who have phenomenal knowledge (they know what it is like to X), but who have not had any experiences which could "earn" that knowledge. For example, a deviant is somebody who knows what it is like to see red, though who has never actually seen, imagined, or hallucinated red. I previously argued that deviants are plausibly impossible--the very idea of a deviant is not obviously coherent--and that, if we do our best to make the notion coherent, the possibility of deviants becomes an empirical question. Here I want to further support the argument that deviants may be inconceivable. The argument I will now develop is that Swampkinds cannot be deviants--or, rather, that any claim that Swampkinds are deviants will carry undesirable philosophical baggage. Swampkinds are beings who are physically and functionally identical to human beings, and who have phenomenal consciousness, but who are cre...

Phenomenal knowledge is normally defined as "knowing what it is like to experience [something]". This is usually further defined either in terms of, or in terms closely related to, the abilities to recognize, remember, and imagine experiences. Some recent philosophical discussions have focused on the issue of deviant phenomenal knowledge. Torin Alter (2008) explains: Phenomenal knowledge is earned if the experience requirement is satisfied. For example, since I have seen ripe tomatoes, my knowledge of what it’s like to see red is earned . . . To access phenomenal knowledge is to exercise closely related abilities, such as the ability to imagine, recognize, or remember relevant experiences. I access my phenomenal knowledge when I visualize a ripe tomato, stop at a traffic light, or have an episodic memory of seeing oxygenated blood. Phenomenal knowledge that is unearned, inaccessible, or both is deviant . In what follows, I use "deviant " to refer to anybody w...

As I mentioned in my last post , Torin Alter alerted me to the fact that Victoria McGeer (2003) makes an argument about Zombie Mary which is similar to my own. I emailed McGeer and she was kind enough to send me a copy of her paper. It is not as similar to my argument as I was expecting, but we do cover some of the same ground. She makes strong use of Zombie Mary, though she does not construct an incompatability argument. Her aim is rather to show that (1) the knowledge argument relies on the very modal intuition it was supposed to establish, and (2) the knowledge argument is implausible. I will discuss her main arguments below, and I will also discuss some related issues. First, McGeer makes a very important point about David Chalmers' position in this whole affair. Chalmers (1996) observes that the modal intuition--the intuition that zombies are conceivable--entails that zombies make judgments just like human beings do. This follows from the fact that judgment...