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Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

47 points by winthrowe 17y ago

btilly 17y ago
I'm not sure when it comes out, but he earlier did an authors@google talk on the same subject, which has been embargoed so the TED version came out first. My comments are based on that earlier version of this talk. Sam did a very good job of demonstrating that it would be really good if we could get morality from science. He did a good job of pointing out that science can validly inform our decision making. However he misses the fact that science is about problems that are tractable, not important. And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has. In essence it is the same mistake the social sciences make. The case that something is important, and that data is a useful thing to have in studying it, does not suffice to make a compelling case that we are on the right line of research. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.html http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h... for a more detailed explanation of my opinions about what is and is not science.
- winthrowe 17y ago
  One point at least briefly mentioned in the TED version is the advancements in brain scanning. I am personally an advocate of the singularity theory of technology, and I am of the opinion that we will get to a point where the psychological and social issues will be describable with sound neurology, and it will become a tractable problem.
  - dmfdmf 17y ago
    I think I hold similar views, except I would say "sound epistemology" not neurology. Do you think P=NP?
- Niten 17y ago
  "And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has." That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.
mattmiller 17y ago
The problem with basing your morals on religion (or science for that matter) is that biblical passages can often be taken out of context to validate any action, the same way scientific data can be looked at in many different perspectives (lying with statistics). Morality is difficult to explain. I think most people just know what is right and what is wrong. A lot of people look to a higher power (religion or science) to justify the wrong actions they want to take.
- btilly 17y ago
  Everyone thinks they know right from wrong. The problem comes when what one person "knows" disagrees with what the next person "knows". Society is full of important debates about moral questions which people legitimately disagree on. (See abortion.) And Sam's presentation does nothing to help us sort those questions out. (Well actually he asserts his morality. But that won't convince people who fundamentally disagree with him.) Now some people like to point out that evolutionary biology has a lot to say about why we develop the internal moral compasses we do. Morality really does seem to be bred into us. But the problem is that the same evolutionary incentives that breed moral behavior also breed negative characteristics like xenophobia and a willingness to selectively cheat. So evolution explains both what we like and dislike about human behavior, and provides no useful way for us to distinguish them.
  - mattmiller 17y ago
    I guess the point I'm trying to make is that allowing 'written' morality (written in a holy book or written by Sam Harris:)) to supersede personal morality is harmful because words can often be twisted to mean what you want them to mean.
rgejman 17y ago
Sure, science can answer moral questions IF you have a pre-scientific moral framework. For instance, "the suffering of conscious beings should be avoided." Then science can help you figure out who/what are conscious beings, under what circumstances they suffer and how to end their suffering. Unfortunately, the speaker misses the fact that science alone gives no basis for morality.
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  absolutely; that talk was kind of embarrassing in how unquestioningly it accepted a kind of utilitarianism.
  - indrax 17y ago
    It could be the case that a scientific exploration of human values would show that (for example) truth-telling is more important than its consequences in what we consider good. Only one way to find out!
- ThomPete 17y ago
  The point is that you can have a moral (whatever that means) society without religion. Mirror neurons is what allow us to put ourselves in others place, thus feeling empathy with them. This and this alone is the basis for the possibility of some sort of social dynamics. I have people in my life I love and don't want anything to happen to so I can recognize that there are other people who feel the same about some they care about. I am therefore willing to make a deal with these other people that we don't hurt those who other people love and they don't hurt who we love. It's really that simply but of course the emergent complexity of this is much bigger.
  - andrewcooke 17y ago
    his caricature of religion was awful. i think most religious people in an educated audience like a ted talk would think of it more as encoding communal priorities than delivered over a phone line from a guy with a beard... ...and an emergent system that can encode ideas in persistent forms cannot be decoupled from its history. you are pretty much going to have some kind of activity close to religion. if you listen to the talk, where he's arguing for universal truths, and domain experts in morality, it's surprising just how close he is to arguing for a rather traditional religious approach...
anigbrowl 17y ago
Good talk, but I can't help feeling that John Stuart Mill said all this more than a century ago, and most of the history of economics consists of his and other people's attempts to address the same questions. On the other hand, with so much ignorance and BS in the world, even in wealthy societies, restating these ideas as often and fluently as possible is a worthwhile endeavor.
ugh 17y ago
I think it’s not quite as simple as that. When we discussed the scope of science in a university seminar one of my fellow students said: “If scientists where to find out that rooms which are painted yellow make students happy, couldn’t we then say that the university ought to paint its rooms yellow? Isn’t then science able to answer one of those pesky ‘ought’-questions?” The logical slip is a subtle one. The ‘ought’-question to answer is not whether the rooms ought to be painted yellow, it’s whether students ought to be happy. Sure, if you know that what you want are happy students or a flourishing human society, morality becomes a problem that is easily accessible to the tools of empiricism or science. But that first step is a problem. I don’t, however, think it’s a big problem. Humans are remarkably similar – most of us want the same things: flourishing societies and rather more happiness than suffering. And that’s pretty much all it takes to lay your foundation. After that it’s all smooth sailing with the tools of science. Sure, there are edge cases (abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so on) but to claim that religion has any kind of edge in answering those cases is completely ridiculous.
- billswift 17y ago
  Ronald Merrill suggested a couple of decades ago that "normative ought" and "instrumental ought" are likely two sides of the same issue which he called the "unification of oughts" (rather like Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism, Merrill was an engineer). That "normative ought" in morality is an instrumental ought with an understood object (for example to improve your or someone else's life); and I would suggest the proper study of morality may be to understand, make explicit, and rank/prioritize those implicit objects.
TomOfTTB 17y ago
Honestly as someone who has spent the better part of his life studying Ethics it’s sad that something like this is given credence. Not because he’s completely off base but because he’s an amateur whose put no study into the actual field. He’s repeating things that Immanuel Kant and Sir Thomas Aquinas thought up centuries ago but doesn’t know it because he’s never bothered to look past his own echo chamber. His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering” and his scientific twist on this is that technology such as neuroscience can objectively gauge suffering for us. The problem with his theory is that it’s simplistic and is in fact the moral philosophy that’s usually debunked on day one of a good Ethics class. Generally the counter argument is something like this… Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss? Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. Bottom line: Sam Harris treats secular morality as if it’s some kind of new concept and it just isn’t. People have been studying it since at least 400 B.C. (namely Aristotle) and anyone talking about a topic while ignoring 2,410 years of previous thought towards that topic is nothing more than a fool.
- xenophanes 17y ago
  > Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. I don't think moral discussion should focus on unpleasant edge cases. More interesting and useful is how to handle more common situations.
  - andrewcooke 17y ago
    people focus on edge cases because when you start with different common cases and extrapolate them, they contradict each other. the edges cases illustrate the contradictions, but they are firmly rooted in common situations - if they weren't, why bother with them? for example, it's common to ask whether someone would divert a train onto another line, knowing it would kill someone, to save some larger number of people. that's interesting because two heuristics we use in common cases are (i) avoid doing something that would harm another and (ii) minimise the amount of suffering. in that case it's not that anyone thinks it's particularly useful to discuss trains because trains are such fascinating things in themselves. instead, it's an interesting case precisely because it shows how starting from two common rules can give contradicting answers.
ThomPete 17y ago
Moral systems have evolved because that is a good way of maintaining the complex dynamics of a society. How they work can perfectly well be explained by science if we are too look at it from a social dynamic point of view with mirror neurons at the center. Which also will explain why some people don't have empathy. Science can obviously not explain WHY something is right or wrong but there is absolutely nothing that indicates that this can or should be answered. As long as the mechanics work.
xenophanes 17y ago
A better basis for morality is this: It's immoral to live in a non-error-correcting way because doing so dooms you to repeat your mistakes (whatever they may be) indefinitely.
- godDLL 17y ago
  That's one negative, and one CS degree. :)
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    What do you mean?
    - godDLL 17y ago
      Your moral is about forbidding something, not guiding somewhere. Very much like the christian commandments. And you need to be of a certain culture to understand the "error-correcting" part.
      - xenophanes 17y ago
        How can we avoid fooling ourselves and correct our errors? is a constructive question that leads to things like the scientific method, and to the use of criticism in discussions.
hubb 17y ago
i know it's difficult or often impossible to accurately title talks like these, but this one is pretty far off. he stays somewhat on topic for a while but ends up drifting really far into compromising western and middle eastern values. i think "moral expertise" or something along those lines would have been better.
cousin_it 17y ago
So am I morally obliged to push my fat friend off the bridge to stop a train that will otherwise kill three people? Answer me, science! And don't even get me started on the Repugnant Conclusion problem...
itistoday 17y ago
Careful, of all the places where language makes it easy to trip up and misunderstand each other, this one is particularly filled with land mines. Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded. He is, I think, fairly clear in saying that science does not tell us what specifically is morally "good" or "bad," but rather that science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness. I'm sure most everyone here will agree that this is not an outrageous claim. Since moral questions usually deal with issues of prosperity and happiness, he concludes that we shouldn't be afraid to bring up science in such discussions.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded. I don't think it is particularly well founded for a reason that hasn't been mentioned yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism I believe that deontological ethics - that is, coming to decide right and wrong actions - is superior to consequentialist ethics, which is to judge actions by their expected results. Many people would disagree with me - a lot of people are consequentialists. But consequentialism usually fails, once you start saying "The ends justify the means" you get into bad places really fast. Historically speaking, consequentialism has produced lots of problems and not much success.
  - indrax 17y ago
    I realize this is going to seem a lot like a 'no true scotsman' argument, but I think there's a problem with saying consequentialism has bad consequences. If it has had bad consequences, they weren't doing it right. (or _possibly_ they just had very different values) It's also possible to be consequentialist and still refuse to due certain things on principle, even if it seems like the right thing to do, because you know you are prone to be wrong about that kind of thing. http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...
rogermugs 17y ago
fascinating because he makes an almost religious argument for absolute truth. he simply calls it objective fact.
marshallp 17y ago
Another way of saying this would be that you can create a mathematical model of morality and have it answer your questions of morality in particular situations. If you come from the viewpoint that there is a mathematical model of everything (waiting to be discovered) then this is pretty obvious.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jemfinch 17y ago
Science cannot answer metaphysical questions, so ethics is entirely outside its scope.

47 points by winthrowe 17y ago

I'm not sure when it comes out, but he earlier did an authors@google talk on the same subject, which has been embargoed so the TED version came out first. My comments are based on that earlier version of this talk. Sam did a very good job of demonstrating that it would be really good if we could get morality from science. He did a good job of pointing out that science can validly inform our decision making. However he misses the fact that science is about problems that are tractable, not important. And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has. In essence it is the same mistake the social sciences make. The case that something is important, and that data is a useful thing to have in studying it, does not suffice to make a compelling case that we are on the right line of research. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.html http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h... for a more detailed explanation of my opinions about what is and is not science.

winthrowe 17y ago
One point at least briefly mentioned in the TED version is the advancements in brain scanning. I am personally an advocate of the singularity theory of technology, and I am of the opinion that we will get to a point where the psychological and social issues will be describable with sound neurology, and it will become a tractable problem.
- dmfdmf 17y ago
  I think I hold similar views, except I would say "sound epistemology" not neurology. Do you think P=NP?
Niten 17y ago
"And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has." That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.

mattmiller 17y ago

The problem with basing your morals on religion (or science for that matter) is that biblical passages can often be taken out of context to validate any action, the same way scientific data can be looked at in many different perspectives (lying with statistics). Morality is difficult to explain. I think most people just know what is right and what is wrong. A lot of people look to a higher power (religion or science) to justify the wrong actions they want to take.

btilly 17y ago
Everyone thinks they know right from wrong. The problem comes when what one person "knows" disagrees with what the next person "knows". Society is full of important debates about moral questions which people legitimately disagree on. (See abortion.) And Sam's presentation does nothing to help us sort those questions out. (Well actually he asserts his morality. But that won't convince people who fundamentally disagree with him.) Now some people like to point out that evolutionary biology has a lot to say about why we develop the internal moral compasses we do. Morality really does seem to be bred into us. But the problem is that the same evolutionary incentives that breed moral behavior also breed negative characteristics like xenophobia and a willingness to selectively cheat. So evolution explains both what we like and dislike about human behavior, and provides no useful way for us to distinguish them.
- mattmiller 17y ago
  I guess the point I'm trying to make is that allowing 'written' morality (written in a holy book or written by Sam Harris:)) to supersede personal morality is harmful because words can often be twisted to mean what you want them to mean.

rgejman 17y ago

Sure, science can answer moral questions IF you have a pre-scientific moral framework. For instance, "the suffering of conscious beings should be avoided." Then science can help you figure out who/what are conscious beings, under what circumstances they suffer and how to end their suffering. Unfortunately, the speaker misses the fact that science alone gives no basis for morality.

andrewcooke 17y ago
absolutely; that talk was kind of embarrassing in how unquestioningly it accepted a kind of utilitarianism.
- indrax 17y ago
  It could be the case that a scientific exploration of human values would show that (for example) truth-telling is more important than its consequences in what we consider good. Only one way to find out!
ThomPete 17y ago
The point is that you can have a moral (whatever that means) society without religion. Mirror neurons is what allow us to put ourselves in others place, thus feeling empathy with them. This and this alone is the basis for the possibility of some sort of social dynamics. I have people in my life I love and don't want anything to happen to so I can recognize that there are other people who feel the same about some they care about. I am therefore willing to make a deal with these other people that we don't hurt those who other people love and they don't hurt who we love. It's really that simply but of course the emergent complexity of this is much bigger.
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  his caricature of religion was awful. i think most religious people in an educated audience like a ted talk would think of it more as encoding communal priorities than delivered over a phone line from a guy with a beard... ...and an emergent system that can encode ideas in persistent forms cannot be decoupled from its history. you are pretty much going to have some kind of activity close to religion. if you listen to the talk, where he's arguing for universal truths, and domain experts in morality, it's surprising just how close he is to arguing for a rather traditional religious approach...

anigbrowl 17y ago

Good talk, but I can't help feeling that John Stuart Mill said all this more than a century ago, and most of the history of economics consists of his and other people's attempts to address the same questions. On the other hand, with so much ignorance and BS in the world, even in wealthy societies, restating these ideas as often and fluently as possible is a worthwhile endeavor.

ugh 17y ago

I think it’s not quite as simple as that. When we discussed the scope of science in a university seminar one of my fellow students said: “If scientists where to find out that rooms which are painted yellow make students happy, couldn’t we then say that the university ought to paint its rooms yellow? Isn’t then science able to answer one of those pesky ‘ought’-questions?” The logical slip is a subtle one. The ‘ought’-question to answer is not whether the rooms ought to be painted yellow, it’s whether students ought to be happy. Sure, if you know that what you want are happy students or a flourishing human society, morality becomes a problem that is easily accessible to the tools of empiricism or science. But that first step is a problem. I don’t, however, think it’s a big problem. Humans are remarkably similar – most of us want the same things: flourishing societies and rather more happiness than suffering. And that’s pretty much all it takes to lay your foundation. After that it’s all smooth sailing with the tools of science. Sure, there are edge cases (abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so on) but to claim that religion has any kind of edge in answering those cases is completely ridiculous.

billswift 17y ago
Ronald Merrill suggested a couple of decades ago that "normative ought" and "instrumental ought" are likely two sides of the same issue which he called the "unification of oughts" (rather like Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism, Merrill was an engineer). That "normative ought" in morality is an instrumental ought with an understood object (for example to improve your or someone else's life); and I would suggest the proper study of morality may be to understand, make explicit, and rank/prioritize those implicit objects.

TomOfTTB 17y ago

Honestly as someone who has spent the better part of his life studying Ethics it’s sad that something like this is given credence. Not because he’s completely off base but because he’s an amateur whose put no study into the actual field. He’s repeating things that Immanuel Kant and Sir Thomas Aquinas thought up centuries ago but doesn’t know it because he’s never bothered to look past his own echo chamber. His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering” and his scientific twist on this is that technology such as neuroscience can objectively gauge suffering for us. The problem with his theory is that it’s simplistic and is in fact the moral philosophy that’s usually debunked on day one of a good Ethics class. Generally the counter argument is something like this… Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss? Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. Bottom line: Sam Harris treats secular morality as if it’s some kind of new concept and it just isn’t. People have been studying it since at least 400 B.C. (namely Aristotle) and anyone talking about a topic while ignoring 2,410 years of previous thought towards that topic is nothing more than a fool.

xenophanes 17y ago
> Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. I don't think moral discussion should focus on unpleasant edge cases. More interesting and useful is how to handle more common situations.
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  people focus on edge cases because when you start with different common cases and extrapolate them, they contradict each other. the edges cases illustrate the contradictions, but they are firmly rooted in common situations - if they weren't, why bother with them? for example, it's common to ask whether someone would divert a train onto another line, knowing it would kill someone, to save some larger number of people. that's interesting because two heuristics we use in common cases are (i) avoid doing something that would harm another and (ii) minimise the amount of suffering. in that case it's not that anyone thinks it's particularly useful to discuss trains because trains are such fascinating things in themselves. instead, it's an interesting case precisely because it shows how starting from two common rules can give contradicting answers.

ThomPete 17y ago

Moral systems have evolved because that is a good way of maintaining the complex dynamics of a society. How they work can perfectly well be explained by science if we are too look at it from a social dynamic point of view with mirror neurons at the center. Which also will explain why some people don't have empathy. Science can obviously not explain WHY something is right or wrong but there is absolutely nothing that indicates that this can or should be answered. As long as the mechanics work.

xenophanes 17y ago

A better basis for morality is this: It's immoral to live in a non-error-correcting way because doing so dooms you to repeat your mistakes (whatever they may be) indefinitely.

godDLL 17y ago
That's one negative, and one CS degree. :)
- xenophanes 17y ago
  What do you mean?
  - godDLL 17y ago
    Your moral is about forbidding something, not guiding somewhere. Very much like the christian commandments. And you need to be of a certain culture to understand the "error-correcting" part.
    - xenophanes 17y ago
      How can we avoid fooling ourselves and correct our errors? is a constructive question that leads to things like the scientific method, and to the use of criticism in discussions.

hubb 17y ago

i know it's difficult or often impossible to accurately title talks like these, but this one is pretty far off. he stays somewhat on topic for a while but ends up drifting really far into compromising western and middle eastern values. i think "moral expertise" or something along those lines would have been better.

cousin_it 17y ago

So am I morally obliged to push my fat friend off the bridge to stop a train that will otherwise kill three people? Answer me, science! And don't even get me started on the Repugnant Conclusion problem...

itistoday 17y ago

Careful, of all the places where language makes it easy to trip up and misunderstand each other, this one is particularly filled with land mines. Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded. He is, I think, fairly clear in saying that science does not tell us what specifically is morally "good" or "bad," but rather that science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness. I'm sure most everyone here will agree that this is not an outrageous claim. Since moral questions usually deal with issues of prosperity and happiness, he concludes that we shouldn't be afraid to bring up science in such discussions.

lionhearted 17y ago
> Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded. I don't think it is particularly well founded for a reason that hasn't been mentioned yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism I believe that deontological ethics - that is, coming to decide right and wrong actions - is superior to consequentialist ethics, which is to judge actions by their expected results. Many people would disagree with me - a lot of people are consequentialists. But consequentialism usually fails, once you start saying "The ends justify the means" you get into bad places really fast. Historically speaking, consequentialism has produced lots of problems and not much success.
- indrax 17y ago
  I realize this is going to seem a lot like a 'no true scotsman' argument, but I think there's a problem with saying consequentialism has bad consequences. If it has had bad consequences, they weren't doing it right. (or _possibly_ they just had very different values) It's also possible to be consequentialist and still refuse to due certain things on principle, even if it seems like the right thing to do, because you know you are prone to be wrong about that kind of thing. http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...

rogermugs 17y ago

fascinating because he makes an almost religious argument for absolute truth. he simply calls it objective fact.

marshallp 17y ago

Another way of saying this would be that you can create a mathematical model of morality and have it answer your questions of morality in particular situations. If you come from the viewpoint that there is a mathematical model of everything (waiting to be discovered) then this is pretty obvious.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jemfinch 17y ago

Science cannot answer metaphysical questions, so ethics is entirely outside its scope.