A FEW DAYS AGO, Sam Harris wrote an article in the Huffington Post, defending his case for "A Science of Morality" from a critique by the physicist Sean Carroll.
I agree with him that it is possible to jump this gap, but not in the way he prescribes.
Carroll's critique was written in response to a talk Harris gave at TED in February, entitled "Science can answer moral questions."
In that talk, he outlined a rough theory of morality as a realm of fact rather than opinion, a realm that was appropriate for scientific investigation.
I should say at the outset that I agree with his intent in general, and with many of the details of his argument, but I'm convinced he is also confused on certain issues—or, at least, that his presentation confused those issues.
These confusions are worth writing and thinking about not because I want to shoot down Harris's argument, but because I think they are inherent to the entire debate over morality.
They pop up time and time again.
In fact, Carroll's essay makes some of the same mistakes, and in the end clarifying them should aid Sam Harris's case more than his.
So let's take a little walk through some of Sam's points, and try to tease out these issues and make some sense of them.
I'll take the liberty of truncating some of his arguments, and reformatting them for clarity, but you can always go to the TED site to check that I haven't misrepresented him.
Sam begins:
I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values.
Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality -- questions of good and evil and right and wrong -- are questions about which science officially has no opinion.
It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people...think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, "What is worth living for?" "What is worth dying for?" "What constitutes a good life?"
...I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.
Now, it's often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres.
It's often thought that there is no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be.
But I think this is quite clearly untrue.
Values are a certain kind of fact.
They are facts about the well being of conscious creatures.
This is the first issue on which I think it is obvious that he is mistaken.
Please bear with me, because I am about to make some points which may seem like nit-picking, but I assure you that they have a profound effect on the entire issue.
Sam is addressing the whole "is to ought" issue—the question of whether it is possible to move from the realm of facts to the realm of morality.
I agree with him that it is possible to jump this gap, but not in the way he prescribes.
He has made three errors in his last two sentences:
- He has confused morality with values—or, perhaps, "moral values" with "natural values".
- He has assumed that both kinds of values are "facts about the well being of conscious creatures".
- He has implied a confusion between two separate meanings of the word "moral".
I would argue that the real situation is more complicated than he paints it, but also more enlightening.
Next: The Real Situation...
