THE PREVIOUS POSTS HAVE focused on the flaws in Sam Harris's presentation at TED.
If there were an evil eye, we would think believing in it was a virtue—even if that did make people blame their neighbors.
But I promised, in the last one, to show that Sam can get everything he wants out of an approach to morality based on natural values.
All he has to do is recognize that the legal, top-down, hierarchical model of morality is, and always was, a confidence game, perpetrated by a handful of priests, kings, and bureaucrats on the rest of humanity.
Morality isn't about what we "ought" to value.
Rather, morality is working out how to get what we already value, simply by virtue of being human, in a social context.
Morality is simply the implementation of natural human values in the real world, which includes the social and political world.
Sam's presentation at TED leans heavily on this fact, without acknowledging it.
When he actually talks about values and facts—instead of his "scientific theory" of morality—the natural model fits what he has to say quite well.
For example, Sam wants to argue that we actually have some knowledge about moral choices:
Now, to speak about the conditions of well being in this life, for human beings, we know that there is a continuum of such facts. We know that it's possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong -- where mothers can not feed their children, where strangers can not find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately.
And we know that it's possible to move along this continuum, towards something quite a bit more idyllic, to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable.
Each of those evils—starving children, a society at war with itself, violate our natural values directly: we value peace, we value healthy, happy mothers and children simply because it's human nature to value these things.
We don't need some over-arching theory of morality, constructed by experts, to tell us to.
And when Sam goes on to say...
And we know -- we know -- that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space. Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not.
He's right. But because it would violate our natural tendency to care for each other—one of our natural human values—not because it violates his abstract principle of "the well-being of conscious creatures".
Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye, so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors? Probably not.
Because it violates the natural human value of truth .
Notice that Sam has to twist the sentence around to even get it to bear on "conscious well-being".
But surely our primary reason for thinking that a belief in the evil eye is not a good thing is that there is no evil eye, and that therefore it's a matter of believing in a falsehood.
If there were an evil eye, we would think believing in it was a virtue—even if that did make people blame their neighbors.
There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths.
And morality relates to these truths.
Again, this is also completely so in the context of the natural model.
The only difference is, that instead of trying to pretend that values are facts, we simply acknowledge that morality involves both facts and values:
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We value A (truth, or health, or...)
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We know B (there is no evil eye, or cholera is not good for people, or...)
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Consequently we make a moral judgment (it's a bad thing to believe in the evil eye, or it would be unwise to put cholera in the water supply, or...)
We move easily from is to ought, without ever needing an authority to bridge the gap.
Next: How Sam can get many peaks on his moral landscape...
