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 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 still haven't had a chance to look at Bruce Waller's book, Against Moral Responsibility   (2011) , but I've been reading about it and related topics in my spare time a bit over the past several days.  One reader, David Duffy, was kind enough to bring one of Waller's papers to my attention.  It's called "Empirical Free Will and the Ethics of Moral Responsibility"(2003).  In it, Waller claims that moral responsibility and free will are either conceptually wedded by definition (in which case, he says, we only get confusion) or there is some synthetic (empirical) connection between them.  He then argues that there is no such empirical connection. I question the claim that there is any confusion resulting from regarding a logical (analytic) entailment between moral responsibility and free will.  Unfortunately, Waller does not support his assertion here, though perhaps he addresses the issue in his more recent book.  I think the only conceptual confusion...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I'm not aware of any satisfactory arguments against Kant's demonstration that the freedom of the will can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.  Kant puts forward that argument in his Critique of Pure Reason .  Yet, in his Critique of Practical Reason , he makes a pragmatic argument for belief in free will: We need to believe in free will because it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Kant's arguments are not just about free will.  They're also about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  Yet, these days, the latter two are not seen as practically required for morality.  We can have moral responsibility without eternal souls or Divine judgment.  But can we have it without free will? Kant was a deontologist--he believed that morality requires duty and dignity, and not just behavior calculated to maximize some quantity of happiness, pleasure or goodness.  Yet, even those pursu...

So much talk about the morality of celebrating bin Laden's death. There's this idea going around that death is just not something that should ever be cause for celebration. That death is always and essentially bad. That killing is evil, even if it is sometimes a necessary evil. I can't buy into it. First of all, killing never increases the amount of death in the universe. The only thing that increases the amount of death in the universe is procreation, and I don't think procreation is bad. (I am a proud father, as it happens.) So, even if death is bad, killing isn't necessarily bad. But is death necessarily bad? Death can be terrifying to anticipate, and it can be devastating to families and communities. And, of course, death can be painful--even cruel. But it is not inherently any of these things. And, even when it carries these negative consequences, it may still outweigh them with positive ones. We might tell ourselves that it would be better if we d...

As I've noted before , Richard Carrier has a problem with definitions. His recent argument for moral realism has several awkward moments, like when he says being a moral realist means "being able to ontologically ground the existence of moral facts"--as if the mere presence of moral realists proved that moral realism was true! But it's his ludicrous discussion of "ought" which prompted me to blog. He approaches the definition as a rational choice theorist might: "ought" means whatever we would do if we reasoned logically and knew all of the relevant facts. But he makes no mention of goals, as if any logical and knowledgeable person would do the same as any other in any given circumstance. Furthermore, we generally make "ought" statements without supposing knowledge of all of the relevant facts. "Oughts" might normally imply a "given what we know" qualification, but not a "given what we would know if we knew ...

I recently discussed my reasons for thinking we should look for a non-cognitivist account of morality. Now I want to take some positive steps outlining what I think such an account might look like. I'm still working through all this, so I expect to stumble a bit here and there. First, there might be a misconception that moral non-cognitivists don't believe in morality, or don't believe that moral statements have the sort of reason-giving power that people normally think. The concern is that non-cognitivism doesn't account for morality as it is commonly understood, and that it tries to undermine the common notion of morality. On the contrary, non-cognitivism (in my view) should fully account for everything philosophically and psychologically interesting about morality. Morality is taken as a given, as a process which we all observe and participate in, and which stands in need of psychological exploration and philosophical elucidation. Another common concern is that...

Slightly modified on 24 Feb 2011. Moral noncognitivism is the view that moral statements (e.g., "X is morally wrong" and "Y is morally obligated to Z") have no truth conditions. They do not express propositions, and therefore cannot be said to express beliefs, where beliefs are defined as propositional attitudes. All this means is that moral statements do not denote facts about the world. Phrases like "morally wrong" and "morally obligated" do not cash out in factual terms. These phrases do not predict, explain, or otherwise refer to any properties, behaviors, or laws. When we look at the grammar, moral statements don't seem different from other sorts of expressions. We can add "I believe that" or "It is true that" at the beginning of moral claims. This might seem to count as a mark against noncognitivism, but I don't think it does. First, to clarify, the noncognitivist does not deny that such statements make sens...

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...

In my previous post I said "x ought to y" just means "if F(x,y), then x will foster x's dignity." [On second thought, since the moral "ought" implies an obligation, I think "x ought to y" rather means "if not-F(x,y), then x will not foster x's dignity."] This means that "we ought not foster our own dignity" is a logical absurdity. This might seem intuitively obvious to many people, but it might not be that easy to understand. Why is it absurd to say that somebody shouldn't foster their own dignity? Here's an attempt to answer that question, and also to work out some related knots. Dignity is what defines us as moral agents. The imperative "should" implies an appeal to one's sense of moral agency, and we cannot simultaneously appeal to and negate somebody's moral agency. So, when I say morality is the process of fostering dignity, I just mean it is the process of fostering moral a...

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 ...

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...