The Problem with Sam (The Final Prelude)

I’m going to let you into an open secret.

Atheists, along with scientists and academics, disagree with each other.

I happen to disagree with Sam Harris about a thing or two, which I will get to shortly, but I also disagree with a number of other atheists on various things.  For example, I think that Richard Dawkins should try to keep his cool a little more and that his arrogant pose isn’t helpful.  I do sympathise with his plight, since he’s an evolutionary biologist and it must eventually get on one's nerves to be continually told by ignorant amateurs that your life work is bollocks because a musty old book contains, along with a raft of ridiculous claims that no-one holds to be true anymore, a barely coherent alternative.

I recently got slightly singed (I won’t say burnt, that would be over-doing it) after straying too close to a heated academic battle, complete with two opposing factions steadfastly failing to agree on the Bertrand Paradox.

So disagreement happens.  However, since I am not a monochromatic type, just because I think that Sam is wrong about one thing this should not necessarily lead to thinking that he must therefore be wrong about everything.  He’s a perfectly pleasant, erudite and genial chap who has a lot of interesting things to say.  It’s just that he has said a couple of things that are somewhat less brilliant.

The first, of course, is the little joke (if that’s what it was) about William Lane Craig putting the wind up atheists – made in opening statements in a debate against the very same William Lane Craig.  Craig is irritating and devious, but he’s not frightening by any stretch of the imagination.  Even if Craig’s ability to lie barefaced is one of the characteristics one normally associates with a psychopath, the likelihood of WLC being a psychopath is probably not high and hence he is (probably) not that frightening.

The second thing is what truly and deeply annoyed me with his book, “The Moral Landscape”.   In many ways this is a very good book, the mission associated with it is laudable (that is not a typo, I meant “laudable”, not “laughable”).  But in my view, the book would have been an excellent book if he had not made what I consider to be a massive and unnecessary concession to the theist camp.

In his book, and in his debates, Sam repeatedly insists that there is such a thing as objective morality.  He does this even when debating with philosophers and apologists.  The problem is that there isn’t objective morality, not even in Sam’s world – at least not in the sense that most philosophers and apologists would interpret the term.

I discussed objective moral values and duties in WLC3: When Morality Arguments are Bad because Craig asserts that objective moral values and duties exist.  It is clear in his supporting arguments that by these terms he means the moral values and duties that derive from an absolute morality, which supposedly originate in the essential nature of his god.  If something is morally wrong, it is always morally wrong irrespective of the circumstances.  One would expect also that if something is morally acceptable then it’s always morally acceptable irrespective of the circumstances.  Objective morality is usually more the preserve of theologians even though it creates problems for the types of people who base their world view on what is written in ancient documents.  If the Bible were to reflect the objective morality of an eternal god, then homosexuality should still be morally abhorrent and incurring the death penalty while slavery should still be morally acceptable (while homosexuality still attracts the death penalty in some nations, to the best of my knowledge none support slavery).

A careful read of The Moral Landscape reveals that Sam doesn’t mean anything like this by his use of the term “objective morality”.  Instead, what he means is something that could, if the term were not already taken, be called “moral relativism”.

I suspect that a major contributor to Sam’s attempts to avoid being seen as being any sort of moral relativist is the fact “moral relativism”, and the related “moral subjectivism”, seem to have almost as bad a rap in the US as “atheism” has – no doubt due in part to the fact that they are associated with secularism.  Moral relativism is charged with a number of crimes: for example being a form of moral nihilism (in which nothing is intrinsically moral or immoral), being incoherent in a number of senses (including self-refutation) and so on.

Clearly Sam doesn’t want to be associated with moral nihilists.

In his book, Sam doesn’t really spend much time addressing what he means by moral relativism, but the clearest indication is found in a section of Chapter One titled “Moral Blindness in the Name of ‘Tolerance’”.  Sam describes a form of moral abdication in which liberal Westerners tacitly condone all manner of horrendous acts because they are carried out in the context of another culture.  It is a mixture of cowardice and cultural shame that leads to tolerance where tolerance is unwarranted.

While it’s understandable that Sam wants to be associated with neither moral nihilists nor the idiot extreme of moral cowardice generally labelled as “moral relativism”, he should not want to be associated with moral absolutists and for that reason he should avoid using the term “objective morality”.

If I understand his intent correctly, Sam uses the term “objective” in the same sense that a scientist would use “objective” measures to ascertain the success or failure of an experiment.  For example, an objective measure for the success of an experiment on the efficacy of prayer on cancer would involve standard recovery rates for various types of cancer, the involvement of a control group, measures of sample sizes to ascertain margins of error and a statistical analysis could then say, for example, that if positive effects were observed in 10 more patients who were prayed for than in the control group, then there is a statistically significant effect.  Either you get that number (or more) and prayer might work, or you don’t and prayer probably doesn’t work.  You actually get a slightly higher proportion of complications in people who know that they have been prayed for, probably because they don’t take as good care of themselves, leaving their recovery up to a god who either doesn’t exist or doesn’t get involved in health issues, or maybe they are nervous about the fact that whenever science looks for god, he never turns up.

A subjective measure might be to use the responses, from the recipients of prayer, to a question about whether they felt better as a result of having been prayed for.

Objective measures used in scientific research are not absolute and in fact almost everything we measure is relative in one way or another.  In this sense, Sam’s suggested “objective morality” is actually relative – relative to the two extremes he describes: a world of unrelenting suffering and a world of maximal well-being.  If an act results in a move towards more suffering, it’s bad.  If an act results in a move towards more well-being, it’s good.

Can I suggest the use of another term altogether, perhaps “rational morality”?  I suggest this option because despite Sam’s protestations, there is no “objective morality” that science can discover.  Instead, what we can say is that rational maximisation of well-being is a suitable basis on which to build a moral framework (or an ethical structure) and that science can be used to determine which acts tend towards maximising well-being, via neuroscience and so forth.

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Some of you might ask “what is this ethical structure of which you speak?”

I’m so glad that you asked.

Over the next few months, I shall be posting a series of articles taken from a document that I first started working on many years ago.  These will culminate in a smaller number of articles in which I discuss a proposed model for representing the ethical structures in which we all operate.

The first of those articles is The Moral Animal.  The previous two preludes are Saving the Dog and Being Bad.