You’ve probably seen or heard about the discussion between Sam Harris and Graeme Wood over at Sam’s website, a discussion called “The true believers.” Wood, of course, has become famous—and notorious—for his analysis of ISIS’s theological background in a piece that appeared in The Atlantic (see my post for the link). Wood’s thesis, which he supported by interviewing ISIS supporters outside the Middle East (the man is no fool and didn’t want to be beheaded), was that ISIS represents an apocalyptic strain of Islam, justified by the Qur’an, that aims to establish an ever-expanding Caliphate and longs for a final battle with the West, during which Jesus will appear and save Islam.
Wood was taken to task for the usual things: neglecting “other motivations” for ISIS’s behavior, failure to interview members of ISIS in the Middle East, and for his “un-nuanced” interpretations of theology. By and large, he took as truth what his subjects told him, and when that largely revealed religious motivations, the “Islamophobia-decriers” had to find reasons to discredit him.
In his long discussion with Sam, they go over these motivations again, and I recommend that you read the piece. I’ll highlight just three things:
1. Motivations: religious or otherwise? There is a slight disparity between Harris and Wood here, with Harris taking the religious motivations espoused by ISIS sympathizers at face value, while Wood says that some people might not be expressing other motivations, like resentment of Western colonialism. By and large, though, both men are on the same page; but Wood is a tad more cautious:
Wood: Yes. However, the countervailing current in social science is the tradition in ethnography and anthropology of taking seriously what people say. And this can lead to the exact opposite of the materialist, “root causes” approach. When Evans-Pritchard, for example, talks about witchcraft among the Azande, he’s describing exactly what they say and showing that it’s an internally consistent view of the world. This is something that anthropology has done quite well in the past, and it gives us a model for how we can listen to jihadis and understand them without immediately assuming that they are incapable of self-knowledge.
What I’m arguing for in the piece is not to discard either type of explanation but to remember the latter one and take the words of these ISIS people seriously. Even though at various points in the past we’ve ignored political or material causes, this doesn’t mean that ideology plays no role, or that we should ignore the plain meaning of words.
Of course, we don’t know what people actually think. Maybe they’re self-deluded; maybe they don’t really believe in the literal rewards of martyrdom. We can’t know; we’re not in their heads. But this lack of knowledge cuts both ways. Why do so many people instantly resort, with great confidence, to a material explanation—even or especially when the person himself rejects it? It’s a very peculiar impulse to have, and I consider it a matter of dogma for many people who study jihadists.
Harris: Yes, especially in cases where a person meets none of the material conditions that are alleged to be the root causes of his behavior. We see jihadis coming from free societies all over the world. There are many examples of educated, affluent young men joining organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State who lack any discernible material or political grievances. They simply feel a tribal connection to Muslims everywhere, merely because they share the same religious identity. We are seeing jihadis travel halfway around the world for the privilege of dying in battle who have nothing in common with the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia whose ranks they are joining, apart from a shared belief in the core doctrines of Islam.
. . . Again, the fact that most jihadis are generally rational, even psychologically normal, and merely in the grip of a dangerous belief system is, in my view, the most important point to get across. And it is amazing how resolutely people will ignore the evidence of this. Justin Bieber could convert to Islam tomorrow, spend a full hour on 60 Minutes confessing his hopes for martyrdom and his certainty of paradise, and then join the Islamic State—and Glenn Greenwald would still say his actions had nothing to do with the doctrine of Islam and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy.
I’m perfectly prepared to accept that some of these militants have motivations other than religion. Many may simply long for excitement, or to feel part of something larger than themselves. But what I’m not prepared to accept is that every one of them has nonreligious motivations. It’s curious to me—and this the one thing I think I’ve contributed to Sam’s thinking—that Western apologists like Greenwald and Karen Armstrong will question people’s motivations when they explicitly say their motivations are religious, but will not question them when they say their motivations are based on economics or resentment of Western imperialism. This is the double standard of Western liberals that so infuriates me.
2. So why the double standard? I think both men agree, and I agree too, that holding ISIS to standards different from those to which we hold, say, the Israelis, reflects a kind of paternalism: a tendency to give a break to people considered oppressed.
Harris: Do you have other ideas about why it’s so tempting for liberals to ignore the link between jihadism and religious belief?
Wood: There’s also a deep urge to deny agency to the Islamic State, and I think it’s fundamentally connected to a reluctance to see non-Western people as fully developed and capable of having intelligent beliefs and enough self-knowledge to express them. These people articulate well-thought-out reasons for what they do. And yet ignoring what they say somehow gets camouflaged in the minds of liberals as speaking up for them. It’s delusional.
I think this is on the mark, though liberals are notably reluctant to admit it, for it’s expressing a kind of reverse racism that they deplore. I consider myself a liberal, and am deeply distressed by the view that different groups should be held to different standards of behavior, with some groups excused or overlooked for performing barbaric acts.
3. The false notion of objective morality. Wood’s interview with ISIS sympathizers convinces me even more that there are no universal moral truths. Listen to what he says about some of his subjects:
Wood: Anjem Choudary is a fixture on Fox News. He talks to Sean Hannity, and many people would say that those two deserve each other. He’s known for screaming about the greatness and supremacy of shari’ah. But I had no interest in the screaming. Instead, I wanted details. We had a lucid, friendly exchange about what he believed a fully shari’ah-compliant caliphate would look like. I found him articulate, informed, and pleasant company in this regard. When I say “informed,” I mean he had answers to all my questions. They might not have been the right answers, but he was able to answer pretty much everything I could come up with about the Islamic State, about how it looks and why it’s so wonderful.
And he did this unflinchingly, even when he was endorsing what I would call rape or slavery—what even he would call slavery, in fact. This was not a tough call for him. If he has any compunction about these practices, it was completely undetectable. That was not true of some others I’ve interviewed who have literalist views of Islam. To be in the presence of someone who can say, in this modern day, that slavery is a good thing and that to deny its goodness is an act of apostasy was a very unsettling experience.
Most moral objectivists would say that slavery is objectively wrong. I say it’s “wrong” because a society that condones it is a dysfunctional society that promotes the subjugation and unnecessary suffering of individuals. But Choudary would say it’s fine, justifying it on Quranic grounds, or even on consequential grounds. How do you convince someone like him that he’s objectively wrong? Such people appeal to divine sanction, and although you can say that there is no god, and he should be appealing to something else, the fact is that many people hold religious dogma as the arbiter of morality.
I have seen attacks on the internet of my views that there are no objective moral truths, but I don’t find them convincing. Slavery is an example that most reasonable people would agree on, but there are other and harder issues, like abortion, that defy any objective “moral solution.” One must, at bottom, express some kind of preference, like for “overall well being,” that can be neither quantified not objectively justified.
ISIS are destroying statues.
This is totally Islamic.
http://islamqa.info/en/20894
Sub
Sub
“How do you convince someone like him that he’s objectively wrong?”
You can’t, but I’d wager you’d think it more than mere preference that you would want to stop him.
I believe that, to some extent, all members are religiously motivated. Other motivators can coexist with this religious motivation.
Maybe there’s one exception — mercenaries. Although, is there much money to be made in joining ISIS? It seems like even for a mercenary there would have to be some belief in the cause, and not just a desire for money and adventure.
Put another way, that I think highlights the absurdity of the non-religious motivation:
Are there Hindus, Christians, agnostics, and atheists who’ve joined ISIS because they’re mad about colonies? Come on.
Apparently, DAESH pay their members more than the other groups in the area that are fighting the Syrian government. Some of the moderates opposed to Assad are worried about this because it means early on, before it was know how brutal DAESH were, they lost a lot of fighters to them for economic reasons. Those groups say that those people now want to leave DAESH and return to them, but once you’re in, death is usually the only way out.
I don’t want this comment to lead to people mistaking my views – I’m just imparting information people might be interested in. For the record, I consider religion is the main motivation of most members of DAESH.
I’ve heard the opposite, that they pay less in order to be sure that recruits are really committed to the cause.
Here’s one of the sources of my info: http://weaselzippers.us/197941-isis-pays-its-fighters-double-what-the-iraqi-army-hezbollah-other-sunni-jihadists-groups-pay-their-men/
Of course, I have no way of verifying its accuracy.
Thanks for the link!
And I don’t remember where I heard what I heard. I think it was after an Indian born jihadi left the cause do to poor treatment and low pay. I could be wrong.
Though you may be right about objective morality, the example you give is not convincing. So Andy Choudary says slavery is ok because the Koran says so. This is evidence that there can be no objective morality? What about when Ken Ham says creation is true because the Bible says so? Is that evidence that there can be no objective biology? Again, you may be right about morality, but I don’t find that particular argument convincing.
Agree.
I think the main point to make about the non-objectivity of morality is that an action depends on context and consequences for moral evaluation.
Shooting a gun is not immoral all by itself.
It is immoral if it results in someone’s injury or death.
But it wasn’t immoral if it was in self-defense.
But it may have been immoral if your assailant was an unarmed youth.
Considerations like the above usually become so numerous and labyrinthine that objectivity is impossible.
Doesn’t nearly every scientific field rely on context and consequences? You can’t understand a cheetah’s need to run at lightning speeds until you’ve seen a Thompson’s Gazelle, learned how its body rations calcium for leg bones and milk, understood the rationale behind carnivorous adaptations, and looked at the unique history of its ancestral lineage and how that’s played off against Thompson’s Gazelle family history, to name just a few contexts and consequences.
Your example seems to me to be an entirely different kind of project.
I think it’s a pretty conventional use of the word “context” to say something like “lying isn’t objectively wrong; it depends on context. Sometimes it may be the right thing to do.”
But that’s just the thing: it’s not a different kind of project. Judging the morality of an action on a case-by-case basis means paying attention to detail, new information, and contingencies. In other words, facts.
Think about it: If you’re paying attention to context, you’re looking for facts that, if found, change what’s actually going on. You see a cheetah running with its brother and you think, “He’s playing.” You see them run towards a gazelle, and you think “They’re hunting.” You see a man running after them with a whip, and you think “I’m at the circus.”
Ok. Perhaps I (among many others, however) am being a little sloppy with the use of “objective”. Perhaps a better term for what I’m describing is “absolute”.
I don’t see any problem with that. I think of morality as like biology: lots of rules of thumb, lots of exceptions too.
Brings to mind the image of a pendulum swinging from a pendulum, swinging from another pendulum…
…which gives you something quite interesting.
Lissagous curves –
http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve
Nice.
Another thing that often seems to add confusion and talking past each other during conversations on this is prescriptive vs descriptive. Some people are talking about one, some the other, and many people get kind of sloppy and blur the lines between the two, or just flat out slice and dice them together like a ninja chef.
Such people appeal to divine sanction, and although you can say that there is no god, and he should be appealing to something else, the fact is that many people hold religious dogma as the arbiter of morality.
So? They do that when confronted with evolution and other facts, and it demonstrates nothing about the truth or falsehood of anything.
Slavery is an example that most reasonable people would agree on, but there are other and harder issues, like abortion, that defy any objective “moral solution.” One must, at bottom, express some kind of preference, like for “overall well being,” that can be neither quantified not objectively justified.
I disagree strongly. Firstly, one could just point out that those problems arise with objective fact-finding anyway, so invoking them to plea for special status when it comes to ethics is inconsistent. For a starter, ethics relies on solving problems to do with consciousness and sentience. It’s nigh impossible to practically get the information you need from the minds of one human, never mind foetuses.
Alternatively, a solution could exist and be discovered, but for all we know, it’ll be impractical to implement when it comes, and some compromise would ensue. Disagreement and lack of knowledge don’t make scientific fact-finding a waste of time, so I don’t see why it suddenly does when it comes to moral issues.
Secondly, why should it come down to preference? I could appreciate the point that moral decisions have to factor in the experiences – pleasant and unpleasant – of people if you do X as opposed to Y, but those are phenomena to be taken into account. There’s a difference between reasoning that you did X because it caused less harm, and doing X because you felt like it. That policy of letting morals be whatever your emotions says they be is hardly consistent with promoting reason and a critical mindset.
And thirdly, the subjective-objective distinction went out the window once the mind sciences took off and the position of monism trumped the age-old claims of dualism and the like. The history of science shows that physics and chemistry took off before biology, which in turn took off before psychology and neuroscience – aka the mind sciences – fields that were once thought to be outside the province of science (natural philosophy at the time).
Given both these issues, ethics is simply a science that hasn’t taken off yet, not because it actually has any special status, but because people simply believe it has special status. We can’t square this special status position with the scientific fact that humans are physical creatures, at least not without contradicting ourselves. After all, if morality can’t be squared with anything from this realm, then what’s left?
Lastly, I don’t know about “overall well-being”, but that’s at least closer to reality than most of the alternatives. Strictly speaking, the best candidate for a real-world phenomenon corresponding to the scale of good-and-bad is human experience, most obviously (but not exclusively) pain and pleasure. You can call that a preference if you like, but if that’s the case then it’s a preference for fact. In this case, the fact is that pain is unambiguously negative even if I stick my hand in a fire and try to will myself to love it.
If the phenomenon exists which best matches the good-and-bad axis, then it follows that ethical statements are simply gauges of (roughly) where a particular action or inaction can be expected to fall on the axis, given other facts about the world and real-world contingencies, possibilities, hypotheticals, etc. Since human experience comes from natural elements (i.e. it isn’t irreducible or spiritual stuff), ethical naturalism is the position that best matches what we find.
Granted, the “pain and pleasure” principle could be put more strictly still and further refined, but I think that’s at least looking in the right direction. There’s even evidence emerging from moral psychology – described in places such as Better Angels – which is picking apart the grammar and rationales for moral attitudes and behaviour. As a result, it’s putting those “inscrutable” preferences up for rational scrutiny.
That is doing more work towards advancing ethics than the view that ethics is just “preference”. It’s incorrect and anachronistic to act like moral criteria are plucked at random based on whim, rather than following certain logics, which is all you can say when your best rationale is invoking preference. And it’s also incorrect to follow the romantic line that ethics is a matter better left to feelings than to rational enquiry (because that’s worked so well for humanity so far).
The abortion example isn’t even that insuperable. Practically everyone agrees that there’s a point before which it’s not a human, and a point after which it’s human and therefore murder to abort it. The problem is getting the specific detail right. The religious are odd because they push it way back to conception, with – revealingly – bogus claims and thus “facts” that the soul appears around this point. There’s a position that the cutoff point is really a gradual fading, going from unambiguously non-human, through ambiguous fading, to unambiguously human, and that picking a cutoff point is simply for practical purposes rather than a strict and accurate reflection of reality.
If it defies any objective moral solution, then it no more does so than trying to get year-accurate molecular clock data for Pre-Cambrian speciation events does.
Some religious do that. Not all.
Please keep your comments shorter; as the Roolz say, we want comments, not essays. So could you tell me why abortion at 7 months is OBJECTIVELY WRONG?
I don’t think it is, and I’m not alone in that.
I want an objective reason, and not just the assertion that “everyone says it’s murder.” I don’t.
At 7 months it will likely be a live birth, if the fetus is viable.
Post viability abortions are performed by induction of labour anyway. And the point of abortion is to end a pregnancy, not kill. Non viable embryos die because they need the biological life support that the woman’s body provides. Birth itself, at term, also “aborts”, ie, ends the pregnancy. Dead fetuses and hydatidiform moles are also aborted, because a woman can be pregnant with both.
It is a pro life myth that women seek to kill viable fetuses on a whim. The trick they use is to pretend that all abortions are of viable prenates, and then use the continuum fallacy to back it up to conception.
I apologize if this does not directly address your point, but there is a misconception, created through pro life propaganda, that women are killing machines, bent on murdering viable, healthy prenates for purely frivolous reasons.
1+
I recall looking into The Jewish Catalogue, a series of three large format books, about an inch thick, each, to see whether abortion was against Jewish law. This was in the 1970s. I recall it said the embryo/fetus wasn’t considered a human being until after it was born, and that the woman owned her body and had the right to control of it.
Also: Numbers 5
A woman suspected of adultery is given a cup of bitter water. If her womb empties, and she is rendered infertile, this is proof of her crimes.
Christians tell me that its ok if God kills babies, so numbers 5 is apparently quite moral!!
Carl Sagan wrote an analysis of the abortion issue long ago and concluded that the most sensitive would want no abortions at all or would be concerned with viability and the most liberal would allow abortions all the way to term. He suggested a solution by suggesting that the first trimester cut off would satisfy almost everyone. This is the supreme courts solution as well. It can be seen as a largely political issue and subject to compromise.
As a medical student, I helped deliver a set of twins. One was known to be dead weeks earlier. Had the other not been there, it could have been aborted appropriately in the third trimester. With the twin in place, that was dangerous. Leaving it there was also dangerous, for both mother and twin, so it was watched closely and luckily did not begin to fester before delivery.
First trimester cut off sounds good in theory. It’s not a perfect answer in reality.
Some women don’t even realize they’re pregnant until the second trimester, through no fault of their own. The physiology is not perfectly cut and dried, though it might seem that way when superficially perused.
I don’t doubt the complexities you mention. The point, I think, of Sagan’s thinking was that for practicality you have to decide what the law should say and you have to find a reasonable point at which to set a limit. Now that I think about it again he might have set the limit later in pregnancy. I don’t recall.
Another way to treat the issue, is as you seem to suggest, determine the limit based on the welfare of the mother and with the guidance of her physician. I agree with that approach, but with that approach its harder to reach a consensus.
Is a consensus needed? Just let abortion be legal, promote birth control methods so unwanted pregnancies don’t happen, and deal with pregnancy as the medical issue it is. Sure, there will still be some unwanted pregnancies getting through, but isn’t that better than some dead pregnant mothers not getting through because non-obstetricians decided on an arbitrary deadline that didn’t apply to themselves personally?
Pro lifers have almost uniformly told me, when honest, that a few hundred, or even thousand, dead women is preferable to many more “unborn babies” being deprived of life. It is a righteous tradeoff, they say, for the baybeez.
Of course. After all, just looking at a picture of a baby can raise a person’s oxytocin level and make that person feel protective. Looking at a pregnant woman in dire straights, medically or otherwise, in our culture of women as still not fully equal to men, brings on a different reaction: blame the victim. Granted, it may be subtle and/or painful to recognize in oneself. This applies generally, to everyone, me included.
I have been told my many a pro life commenter, mainly men, that women *choose* death/disability and injury when they ‘spread their legs’ ( it is crude, but that’s the attitude expressed) and that women only have ‘nature’ to blame, not pro lifers, for being in a position that threatens their life and health. Blame nature and your slutty ways, women!
Pregnancy- what women were made for. Kind of like how your fridge is made for keeping food cold.
Speaking of cold, it sends a chill down my spine. How dehumanizingly cold it is, like a box in the morgue.
I was mistaken, sorry. I looked up ‘Carl Sagan views on abortion’ and found:
“With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester–except in cases of grave medical necessity–it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life.”
That’s good to know.
I don’t disagree with your statement above. Note – Sagan grants an exception for grave medical necessity. This is, in my view, unnecessarily restrictive but it would be easier to get congress and the Supreme Court to relax a bit. Row vs Wade is at risk in the current political climate. I think protecting that ruling is critical.
Understood. Unfortunately, legislators don’t trust obstetricians to make the medical decisions, so they are taking that away and replacing it with ridiculosity, like legally raping a woman with an unnecessary ultrasound up her birth canal before permitting an abortion, limiting abortions to less than one trimester, blocking abortions for rape cases, etc. The better negotiating tactic is to counter with the opposite extreme, so they must try to negotiate for something more reasonable. Once they control women’s bodies, they’ve enslaved women.
doc, I share your frustration. I think perhaps the best political strategy for the time being may be to concentrate on the Supreme Court. That means supporting liberal political candidates. Aside from that, the future is bound to be a bumpy road for some time to come.
They don’t need to overturn RvW. In fact, that hasn’t been the strategy for a long time. They seek to make abortion impossible at the state level, through the implementation of TRAP laws, supposedly done for women’s safety.
If they can close a majority of abortion clinics, and make telemedicine abortion impossible to get (the doctor prescribes ru-486 over video), and also ban abortion at 20 weeks…16…14 etc, they will have succeeded.
I see you’ve already corrected yourself below. Yes, Sagan & Druyan felt that what was unique about humans was thinking, and that the cut-off line might therefore be when certain fetal brainwaves are detectable, which happens to be around the start of the 6th month of pregnancy; thus they felt Roe v. Wade was sensible.
See here:
http://www.2think.org/science_abortion.shtml
(Which is the last page of a 4 page essay; go back to page one to read the whole thing.)
Please keep your comments shorter; as the Roolz say, we want comments, not essays.
Sorry, Jerry. I got carried away.
So could you tell me why abortion at 7 months is OBJECTIVELY WRONG?
Not off the top of my head, as I don’t know much about prenatal development. The first issue I’d want cleared up would be what the brain and nervous system of the developing young would be by that point, as the degree of development would correspond to the degree that we could compare its premature termination with the brain death of an adult. From there, I’d want some idea of what the contents of its consciousness would be, especially but not exclusively with regard to whether it could feel pain or pleasure. I’d want to get an idea of what it had got to lose.
Not a small order, I know – figuring out what’s in an embryo’s head is nigh-impossible – but that’s the evidence I’d need to determine one way or another. And translating that into practical policy would be quite another thing.
You might be interested in the Sagan & Druyan piece I linked to above; they considered some of the same things you’re concerned about. Here’s a link to the beginning of the web summary:
http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml
Of course, we know more now than we did then about fetal stages, and we’ve also pushed back the point at which a premature baby can live.
Thanks. It’s a fascinating read. 🙂
I think the point that people who argue against objective morality are trying to get at is that, whilst human flourishing is something you can investigate and, at least in theory, objectively verify, the actual initial step of determining that human flourishing is objectively moral, in the same sense that we speak of physics as being objectively true, is not possible.
I’d agree with you that it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that some situations, some physical or mental states, are objectively more painful than others. That really shouldn’t be controversial, although plenty of people feel uncomfortable just considering it. But the step from there to saying someone’s pain or unhappiness is objectively ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’ seems impossible to justify. I’d very much like to be able to do so, but I can’t. Hume really was a breathtakingly disinterested and scrupulous sceptic – his argument still holds up.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to just opt out of moral discussions(I’m too gobby to do that), but at a fundamental level I can’t objectively ground my preference for human happiness. It probably is one of the few faith positions I hold, although the is/ought distinction is also one of those ‘going nuclear’ arguments Stephen Law talks about, in that neither side, the religious objective moralists included, can objectively justify their morality. It cuts both ways so the playing field’s pretty level.
I find it particularly instructive to imagine what kind of world we’d expect to find if morality was not objective. I’d expect to find a world where people were constrained by certain evolutionarily adaptive rules of thumb about how to treat others, a world where those rules were generally shared but particular outlying individuals often broke them, and a world where disagreement about other less adaptively important ‘moral’ issues was rampant. I’d also expect there to be certain apparently ethical issues, for example sexuality, which, upon inspection, are simply irrelevant, and where concern about them is derived from instinctive, adaptive ‘yuk factors’. Basically, I’d expect to see the world we’re living in.
I might be wrong of course, but I don’t think you’re particularly far from Jerry’s position – the disagreement is about whether the is/ought divide can be bridged, but the rest of what you say, about the possibility of scientifically evaluating ‘well-being'(NB, not ‘morality’) is very reasonable.
PS, apologies for my length, as the actor said to the bishop.
Not at all. I’ve written long posts already.
I’m afraid I must disagree. I think this fundamental “is/ought problem” is problematic in itself, because it rules out any way of connecting morality with physical reality. In this sense, I think moral subjectivism has more in common with religious and romantic ideas than with moral objectivism. It ties in with dualism, which treats minds as if they are in a category all of their own, and nothing to do with bodies. This makes me suspicious.
It’s clear enough when we say things like “yes, pain is painful, but is it actually bad?” How is pain not bad? If even pain, as unambiguous an example of a bad experience by definition, can be treated as somehow irrelevant to morality, then it makes me wonder what people mean when they use either word. To me, it’s like saying we have no objective truth but we can still argue against religionists. Yes, but we won’t get anywhere, because we’ve denied ourselves any kind of standard or consistency. This is not a level playing field. This is no field at all.
A criterion of being objective is that something will be the way it is, regardless of what people think. Pain again fits the bill, because its experience is uniformly, almost tautologically, negative. If it doesn’t hurt, then it isn’t pain.
I argue against moral subjectivism in particular because I see it as a damaging trend, in the long run, to any kind of progress in ethics, which I think is a scientific field that has been held back for far too long already. It also contradicts, in my eyes, the imperative to promote reason and science, when both are considered trumped by such a romantic source as preference, whim, feelings, intuition, and other things that should strongly arouse suspicion.
The most you can objectively say is that pain hurts, not that pain is bad. I like feeling the pain of sore muscles the day after a lifting workout. And of course pain is the whole point in bondage/SM.
I must admit, one of the more interesting findings has been that pain and pleasure are not mutually exclusive. Part of this is because emotions can be recursive: you can feel confused about feeling painfully guilty about enjoying something, for instance.
My only response, at present, is twofold:
1. I don’t agree with the severing of “hurt” and “bad”. Sure, the emotions you feel in response to pain can be pleasurable – indeed, you might have a mental framework that would feel disappointed or doubtful if it didn’t, at some point, involve pain – but pain itself is still a negative experience.
2. This would call for a revision of the way we understand emotions interacting. It might be a net calculation, a basic example of which would be pleasure-pain=good or neutral or bad. I don’t think it necessarily calls for saying that pain is itself good, though you could argue the stuff that occurs around pain can mitigate it.
The only other thing I will say is that people usually enjoy pain only under very specific conditions, such as when they feel they can control the experience themselves. A masochist still isn’t going to like being forcibly tortured, for instance.
My twins were born at 7 months. 3 lbs each. With current medical technologies such early birth is almost routine but there is still high risk of a large list of problems ranging from completely recoverable to major permanent impairment. Without major and constant intervention it is a very low probability that infants born that early will survive.
We were lucky, our twins had no defects or chronic issues. But they had all the issues typical of 7 month old humans. Lungs not fully developed, could not eat, breathing not fully autonomic yet, lower esophageal sphincter not on line yet, and more. They were scheduled to be in NIC for 2 months, but spent only a month because no major issues occurred.
Their release from NIC came as a surprise, and I was terrified about taking them home. I don’t think a week had gone by since the last time a nurse had walked up to me while I was holding one of them, asked if she could hold them, and then began stimulating them to start breathing again. The first several nights at home I had their cribs arranged in an L shape and I sat in a chair in the angle and watched them all night just in case they needed to be reminded to breath
During that month in NIC they were subjected to a constant string of tests and examinations for the huge list of issues common with preemies. That continued until a final evaluation at about 9 or 10 months.
Wow. Glad there were no big problems encountered. These early days of their lives are quite an adventure. Good luck ahead.
Thank you rickflick. All is good now. They have reached the age where they are beginning to realize that they know everything. Next stage, parents are idiots. We are beginning to see signs of that already, so my work is nearly done!
Oh, that sounds terrifying! I’m so happy you all have come through this stage now. Thank goodness for modern medicine.
Thank you Diane.
Thank Goodness indeed. Dan Dennett said it very well.
Fetuses don’t gain the capacity for sentience ie awareness/consciousness until at least 25wks gestation.
From a paper by Kostovic, et al, I will just paste the salient parts:
The development of the subplate and thalamocortical connections in the human foetal brain”, Kostovic et al.
The presence of thalamocortical synapses in the subplate is a necessary, but not sufficient requirement for the conscious cortical processing, which was emphasized in attempts to explain cortical mechanisms of responding to a painful stimulation (3,5,6,18). The general agreement seems to be that due to the functional immaturity of thalamocortical connections, there is no cortical processing and no feeling of pain before 23 PCW, i.e. 25 weeks of gestation (7).
—–
So basically, until the cortex is functionally mature, consciousness is impossible.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3731572/
Also, embryos and fetuses are sedated and anaesthetized in utero. If they were fully awake, and able to respond to every stimulus, they would kill their mothers. A fetus, by simply kicking, can break a woman’s ribs and damage her connective tissue. Imagine if that fetus was startled, and started flailing in fright? A dead woman, and fetus, that’s what you’d get.
Also, some babies are born ‘in caul’, which means that they are born within the amniotic sac, which doesn’t break. They don’t wake up, not even after having their heads painfully squeezed through the birth canal. You’d think that they would be writhing in pain when born, but they look like they are sleeping.
Ok, I tried to keep this as short as possible while keeping all of the important information. I apologize if it’s too long!
I don’t know what Jerry would make of your post’s length, but I’m not complaining. Thanks for the insight. 🙂
Hi Jerry:
I think in your post at the 1. “Motivations: religious or otherwise ….. while Wood says that some people might not be expressing other motivations”, you might actually mean to say “might be” instead of “might not be” so to contrast with Sam Harris. Maybe? I don’t know – I guess it contrasts either way, but on first reading it seems not to contrast.
I’d also say that at 7 months, the fetus may already have a capacity to suffer comparable to that of a full-term newborn.
I don’t think that abortion at 7 months is objectively wrong in all cases. E.g. if the fetus has a condition that dooms it to a painful or significally shortened life, I’d say that abortion is objectively right.
Moreover, even if the fetus is OK and the mother has just changed her mind, in which case the abortion is – to my opinion – objectively wrong, this is still no ground to ban it, because the mother has the final say over her body, and the fetus is still connected to her body. (For the same reason – personal autonomy, a mother can quite legally kill her perfect full-term baby by refusing a Caesarean. Doctors can try to convince her as much as they like while the fetus is dying, but they cannot force her to CS.)
I agree.
It is always human. The sticking point is personhood. People have rights. Human is not a synonym for person.
And the primary moral argument is, are people entitled to other people’s bodies, should their lives depend upon it?
It is always human. The sticking point is personhood. People have rights. Human is not a synonym for person.
Yes, you’re right. I should go back and switch “human” with “person”.
And the primary moral argument is, are people entitled to other people’s bodies, should their lives depend upon it?
I should have thought it was obvious: no. Nobody’s life should be held hostage to someone else’s decisions. There might be cases where you have to pick one or the other – for instance, terminating a pregnancy to save the mother’s life – but in that case it’s simply the lesser of two evils, not a case of picking one good option and one bad option.
I thought the primary moral arguments were over at which point a developing foetus could be considered sufficiently developed to be classed as a person, and how that compares with a mother’s needs.
I thought the primary moral arguments were over at which point a developing foetus could be considered sufficiently developed to be classed as a person, and how that compares with a mother’s needs.
Yeah, that’s how it is usually framed.
But what about being a full person gives one a right to use another person’s body and body parts for their own needs? And if other people owe us their bodies, why can’t we take their property too, if being a person entitles us to their stuff/bodies to sustain our own lives?
But what about being a full person gives one a right to use another person’s body and body parts for their own needs?
When doing otherwise would kill them, of course.
And if other people owe us their bodies, why can’t we take their property too, if being a person entitles us to their stuff/bodies to sustain our own lives?
Property ownership is merely instrumental to welfare and safety. It’s an effective tool in civilized society to help settle disputes, but it doesn’t compare to suffering and death by a long shot.
When doing otherwise would kill them, of course.
So I can claim your body parts if my life depends upon it?
In an ideal world, I should think yes, unless it endangered my life in turn, in which case much weighing of the pros and cons would ensue. In the real world, I think that proposal would hit a few snags. Legal ones, for a start. Not to mention that a recurring medical issue in reality is a scarcity of organ donations that could save potential lives. That is a genuine tragedy.
I’m not trying to be a smartass, but neither am I prepared to back down from implications of my own argument just because I don’t immediately like those implications.
I think it comes down to an issue of *consent*.
If our lives depend on something that someone else possesses – kidney, liver lobe, bone marrow, blood,and property, can we take it, without their consent? Are we entitled to it, just because we *need* it, for our very lives?
If a man is dying and he needs
$30,000 to pay for a very expensive medication, is he entitled, morally, to steal the contents of your bank account? And your property doesn’t affect your life/health the way organ theft does. You can live without your savings.
I see what you’re saying, and I can’t pretend I’m comfortable thinking of a counterargument for it. I’d like to take the easy option and say that even consent is, in a sense, as instrumental as property ownership. A good example is self-defence. No one can say that a deadly attacker consents to being killed by someone trying to save himself or herself, but we’d understand the logic behind killing him to protect others, and wouldn’t resent trumping this with the principle of saving lives.
In practice, though, it seems to me that one of the quickest ways to make everyone worse off is by trampling over people’s consent and interests, and I can’t dismiss this either, even if only on pragmatic grounds. After all, who is going to be entrusted with coercing others? In reality, you’d need a lineage of angels to take the job, and it’s hard to get someone who wouldn’t abuse the system in some way.
You wrote, “When doing otherwise would kill them, of course.”
That is a standard in support of parasites.
I’m afraid I don’t understand which parasites you mean. Parasites as in ticks and lice, or parasites as in people who play the system to con people out of organs?
What need is there to distinguish, when the slippery slope you proposed will expand to include all, anyway?
Slavery has *become* objectively wrong, because god changed her mind. She just hasn’t gotten around to editing the holy books yet.
I think folks like K. Armstrong are simply full of **it and truly believe that they know better than the people they’re writing about. Oh no no no, christians don’t really believe in the literal interpretation of the bible, Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ and jihadists are Not True Muslims. Armstrong prefers her delusions to reality and will vigorously defend her idiotic positions and indeed try to propagate them. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to enjoy having such delusions rather than deal with reality.
Wait — Did you say “Armstrong?” I was reading/thinking “Aslan.”
Regarding the question of objective morality, it seems to me that one will do to say anything that one needs or wants, limited only by physical laws (no matter how badly one needs or wants to read minds, levitate or go back in time, they will not) and the pro-and-con calculation of consequences.
Treating a subjective truth as it were onbjective cab be a handy shortcut to being good, but at its core the most deeply held objective truth is followed only as far as the above needs and abilities will decide.m
.
“but will not question them when they say their motivations are based on economics or resentment of Western imperialism”
And they won’t question them when the actions aren’t violent – no one questions the motives of a Catholic participating in communion as religiously motivated. or even charity work as religiously motivated. but violence? no, no, that can’t be religiously motivated.
Would Anjem Choudery feel the same way about slavery if the Koran said he was to be the slave?
I agree with you about the issue of objective morals but doubt that your argumentation at the end can work to convince anybody who thinks differently. There are, after all, people who unreasonably disagree about simple matters of fact, and one could just as well ask in those cases, how do you convince someone like him that he’s objectively wrong?
What I mean is that those believing in objective moral truths could (and will) retreat to the position that although there are moral truths Choudery is just unreasonable about them, just like, say, anti-vaxxers are unreasonable about objective truth.
(The real problem is that we can do an experiment to see if vaccines work, but even if we do an experiment to see if slavery decreases human welfare we would still be left with the question of how to design an experiment to test if we should care about human welfare or not. From there on it is turtles all the way down.)
but even if we do an experiment to see if slavery decreases human welfare we would still be left with the question of how to design an experiment to test if we should care about human welfare or not.
I hear this canard a lot, and I’m not convinced it’s anything but an ill-formed objection.
If “should” means anything, and you pay attention to how it’s used, then a question with the word “should” in it is asking between two hypothetical states of the world, which differ from each other on an axis of good-and-bad. Why should I care about other people (as opposed to not caring a fig about them)? What is good about the former hypothetical world – in which I’m caring about people – compared with the latter hypothetical world – in which I’m going about doing what I want?
The issue to resolve is what corresponds in the real world to that good-and-bad axis. The best candidate I know of is simply the pleasure-pain axis (to do with suffering), with the question of death thrown in. You can argue over whether or not any particular policy is good or bad, but if you stick your hand in a fire, there’s no denying the negative experience that ensues.
Once you’ve got the good-bad axis sorted, that’s it. Asking why you “should” follow that axis is no more sensible than asking if you can digest an explanation of how digestion works.
But if you’ve decided ahead of time that facts have nothing to do with values, then you’ve got bigger problems than merely being unable to perform an experiment. For one thing, your moral reasoning is circular, arbitrary, or stuck in an infinite regress, with no anchor onto reality.
“The issue to resolve is what corresponds in the real world to that good-and-bad axis”
In practice people adjust their good-bad-axes to their own needs.
In practice, people can adjust their realities to their own needs with a straight face. Why should ethics, the target field for anyone with an agenda to hide, be any different?
I think you misunderstand – the claim is not that facts have nothing to do with values but that “we should minimise pain” is not a fact.
You can sieve through the entire world and produce all the facts you like, you will still only get a description instead of a prescription. There is no should or ought or must; there is only “if you happen to want to avoid A, THEN you should do B”. But if somebody really insists on asking whey they should give a damn about A (be it the extinction of humanity or the enslavement of an entire people) then that’s that. (For the record, I am against both, but that is my personal preference, not a general law.)
As for your last sentence, that moral reasoning is arbitrary and an infinite regress is precisely my conclusion, but so what? Your issue with it sounds suspiciously like an appeal to consequences, on par with “there must be souls because I want to be immortal”.
I think you misunderstand – the claim is not that facts have nothing to do with values but that “we should minimise pain” is not a fact.
The problem is the same in both cases: how can values interact with facts if they’re two different categories of thing? It’s the exact same objection to dualism: how can an immaterial mind interact with material body? In both cases, I think the solution is a form of monism: values are affected by facts because they are, in themselves, facts, just as an “immaterial” mind is, in fact, the material work of the brain. If no fact can produce a “should” or a “could”, then how did morality come to exist in the first place? It didn’t appear out of another dimension.
As for your last sentence, that moral reasoning is arbitrary and an infinite regress is precisely my conclusion, but so what? Your issue with it sounds suspiciously like an appeal to consequences, on par with “there must be souls because I want to be immortal”.
Well, I do worry about the end-game consequences of this line of reasoning in the real world, but that’s not what I was getting at. My point is a logical one: if ethics is arbitrary or an infinite regress, then that is not a feature of the moral subjectivist position, to be shrugged off or accepted. It is it’s biggest, most awkward and self-defeating bug in rational discussion. For if morality is, at bottom, arbitrary or circular or an infinite regress, that’s essentially saying it’s empty hot air that means nothing. Moral subjectivism is arbitrary, circular, or requires a non-parsimonious infinite regress to buoy up moral statements.
Meanwhile, back on the subject of ISIS in Iraq, it appears the Iranian military is in the process of aiding directly to assist those who will fight in Iraq and that is good news and as it should be. When one lunatic branch of religion gets out of hand it is only justice that another one should be there to correct the problem.
Here’s a British point of view about today’s outrageous Muslim extremism.
https://dotsub.com/media/72457cbc-fe18-4053-ae3f-6c7639cf4e79/embed/
There may be a lot of truth in what he says, but it would come across better if said dispassionately. Of course he doesn’t feel dispassionate about this subject. In fact, it seems to me he is in danger of becoming just like the people he criticises. Let’s just say, I’d hate to be on the other side of one of his passionate subjects. Something to keep clearly in mind is that the main victims of Islam are Muslims.
Pat Condell, the guy in the video, has pointed that out before, too. He started, IIRC, as a stand-up comedian, so his style evolved from there. The subjects are too lethal to be funny, anymore, and if he’s trying to persuade the opposition, others have tried kindness and gentleness; clearly something more is needed. For those who need no convincing, he gives voice to Angry Atheists, angry about inhumane actions of religionists.
“In fact, it seems to me he is in danger of becoming just like the people he criticises. Let’s just say, I’d hate to be on the other side of one of his passionate subjects.”
No matter how much you might hate to be on “the other side”, you would still be on the receiving end of nothing but words. When Pat Condell beheads someone in one of his videos, or machine-guns a room-full of muslim journalists, then you can say he’s “just like the people he critcises” – but not before.
Like Condell, I’m completely pig-sick of muslim grievance-mongering, jihadist violence and all the rest of it. I think the time for mincing words is long past.
Well said…
Of course jihadis are religiously inspired. All you have to do is to consider the many political ways that, say, the average Iraqis could respond to his/her country’s situation. They could take inspiration from the largely peaceful western feminist movement of the last 50 years. They could form democratic, secular sister parties to the Kurds attached to the Second International.
There are loads of ways a working, middle or upper class Iraqi could respond. But, if your solution is a world-wide caliphate then that means you should follow Mohammed’s example in the Koran.
The precedent for ISIS destruction of idols is in Sura 17:73. If, as a Western scholar, you look it up, it is very hard to read it as a recommendation for iconoclasm of other religions’ artefacts. Nevertheless, it was interpreted very early on by an Islamic ‘scholar’, Tabari, as precisely that, the destruction of the pre-Islamic goddess al-Lat or Tagiyyah, demanded by Mohammed.
I’m staggered too, at Armstrong and Greenwald’s apologist gymnastics. It must take a lot of energy to prove black as white.
Allele akhbar. x
I truly can’t believe that, five years on and in the face of mountains I intelligent criticism, Sam Harris still clings to his ridiculous “objective morality” thesis. It’s nothing short of embarrassing.
As for the interview, what struck me reading it was how bizarre it is that in the year 2015 we are actually having sober, rational discussions about using explicitly theological tactics in a war. At the same time, it is really refreshing to see people discussing ISIS in the common sense terms they themselves present to is, rather than the exquisitely crafted euphemistic academese such analyses are usually couched in.
I appreciate your sentiment, but it would be good if you showed some sensitivity to the fact that I consider Sam a friend. The word “ridiculous,” I think, is superfluous. While I think morality cannot be objective, apparently other people differ (I’m surprised at that given that when Sam’s book came out few wanted to defend that thesis), so why don’t you address the argument that other people are making that SUBJECTIVE morality is ridiculous.
I don’t think it’s embarrassing. I still haven’t heard anyone refute Sam’s main point, which is if there can be a morality which causes the worst possible misery for everyone, then any other morality is objectively better. You don’t need to know the answer to know that there is an answer. And you don’t need to know the right answer to know that some answers are obviously wrong. No one knows, or can know, exactly how many sharks there are right now in the oceans of the world. But there is a right answer. Three is obviously not the right answer. Just because we may never discover the best moral code, doesn’t mean we can identify obviously inferior ones. And just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Can –> can’t
I think there is objective morality. It’s not for nothing that many nations formulated versions of the Golden Rule, and Kant talked that good is what still looks good when elevated to a universal principle.
Slavery is objectively wrong because there are very, very few people who would want to be slaves. All support for slavery comes from those who regard themselves solely in the role of slavemasters. So, to me, this is a no-brainer.
What I find even more exciting is the study of moral psychology. One of the best takes I’ve seen is in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he looks at the moral sense and dissects it to show the logic, both evolutionary and social, behind moral intuitions. It also references Haidt’s work, which in my view has produced the most useful models of how people relate to others morally. I strongly recommend it.
Time for me to do some work, but you might find this to be a fascinating read:
http://www.gargaro.com/pinker.html
Excellent. It’s depth puts propaganda to shame.
An interesting take on the motivations comes from looking at the women in secular countries who choose to leave their families and join ISIS. What are their motivations? A reporter has ended up risking her life by going online to figure it out.
There were several interesting motives. One involved — believe it or not — the desire for a better life and a big house (the men lie to them.) But here’s an interesting quote re both the men and women:
Thinking “with the heart?” Egads.
They’re not religious, they’re spiritual.
How did that happen? Well, in part, it’s probably hard to find any mainstream push against being “spiritual” that’s not coming from atheists.
I just compare it to the Crusades. Think of how romantic and exciting it would be to travel to the Holy Land, to fight for God, or just be there, as a witness to it all. Suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy, does it?
IMO, this is their crusade. Handsome, heroic knights. Courtly love. The sense that you are REALLY DOING SOMETHING. Making a difference. You are now *someone*
Romantic and exciting to join the Crusades. Your travel would be likely on foot, 2000 miles if you were one of the few who survived and the rest died for g*d. In fact, it was only the first of 4 Crusades that even made it. Yeah, it was a 4 year holiday.
I am sure that it sounded great in theory.
Didn’t soldiers, at the start of WW1, also think that they were going on an adventure?
Or pretty much any war I guess. It’s when they return you get the straight dope.
I read a book on the Civil War that said one reason that many men–North and South–joined up was the feeling that this would be a grand adventure, the defining event of their lifetime, and they didn’t want to miss out. They called it “seeing the elephant”–in the days before circuses and zoos became as common as they are today, seeing an elephant could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I’m a Western liberal. Sam Harris is a Western liberal. PCC is a Western liberal. The WEIT website is hardly a hotbed of conservative tea party theocrats. Hell, the values of the Enlightenment from which gnu atheism itself springs are at the humanist heart of Western liberalism.
I think it would make more sense then to refer to the apologists who insist that radical Islam is not really connected to either Islam or religious modes of thought as some Western liberals or — to be snarky — put them in scare quotes. “Western liberals.”
They ought to know better.
I think you have missed the point. Many self described liberals do apply double standards, for the reason JAC indicates: a hierarchy of perceived victimhood.
When I say many I mean very many. I in fact mean most. But JAC need not mean most; he only needs a large enough number to be irritating for his point to make sense.
I think you missed my point. I don’t doubt that many self-described liberals take this stance. I’m questioning the wisdom of criticizing them as if one wasn’t also a liberal.
It’s like atheists publicly complaining about “atheists.” Given that it’s already a socially marginalized or controversial group, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to sound like you’re religious or conservative, too (or wish you were.)
Some atheists. Some liberals. Or even many or too many. Otherwise opponents will gladly co-opt reasonable internal conflicts into their bulk of reasons why it’s wrong to be a liberal, or wrong to be an atheist, in general.
Besides, our argument is that it’s not liberal to side with groups which do not practice liberal values. Granting that this is the “liberal” position just feeds into the confusion. We need to take the Enlightenment back and remind our colleagues of what true liberalism entails.
Well written and I agree with your points! Except on the morality part:
“Wood’s interview with ISIS sympathizers convinces me even more that there are no universal moral truths.”
Why would that convince you? That doesn´t seem like a scientific approach to a question.
“How do you convince someone like him that he’s objectively wrong?”
Why is convincing everyone a part of the equation regarding objective morality or not?
Thanks for a great blog.
Most, if not all, moral objectivists believe that their morality is the objectively correct one. So moral objectivism is a tautology.
I’d like to see an objectivist argue for the correctness of a particular moral “truth,” without recourse to subjective opinion at some point.
From what I have read people tend to act like the people they are around and get ideas from the people they hang out with. If they have some crazy ideas they do crazy things. The worse thing for a person is to believe in infinite goodness or to believe in some idea that will bring a Utopia or something like that. Religions all give people this but some people accept the changes to their moral systems that allow them to do infinite harm for infinite good. The religion is not necessary but it is the scaffolding or the genetic structure of the crazy
Since religious belief is ultimately based on what can only be imagined a strictly materialist root cause approach to religious motivations will not be very fruitful. It is a mind that does the imagining, so what the mind thinks in this respect is the most important factor in determining motivations,
“western imperialism” or (violent?) “islam”
False dicotomy – though KA doesn’t know this, I think. GG did at one point – haven’t read in a while. The question in my mind is *why* Sharia, Islamism, etc. is popular, etc.
And *one* reason is the WI. If your political leaders are selling off your resources, or your state is getting smashed by outside powers (mostly the US, but others), then who do you turn to? It isn’t an easy question – the US acknowledged during the cold war that they drove many people and movements into the Soviet orbit (e.g. Cuba) because of the necessity of some protection, the “enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and much else.
None of this justifies, never mind exonerates, the behaviour, and it is not the only concern in play, but IMO we ignore it at our peril.
How could there exist any objective morality when our build-in-morality is created by a mechanistic process, blind to it’s effects?
In my opinion you need a miracle for that.
Luckily humans are social beings so we behave rather nice most of the time, I see no real problem there.
For people who think that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is the way to go, I have the following quote from Schopenhauer:
“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.”
The boredom part is mostly neglected in discussions about morality.
How could there exist any objective morality when our build-in-morality is created by a mechanistic process, blind to it’s effects?
How could there be any objective aerodynamics if wings are the product of blind evolutionary forces?
How could there be any objective optics if eyes only come about through natural selection?
How could there be objective ways to produce food if nourishment and agriculture are simply the products of billions of years of lineages becoming capable of hunger pangs?
There may be good arguments against objective morality, but pointing out evolution is not one of them.
There is only one method/process capable of producing objective truth’s :
science.
It produced objective truth’s about optics and aerodynamics and other things.
If someone proved the existence of “Objective morality”, it would get him a Nobel-prize.
If someone proved the existence of “Objective morality”, it would get him a Nobel-prize.
The problem with that mode of thinking is that it ignores the current problem with ethics: hardly anyone believes it is a science. One reason people aren’t handed Nobel prizes for ground-breaking research into ethics is that the field is roughly at the stage the mind sciences would have been in the Middle Ages – held back by erroneous, “spiritual” beliefs that are – at least, so I think – divorced from reality. That’s why I said above that moral subjectivism has a lot in common with religion and romanticism.
It’s not a breakthrough that’s needed, much less a Nobel prize. It’s a shift in perspective, akin to the one that has seen Descartes’ mind dualism with scientifically justified physical monism. We didn’t need a Nobel-winning breakthrough to discover that minds come from physical brains and not some ethereal ectoplasm.
Ok, we disagree 🙂
“We didn’t need a Nobel-winning breakthrough …”
I would nominate Newton and Darwin.
“ignores the current problem with ethics”
People are already ethical, we don’t need additional ethics. A lot what we call ethical behavior seems to me suppressing impulses. There is indeed research that suggests knowing more about ethics doesn’t make you more ethical. I’m with Jonathan Haidt who argues that ethics is similar to taste.
“There may be good arguments against objective morality, but pointing out evolution is not one of them.”
Science tells us that build-in-morality is a biological adaption. The process that created it doesn’t care about truth or justice or empathy. And even if it did, it has no way to reach such a goal.
I don’t think I understand what you mean by “objective” in this context.
If humans have a “built-in-morality” that is a product of evolution, is that not an objective fact about human behavior?
It seems clear to me that there are significant aspects of ethics / morality that are objective and subjective. Evolved human behavioural characteristics seem to me to be unambiguously objective. Unless by “objective” you mean something like Platonic Ideals similar to, for example, Ken Ham’s concept of objective morality. But I don’t think reasonshark or Sam Harris, or similar, mean anything like that.
I indeed disagree, on this point, with Sam Harris that ” ‘moral questions’ will have objectively right and wrong answers which are grounded in empirical facts about what causes people to flourish”
Objectivity, Nothing special:
Wikipedia Objectivity (philosophy):
Generally, objectivity means the state or quality of being true even outside of a subject’s individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings.
Okay, but that wasn’t what I was trying to understand about your comment.
I am confused by this.
Given that you disagree that there is any objective component to morality, then stating that “science tells us that build-in-morality is a biological adaptation,” seems contradictory. If humans do indeed have, to one degree or another, built in (instinctive?) morality, that is a result of their evolutionary history, that is an objective fact about humans. And surely it then would follow that there are at least some objective facts about human morality.
Unless in addition to the definition you quoted you also take objective to mean “absolute?”
People are already ethical
How do you know? You don’t agree that ethics is objective, and yet you feel you can talk about ethical behaviour as though there were a standard to judge by. If it’s that easy, I could define any behaviour as ethical and say humanity has always behaved ethically, or define any and all behaviour as ethical and say humanity has always behaved unethically. And that’s the problem with moral subjectivism: any “standards” it comes up with are totally useless.
Science tells us that build-in-morality is a biological adaption. The process that created it doesn’t care about truth or justice or empathy. And even if it did, it has no way to reach such a goal.
This is a poor argument. Natural selection is a description of how functional, complex and designed things arise through systematic and biased birth and death rates. The process doesn’t “care” about anything, not even maximizing genes. It is simply an explanation of how interesting stuff first arises without the need of conscious planning.
And if it had no way of producing some morality, then how did morality arise in the first place? Did it come with the soul that a god injected into the human lineage?
An insistence that words like “good and bad” have nothing to do with reality – for instance, as “taste” – is only logically consistent with either moral objectivism or nihilism. Saying good and bad are a matter of taste is little different from saying they can mean anything you want them to mean.
darrelle + reasonshark :
I do believe, like you that there are objectively true statements about morality, science is the only way to know which ones, but there are no objectively true moral statements.
for a list of shared values I refer always to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Foundations_Theory
We share all of these values with almost everyone, but that doesn’t make them true.
For instance one of the not so nice shared moral “values” is racism which is also very common. That doesn’t make racism good.
I even think that that my own morality is not objectively true; in daily live I will react like most people, my emotions always win.
Morality is a biological adaption which enhances our reproductive success. In The Selfish Gene, there is a chapter called, “Nice men finish first”. I would argue more or less the same for how it came into existence.
Indeed this line of reasoning leads to moral nihilism. But apart from an also non existing God, where could our morality come from?
I see it as one of my greatest achievements figuring this out, but most will see it as pure nonsense. I can live with that 🙂
I hope this explains something.
I read an article recently pointing out that the barbaric behavior, beheading, torture, burning in these Muslim areas did not end on its own (in places where they ‘ended ‘); these practices were actually forcibly terminated by the colonial powers. They remained embedded in the culture however.