IF YOU'VE BEEN FOLLOWING these posts, you'll know that so far they've been centered around three points concerning Sam Harris's talk at TED on science and morality.
While I have complete sympathy with Sam's goal, he has let three confusions slip into his presentation.
He has:
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Failed to distinguish between natural values and moral values.
You can go here to read about this, and the next point, in more detail. -
Assumed that values are "facts about the well being of conscious creatures."
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Conflated two completely different senses in which we use the word "moral".
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We use the word "moral" to describe a kind of belief and behavior, as when I said above that "family values" were based in a moral system.
When the word is used this way, it doesn't imply anything about the rightness, wrongness, or even wisdom of a belief or act—it only implies something about the way the person in question views the belief or act.
We use the word in this way when we say things like "that's a moral issue for him."
It doesn't mean we agree with him at all.
It doesn't mean that we are making a moral judgment—only that we recognize the fact that he feels he is. - But there's a second use of the word that is the equivalent of making a moral judgment.
As in, "That was the moral thing to do."
Or as in "Beating your spouse is immoral."
In these cases, we actually use the word "moral" to mean that something is "right" or "wrong".
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Obviously, it's very important to keep these two usages completely distinct in any discussion of morality, yet people easily slip from one usage to the other, often in the middle of a thought.
In fact, it seems to me that Sam Harris has inadvertently made that same slip in his last two sentences in the quote above:
Values are a certain kind of fact.
They are facts about the well being of conscious creatures.
The "values" he is talking about here are what I have called "moral values"—ideas about what is right and what is wrong.
These values are "facts" in the sense that it is a fact that some people think being gay or dancing or using birth control are wrong (or that theft or murder or hating gays is wrong), and that those same people view this as a moral position.
But to say they are facts in this sense is not to say that Harris (or I) agree that they are "moral" in the second sense.
Then he goes on to say that they are "facts about the well being of conscious creatures".
At this point he is referring to morality in the second sense—the sense in which to say something is moral is to say it is good.
And when he makes this jump between moral meaning "a belief or act based in an idea of rightness or wrongness" and moral meaning "a belief or act based in a correct idea of rightness or wrongness" he introduces an ought of his own between the lines:
We ought to value the well being of conscious creatures.
I'm not arguing that he is wrong to do this—he still has to make his case, and he may be right—only that he has not bridged the "is to ought" chasm yet.
He has merely introduced a fundamental "ought" of his own, from which he could now derive an entire moral system—much in the way that a religious person derives a moral system from the belief that their scriptures or tradition are the fundamental source of "oughtness".
I certainly like Sam Harris's approach better. For one thing, we don't need a pastor or mullah or priest to interpret it for us.
But he still has to produce an argument for this fundamental ought, and if he wants to argue that his approach is scientific, he must show that the basis for that ought, which he is using as a bridge from science to morality, is itself scientific.
This is what he attempts to do in the next section of his talk...
Next: Sam's case for his
fundamental "ought"...
