Subtitled “How Science Can Determine Human Values”
(Free Press, Oct. 2010, 291pp, including 100pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index)
Sam Harris came to fame in the years after 9/11 for writing a critique of religion called THE END OF FAITH. He, along with writers of later books, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, became known as the “four horsemen” of the “new atheists”. I reread that book a few years ago and reviewed it here. The present book followed in 2010, and I read it the first time in 2014 and quoted from it a bit in this post. Then I reread this book about three years ago and took detailed notes, which I’m now summarizing here.
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Gist: Harris is challenging the nostrum that science can tell us about the world but not about how to behave: that is, science can have nothing to say about morality. Yes it can, he claims, essentially by applying a utilitarian policy upon the world: design society to maximize the happiness, or well-being, of as many people possible. Further, what science can say avoids the trap of inconsistent religions making contradictory, and incorrect, claims about the nature of reality
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Every book is different when it comes to capturing it in a blog post. In this case, the chapters don’t neatly distill into a set of bullet points. My summaries of those chapters turned out to be long enough that I’m not going to post the full notes (5000+ words) here, just the summaries.
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Introduction
Despite what most people think, we can use science to advise us on the best ways to help billions of people to flourish on this planet. The title refers to a hypothetical physical landscape with peaks and valleys, areas of well-being and suffering respectively. There may be no one single best peak. We define “well-being” much as we do health. Standards can change, and they are not bound by evolutionary fitness. There are clear differences between example good and bad lives. We dismiss the idea that acting badly is a prelude to living well in an afterlife; but it’s possible suffering may help us reach a peak. Religion and science are in a zero-sum game with respect to facts. (See quote above.) P25:
Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and attention — often with tragic results. Is this really a dichotomy about which science can claim to be neutral?
Ch1, Moral Truth
Author discusses matters of objectivity and subjectivity, and dismisses the idea that anyone’s notion of morality is as good as anyone else’s. (E.g. Jeffrey Dahmer; the Catholic Church; the Taliban.) Consider the worst possible misery for everybody. The problem with ‘tolerance’ of moral differences is that it’s insensitive to the well-being of actual people. We distinguish the reasons people do things (the results of evolution, e.g. for Jonathan Haidt) with concerns about maximizing human well-being, followed by the project of changing people who commit harmful behaviors to behaviors that lead to better lives. P53:
The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people will have flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have flawed conceptions of physics. … And the fact that millions of people use the term “morality” as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.
Ch2, Good and Evil
Morality is relatively a recent development. Briefly: genetic change in the brain => complex social emotions => cooperative behavior, concerns for reputation etc. => cultural norms, laws, social institutions. Good and evil, right and wrong, will be increasingly understood scientifically, because we can evaluate how moral concerns affect the well-being of people. Author claims that moral beliefs are ‘true’ to the extent they relate to human well-being. Intuitive moral truth can’t be relied on. There are problems, e.g. we can’t know long-term consequences; we’re subject to biases. We can dismiss religion on familiar reasons. Many people are simply wrong in their opinions about morality. Discusses Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt. Human evil is a natural phenomenon; we have some innate level of predatory violence, somewhat overcome by altruism. We need to use reason to transcend evolutionary pressures. Free will seems to be an illusion. At the same time, it’s the basis for moral responsibility. It remains a compelling mystery. Perhaps the illusion of free will is itself an illusion.
Ch3, Belief
The difference between belief and knowledge is a matter of certainty. Beliefs do not reside within particular areas of the brain. (Author studied such matters with MRI at UCLA.) Much is unconscious. Beliefs are acquired for emotional and social reasons. The internet has made things worse, but allowing bad ideas to flourish, and allowing people to overestimate their own abilities. (124.4 quoted earlier) Cognitive biases affect political discourse. (Here I’ll quote more, 124-5)
Consider political conservatism: this is a fairly well-defined perspective that is characterized by a general discomfort with societal change and a ready acceptance of social inequality. …an attitude correlated with dogmatism, inflexibility, death anxiety, need for closure, and anticorrelated with openness to experience, cognitive complexity, self-esteem, and social stability.
[Then quoting another writer] “Conservative ideologies, like virtually all other belief systems, are adopted in part because they satisfy various psychological needs. To say that ideological belief systems have a strong motivational basis is not to say that they are unprincipled, unwarranted, or unresponsive to reason and evidence.”
To which Harris replies:
This has more than a whiff of euphemism about it. Surely we can say that a belief system known to be especially beholden to dogmatism, inflexibility, death anxiety, and a need to closure will be less principles, less warranted, and less responsive to reason and evidence than it would otherwise be.
Some types of reason are inseparable from emotion; people make up stories to justify their beliefs. We all engage in induction and deduction; we’re subject to biases, i.e. reliable patterns of error. Author wonders what would happen if it became impossible to lie. … Humans fail at rationality in predictable ways. Science is not devoid of values; it tries to value principles of reasoning.
Ch4, Religion
The world has not grown less religious, except in developed societies — except in the US, where religion correlates with being poor and with racism. Religion begins with belief, devolving into ritual when literal beliefs fade. Religion makes an intuitive sense, e.g. the ‘common sense’ duality of mind and body. “Religion is largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality.” Some religions entail verifiable predictions. A century and a half of brain science has shown the doctrines of religion to be steadily more implausible, e.g. the soul doctrine. Yes, some scientists claim to be religious, but their defenses are poor, e.g. Francis Collins’ book is an intellectual suicide. His claim about the frozen waterfall merely means that anything can confirm anything. He claims that moral law applies exclusively to humans, which is nonsense given studies of various animals; morality is a product of evolution. (With more detail and bg about Collins.)
Ch5, The Future of Happiness
There is, overall, moral progress in the human race. [[ One of Pinker’s big themes ]] Discussion of Haidt, Gilbert, Kahneman. Could there be something more important in life than the well-being of conscious creatures? Even if morality is not strictly a science, there are nevertheless better ways to do things than others. The alternative is to let faith-based religion, “that great engine of ignorance and bigotry,” have its way. Final para:
If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery. Whether or not we ever understand meaning, morality, and values in practice, I have attempted to show that there must be something to know about them in principle. And I am convinced that merely admitting this will transform the way we think about human happiness and the public good.
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My take: There is plenty of clear thinking going on here, especially about the inadequacy of contradictory religions to establish systems of morality. At the same time, there isn’t really any “science” here, just a nice metaphor about a landscape with peaks and valleys.
So it’s worth reading the Wikipedia entry for the book, not only because it captures some of the subtleties I’ve missed, but for its summary of various criticisms of the book, mostly which focus on the vagueness of Harris’s notion of “human welfare.”
