Specter of Reason

I've been discussing things to do with Sam Harris' Moral Landscape Challenge lately, but I forgot to congratulate the winner, Ryan Born .  Though it was Harris' challenge, it was Russell Blackford who chose the winning essay.  I've only read a handful of the entries, but I don't recall reading any that were better than Ryan's.  It's a well-written and interesting essay, and I trust Russell to have found the best of the lot. That said, I'm not thrilled with Ryan's essay.  I like the general strategy of taking up the Value Problem.  However, Ryan's primary tactic is problematic.  He takes up the idea of self-justification in a confused, or at least confusing, way.  Sam Harris has said that he would change his mind if he could be convinced that "other branches of science are self-justifying in a way that a science of morality could never be."  Ryan mistakenly takes Harris to be saying that science is self-justifying.  This allows Harris ...

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Sam Harris' first book, the award-winning best seller, The End Of Faith . Over the past decade, he has earned a good deal of public acclaim and devotion, and for respectable reasons. Sam Harris is a gifted writer and speaker. His eloquence and clarity of expression are enviable. In addition, he has been an outspoken advocate of reason, critical thought and secular values when this has been sorely needed. For these reasons, I would like to see Harris as an ally and potential friend who, like me, wants to make the world more hospitable to atheism and reason. However, his attitude towards the decorum of professional philosophy is hurting the cause, and his own arguments are suffering, too. In his review of Harris' most recent book, Free Will , Daniel C. Dennett admonishes Harris for not doing his homework and not engaging with "the best thought on the topic." This sort of reaction to Harris is not uncommon from profession...

I still haven't explained why I think Harris' response to Dennett is embarrassingly bad.  It's not because Harris is wrong about free will.  It's about the arguments he gives and the tone with which he gives them.  But I'm not going to get into that in this post.  Instead, I want to discuss why Harris is wrong about free will.  I've recently laid out a brief argument on the topic, but I suspect that unsympathetic audiences are not likely to be satisfied by it.  They say they have a better grasp of how people think about free will.  I don't know what makes them think they're experts on the subject, but what I do know is that they seem very confused about the issues. Look at Jerry Coyne , one of Harris' sympathetic readers: "I still see compatibilism as a wasted effort by philosophers to save our felt notion that we have agency; that we could have chosen otherwise . . . . Even Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg, a determinist if there ever was one, ...

[This post was significantly modified many times on February 19, 2014.] My responsibilities as a school teacher have led me to ignore most corners of the blogosphere since late last August, so I missed the fact that Sam Harris issued a Moral Landscape Challenge .  I just learned of it this morning, a little over a week after the deadline for submissions.  I'm very disappointed, since I very much want to participate.  I've therefore written a 760-word essay, and I hope Sam Harris will consider it.  I don't expect any rules to be broken on my account, but I think the consideration of my arguments is more important than whether or not I qualify for a monetary reward.  (Not that I couldn't use the money!  School teachers tend to be overworked and underpaid, and Poland is anything but an exception.)  Obviously the best of the essays submitted during the official entry period deserves to win the $2,000 prize.  But if that essay doesn't change Harris' ...

I don't have the time, and don't see much of value, in posting at length about Dennett's recent review of Sam Harris' book, Free Will , or Sam Harris' reply.  I did, once upon a time , suggest that such a review from Dennett might be worth reading, though I quickly changed my mind, supposing that silence from Dennett would be better.  As it turns out, I'm not sure.  A lot of Harris' fans and supporters are still in need of argumentation to understand why Dennett (and others) think they are mistaken.  And Dennett is more capable than most when it comes to clearly and persuasively laying out arguments.  And yet, even after he has done so, he is accused of missing the point.  On top of that, his snarky tone--fully justified, in my opinion--is used against him.  So, in unsnarky terms, and without addressing particular moments in this debate, let me try to get to (and unravel) the bottom line. Harris' main contention is that there is a certain lived expe...

One of Sam Harris' New Years' resolutions may have been to make a contribution to the debate over stricter gun laws.  That would explain his January 2nd blog entry, " The Riddle Of The Gun ," though its merits as a substantive contribution to the public discourse are questionable.  I will briefly address the lack of any such merits, but first I want to comment on some of the reactions to Harris. Though Harris' comments on gun control have provoked some debate in various quarters, the debate does not appear to have anything to do with any unique arguments or insights Harris has offered.  It has more to do with Sam Harris himself and, sometimes, how one should respond to his so-called "contributions."  Russell Blackford has been particularly keen on focusing on the latter point .  The last of those links takes you to Russell's most recent post, in which he criticizes Ian Murphy's rather harsh criticism of Harris, which Russell says is too ins...

Why do public atheists like Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss denigrate philosophy without apparently realizing how philosophically poor and unsophisticated their arguments are, and how much better they would fare by taking philosophy seriously? There seems to be a lot of support for this combination of arrogance and ignorance in the atheist community.  Everybody thinks they know how to think about difficult philosophical concepts.  Everybody has an opinion on philosophy, but hardly anyone has the patience, charity or education to speak about it authoritatively. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from pretending. I complained about the cult of personality back in 2010, when Harris was selling his book on morality, and again recently , after he arrogantly assumed an authoritative aptitude on the issue of free will.  Isn't it odd that Harris, who seems to think rigorous attention to philosophical argument and scholarship is beneath him, is so eager to publicly debate a...

I ended my last post by saying that I hope Dennett declines Sam Harris' invitation to publicly discuss free will with him.  That might not seem very fair or friendly.  Why shouldn't I want to see Dennett and Harris discuss free will publicly? The reason is this:  Harris has not shown that he can treat well-tread philosophical subject matter fairly and authoritatively.  He has only begun a career in neuroscience, and has yet to distinguish himself as anything other than a popular writer and speaker on matters related to atheism.  His abilities to write and speak are certainly praiseworthy, but they do not earn him the stature of a great intellect.  Furthermore, his reasoning on philosophical topics is highly suspect, often problematic, occasionally incoherent, and overtly Buddhist (in an irrational and self-contradictory way, which is perhaps the norm for Buddhism in general, but shouldn't make Harris very comfortable).  Harris is not an authority on ...

I want to quickly point out some major problems I have with Sam Harris' recent comment on his disagreement with Dennett on the issue of free will. His main idea is that, while he and Dennett agree on everything about how people actually function, and while they agree on what sorts of free will are worth having, they disagree on what ordinary people mean by the phrase "free will."  He thinks Dennett is just redefining the term and thus changing the subject, rather than engaging with how people actually think about free will.  He suggests this strategy is dangerous, because people are living under an illusion which needs to be dispelled. Maybe he makes a stronger case for this in his book, but in the post there's a severe lack of support for this claim.  Dennett's arguments seem very well in tune with how people talk about free will, and Dennett seems more eager than most to identify how cognitive illusions influence our understanding of consciousness and relat...

For no particular reason, I just returned to this discussion at Butterflies & Wheels, in which Peter Beattie charges Massimo Pigliucci with two counts of deplorable argument. I was surprised to find that one of my comments had been deleted. Nobody had said anything about it. I don't follow B&W. That discussion is the only one in which I've ever participated, so I'm not sure what to think. The deleted comment consisted of me pointing out to another commenter that I thought we had been "wasting our time on a clown with delusions of philosophical grandeur." I was speaking of Peter Beattie. I'm not sure, but I presume this is the Australian politician who was Premier of Queensland from 1998 to 2007. That's not why I called him a delusional clown. I called him a delusional clown because he was acting like one. I don't blame anybody for deleting senseless insults, and if there was no justification for my comment, so be it. But sometimes...

In his arguments for a science of morality, Sam Harris relies heavily on the following analogy: well-being is to morality what health is to medicine. His claim is not simply that morality is a natural phenomenon which can be studied as rigorously as any other. Rather, it is that moral prescriptions can be as scientifically grounded as medical prescriptions. That there is no basic difference between a doctor giving a patient medicine and a moral scientist prescribing right conduct. Of course, when a doctor says, "take two and call me in the morning," she is, in a sense, prescribing right conduct. She is telling her patient what to do. More often than not, I think, the patient trusts her to give good medical advice. That is, the patient is listening to the doctor precisely because he wants to recover from some malady, and believes that the doctor knows how to help him get over it. The prescription would not be morally binding unless we were to suppose that people had a mor...

Sam Harris has responded to Russell Blackford's review --or, rather, to Jerry Coyne's summation of Russell's review--at Why Evolution Is True . I've joined the discussion with a number of elaborate comments. I'm reposting my most recent comment below (with slight modification), since I think it is of the most general interest, and because it develops some of my own ideas in interesting ways: About defining “morality,” I think there are two assumptions in play here: 1) Evolution has favored ways of thinking which promote general well-being. 2) What people call “morality,” though different in many details, is just those ways of thinking which promote general well-being. If we accepted these two premises, we could argue that what is moral is just what promotes general well-being. There is no sense in saying something could be moral without promoting general well-being, because the definition of “morality” doesn’t allow it. I think (1) is possibly ...

I've been discussing Sam Harris a bit at Russell Blackford's blog, Metamagician and the Hellfire Club . Russell's published a review of Sam's new book , The Moral Landscape , and he makes some very strong criticisms, all of which I agree with. Russell has also quite surprisingly and kindly drawn attention to me and Specter of Reason, even though he has suggested that I'm a bit too hard on Sam. I am indeed much more critical of Sam's recent work on moral philosophy. I cannot help but worry about popular attitudes towards atheism and philosophy, and I don't think New Atheism has always and only been of help. Don't get me wrong. The New Atheists have done a lot that is good. But they have also done some harm, and I'm worried about their overall direction. Sam's recent work (his public appearances as well as his new book) may be the worst so far. It strikes me as both arrogant and ignorant (a dangerous combination), and exploitative of the i...

Conversational Atheist has posted Sam Harris' proposal for grounding moral dictums in the process of scientific discovery. Harris proposes nine "facts" which are supposed to demonstrate the scientific foundations of moral righteousness. I won't comment on all of them, but I have some things to say about a few of them. As I'll explain, I cannot accept at least four of the nine. To start with, for the purposes of this post (and only this post), I'll tentatively accept Fact 1: FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of wellbeing for many sentient creatures, to the degree that wellbeing is possible in this universe. While I'm not sure there is such a thing as "the worst possible misery for everyone," I don't think this notion is the ...

Sam Harris says the worst imaginable universe is one in which all conscious beings suffer as much as they can and for as long as they can. This is not just categorically bad, but the categorically worst-case scenario. This is supposed to be intuitive. Yet, my intuition tells me we can imagine a worse situation. Imagine planet X populated by as-yet-undiscovered aliens. Now imagine a universe in which all the animals on earth suffer for as long as possible and to the highest possible degree, and in which the aliens on planet X enjoy this suffering greatly. The suffering on earth gives the aliens more pleasure than anything else in their entire history. They celebrate it annually, laughing at and finding joy in documentary films, pictures, and reenactments which graphically depict the unspeakable horrors experienced on earth. My feeling is that this scenario, in which the suffering of some produces great pleasure in others, is less appealing--less morally satisfying--than the scenar...

I just watched a few segments from the recent "The Great Debate" discussion panel on "Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?" At the moment, I just have a little to say about Sam Harris' bit . I'm impressed by the lack of an informed and substantive argument in Harris' presentation. He is a very good speaker. He is natural and compelling. And I'm sure he's selling a lot of books. He just doesn't make a good argument. He begins by presenting his view that values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures; that statements of value are just one variety of factual proposition. He believes that, when I say I like something, or prefer a certain course of action, or believe that such-and-such is good, I am expressing a belief about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that the veracity of such beliefs can be tested against reality using the tools of scientific discovery. He ends by challenging us to act; it is our mo...