YESTERDAY I POINTED OUT THAT Sam Harris can get everything he wants without embracing the deductive, top-down, approach to morality which he outlined in his talk at TED.
I value food much more when I am hungry than I do after thanksgiving dinner.
I value truth more in the political and scientific realms than I do when arranging for a surprise party.
He can, instead, embrace a scientific, bottom-up approach, which sees morality as an emergent phenomenon, rising naturally from human nature and human culture.
The kinds of values which he has tried to derive from his single principle of "the well-being of conscious creatures," such as peace, or health, or happiness, are all things we value anyway, without deducing them from an uber-value.
And some of the things he wishes to fit into his system, such as valuing the truth, are not as clearly connected to his single principle as he imagines.
If a consistent deception would improve the well-being of humans by 10% overall, would Sam agree that it was a good thing?
On the other hand, we do simply value the truth, and we don't need to derive that value from any other principle.
Truth is valuable to us.
The same sort of disconnect occurs with Sam's next point:
I think of this as kind of a moral landscape, with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well being of conscious creatures, both personal and collective.
And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human wellbeing that we rarely access, that few people access. And these await our discovery.
Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual.
Perhaps there are other states that we can't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them.
And later adds...
Another thing to notice is that there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing.
And...
Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality?
Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat.
There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food.
But there is nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison.
The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition.
Many people worry that that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions.
That is, Sam wants an approach to morality that allows for multiple right answers to moral questions.
This, too, emerges quite easily—even more easily—in a natural, bottom-up, model of morality: from the collective interaction of human values.
We don't need to reduce all morality to a single, top-down, system in which everything can be deduced from a single principle or concern.
In fact, by positing such a measure for morality, by reducing it to a single concern, we introduce the possibility that Sam's "moral landscape" would lead to a single, morally required, approach to human life.
If there is only one "y-coordinate" on Sam's landscape, is it really likely that all of those peaks have the same exact height?
Wouldn't one almost inevitably be higher than the others, if only by a fraction, and therefore be the most moral?
On the other hand, consider the real world of human experience, where there are multiple values, not just multiple kinds of well being.
Some people value fairness more.
Some value respect more.
Others value caring more.
And even those people vary from day to day and moment to moment in where they put the emphasis.
I value food much more when I am hungry than I do after thanksgiving dinner.
I value truth more in the political and scientific realms than I do when arranging for a surprise party.
A morality based on our natural values is a morality with built-in flexibility.
It lacks the rigidity of the toxic political and religious "moralities" which Sam himself finds so dangerous—but which his own approach might easily lead to as well.
Sam's picture of many different moral peaks, each valid in its own way, becomes inevitable under a natural approach.
Next: How Sam can save the children
with the kind of scientific
input he wants...
