More on Harris

Blogger wouldn't let me publish this response to Jim's latest comment on Sam Harris using science to answer moral questions because it was too long. Here it is in a separate post.

Here’s what I think Harris is up to: He wants to establish a moral norm without reference to a higher authority – moral certainty without God. He at least recognizes that he can’t come up with a rule that covers every situation. That’s why he makes his distinction between answers in practice and answers in principle. But he still wants an approach that can establish that certain conduct, like killing your daughter because she was raped, is objectively and absolutely wrong.

As much as I sympathize with this effort, I don’t think that the project will work. As both a practical and theoretical matter, there’s simply no way that we can escape the “twilight which the historical situation spreads over good and evil.” Given the endless complexity of the world and our limited perspective, making final pronouncements about good and evil is a dangerous business. Oliver Wendell Holmes had it right: “Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.”

All cultures and times have their own blind spots. Jim has talked about the idealism of the 60’s. And, yes, I agree that it was a very idealistic time. I would go so far as to say that it was a moral time. We wanted to end all wars, eliminate poverty and establish racial equality. But no one at the time ever gave much thought, for example, to gay marriage as a moral or a justice issue and my bet is that if someone had brought it up, it would have been shrugged off as irrelevant and ridiculous. The same thing for handicapped access or other considerations for the disabled – no one in the 60’s ever thought that that was a moral issue worth worrying about. So, where are our blind spots today? Does anyone have any doubt that a century from now people will be scratching their heads wondering how we could have ever been such inhumane brutes?

Unfortunately, our rationality tends to be wrapped around these moral gaps and rarely helps us see them. How often does rationality end up being rationalization?

I concede that “maximizing human well-being” is an excellent moral principle, and it may be the tip-top of all moral principles. But I don’t think it gives us much by way of a final answer about anything. Among other problems, there are two huge variables staring us in the face here. The first variable is “maximize.” How do you “maximize” the well-being of over 6 billion people, all with competing interests? That notion seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers. And, second, we have the question of “well-being.” People disagree plenty on what’s good for them. The fellow who murders his own daughter because she was raped may well be thinking that this is the best thing for her under the circumstances.

If all Harris is saying is that we should think hard about what we’re doing rather than just follow blindly what somebody else says, I would agree 100%. As Bonhoeffer says, a responsible person must on his own “observe, judge, weigh up, decide and act. [He] must examine the motives, the prospects, the value and the purpose of his action.” But, I’m just not seeing how applying rigorous rationality to the process eliminates the moral ambiguity. Giving another nod to Bonhoeffer, the truth is that, even after all the careful thought and analysis, we necessarily must still act “without any claim to an ultimate valid knowledge of good and evil. Good, as what is responsible, is performed in ignorance of good…”

It just seems to me that, by making rationality or scientific thinking some ultimately validating principal, Harris has jumped back into the boat that he’s trying to get out of, namely the problem of handing off the responsibility for our decisions to some other authority. I don't think that we can escape judgment by claiming that our conduct was morally justified because it followed the dictates of rationality. Aren’t we just back at Nuremberg?

Tarrou in Camus’ The Plague says at one point, “Can one be a saint without god? – that's the problem, in fact, the only problem, I'm up against today.” And he’s right: the moral problem is how to be a saint without being able to appeal to any validating authority – not some book written 2000 years ago, not the Pope, and not even the direction of our own rationality.