Making Sense with Sam Harris - #364 — Facts & Values

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Sam Harris revisits the central argument he made in his book, The Moral Landscape, about the reality of moral truth. He discusses the way concepts like “good” and “evil” can be thought about objectively, the primacy of our intuitions of truth and falsity, and the unity of knowledge. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. In 2011, I published my third book, The Moral Landscape, which was an edited version of my doctoral dissertation, in which I argued that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values, and that much of importance depends upon our admitting this and trying to work out how we can all make moral progress together. The book was widely criticized, both for things I said in it and for things I hadn't said. I did say a few things which needlessly provoked academic philosophers and graduate students. I wrote at one point, by way of explaining why I was dispensing with some of the terminology one might expect to encounter in any discussion of moral truth, that every mention of terms like metaethics,

deontology, non-cognitivism, anti-realism, and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. That's still true, of course, but it pissed off a lot of academics. Worse, many people couldn't get past the book's subtitle, How Science Can Determine Human Values, because I have a far narrower conception of science than I do. Many people, including many scientists, seem pretty confused about the boundaries between science and other modes of thought, as I'll discuss here. Consider the concept of objectivity, which most people assume is central to science. It is central, but only in one sense of the term. As the philosopher John Searle once pointed out,

we should distinguish between epistemological and ontological senses of objectivity. Of course, terms like epistemological and ontological also increase the amount of boredom in the universe, but I'm afraid they're indispensable. Epistemology relates to the foundation of knowledge. How do we know what is true? In what sense can a statement be true? Ontology relates to questions about what exists. For instance, is there only one type of stuff in the universe? Are there only physical things? Or are there really existent things which are not

physical? For instance, do numbers exist beyond their physical representations? And are there really existent things which are not physical? For instance, do numbers exist beyond their physical representations? And if so, how? Science is fully committed to epistemological objectivity, that is to analyzing evidence and argument without subjective bias. But it is in no sense committed to ontological objectivity. It isn't limited to studying objects, that is, purely physical things and processes. We can study human subjectivity, the mind as experienced from the first-person point of view, objectively, that is, without bias and other sources of cognitive error. And as I've argued elsewhere, meditation is a crucial tool for doing this. It is simply a fact that human beings can become much better observers of their direct experience. And becoming better

at this actually makes a wider range of experience possible. Morality is subjective in the ontological sense, right? It's not found out there among the atoms. It rests on the reality of consciousness and the experiences of conscious beings. To say that morality is subjective is not to say that it isn't real. We can make truth claims about it. That is, we can be epistemologically objective about it. I hope that distinction is clear. To say that science is committed to epistemic objectivity is to say that science depends on certain epistemic values, values like coherence and simplicity and elegance and predictive power. If I told you that I had an extremely important scientific theory that was self-contradictory and needlessly complex and could not account

for past data and could make no predictions whatsoever, you would understand that I must be joking or otherwise speaking nonsense. We cannot separate statements of scientific fact from the underlying epistemic values of science. These values are axiomatic, which is to say that science does not discover them, or even attempt to justify them. It just presupposes their validity. If you suspect that I have just called the traditional distinction between facts and values into question, you would be right. And this is a point to which I will return.

For those unfamiliar with the moral landscape, here is my argument in brief. Morality and values depend upon the existence of conscious minds, and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of nature, whatever those turn out to be. Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right to a greater or lesser degree, and some will be wrong with respect to what they deem important in life. Many people worry that

any aspect of human subjectivity or culture could fit in the space I just provided. After all, a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream is a natural phenomenon, as is a preference for the comic Bill Burr over Bob Hope. Are we to imagine that there are universal truths about ice cream and comedy that admit of scientific analysis? Well, in a certain sense, yes, science could in principle account for why some of us prefer chocolate to vanilla, or why no one's favorite flavor of ice cream is aluminum. Comedy must also be susceptible to this

kind of study. There will be a fair amount of cultural and generational variation in what counts as funny, but there are basic principles of comedy, like the violation of expectations, the breaking of taboos, etc., that could be universal. Amusement to the point of laughter is a specific state of the human nervous system that can be scientifically studied. Why do some people laugh more readily than others? What exactly happens when we, quote, get a joke? These are ultimately questions about the human mind and brain. There will be scientific facts to be known here, and any differences in taste among human beings must be attributable to other facts that fall within the purview of science. If we were ever to arrive at a complete understanding of the human mind,

we would understand human preferences of all kinds, and we might even be able to change them. However, epistemic and ethical values appear to reach deeper than mere matters of taste, beyond how people happen to think and behave, to questions of how they should think and behave. And it is this notion of should that introduces a fair amount of confusion into any conversation about moral truth. I should note in passing, however, that I don't think the distinction between ethics and something like taste is as clear or as categorical as we might think. For instance, if a preference for chocolate ice cream allowed for the most rewarding experience a human being could have, while a preference for vanilla did not, we would deem it morally important to help people overcome any defect in their sense of taste

that caused them to prefer vanilla. In the same way that we currently treat people for curable forms of blindness, it seems to me that the boundary between mere aesthetics and moral imperative, the difference between not liking Matisse and not liking the golden rule, is more a matter of there being higher stakes

and consequences that reach into the lives of other a matter of there being higher stakes and consequences that reach into the lives of other people than of there being distinct classes of facts regarding the nature of human experience. There's much more to be said on this point, of course, but I'll pass it by for the time being. In my view, morality must be viewed in the context of our growing scientific understanding of the mind. If there are truths to be known about the mind, there will be truths to be known about how minds flourish. That is about well-being altogether. Consequently, there will be truths to be known about right and wrong and good and evil. Many critics of the moral landscape claim that my reliance on the concept of well-being was arbitrary and philosophically indefensible. Who's to say that well-being is important at all,

or that other things aren't far more important? How, for instance, could you convince someone who does not value well-being that he should value it? And even if one could justify well-being as the true foundation of morality, many have argued that one would need a metric by which it could be measured. Else there could be no such thing as moral truth in the scientific sense. There's an unnecessarily restrictive notion of science underlying this last claim, as though scientific truths only exist if we can have immediate and uncontroversial access to them in the lab.

A certain physicist, who will remain nameless here, was in the habit of saying things like, I don't know what a unit of well-being is, as though he were regretfully delivering the killing blow to my thesis. I would venture that he doesn't know what a unit of sadness is either, and units of joy and disgust and boredom and irony and envy and schadenfreude or any other mental state worth studying won't be forthcoming. If half of what many scientists say about the limits of science were true, the sciences of mind are not merely doomed, there would be no facts for them to understand in the first place. Consider the possibility of a much, much saner world than the one we currently live in. Imagine that due to remarkable breakthroughs in technology and

economics and psychological science and political skill, we created a genuine utopia on Earth. Needless to say, this wouldn't be boring because we will have wisely avoided all the boring utopias. Rather, we will have created a global civilization of astonishing creativity and security and happiness. However, let's imagine that some people weren't ready for this earthly paradise once it arrived. Some were psychopaths who, despite enjoying the general change in quality of life, were nevertheless eager to break into their neighbors' homes and torture them just for kicks. A few had preferences that were incompatible with the flourishing of whole societies. Try as he might, Kim Jong-un just couldn't shake the feeling

that his cognac didn't taste as sweet without millions of people starving beyond his palace gates. Given our advances in science, however, we are now able to alter preferences of this kind. In fact, we can painlessly deliver a firmware update to everyone. Imagine that we do that, and now the entirety of the species is fit to live in a global civilization that is as safe and as fun and as interesting

and as creative and as filled with love as it can be. It seems to me that this scenario cuts through the worry that the concept of well-being might leave out something that is worth caring about. For if you care about something that is not compatible with a peak of human flourishing, given the requisite changes in your brain, you would recognize that you were wrong to care about this thing in the first place. Wrong in what sense? Wrong in the sense that you didn't know what you were missing. This is the core of my argument. I'm claiming that there must be frontiers of human well-being that await our

discovery, and certain interests and preferences surely blind us to them. In this sense, epistemic and ethical values are fully entangled. There are horizons to well-being past which we cannot see. There are possible experiences of beauty and creativity and compassion that we will never discover. I think these are objective statements about the frontiers of subjective experience. However, it is true that our general approach to morality does not require that we maximize global well-being. There is this tension, for instance, between what may be good for us and what may be good for society. And much of ordinary morality is a matter of our grappling

with this tension. We're selfish to one degree or another, and we lack complete information about the consequences of our actions. And even where we have sufficient information, our interests and preferences often lead us to ignore it. But our failures to be motivated to seek higher goods or to motivate others to seek them do not suggest that no higher goods exist. In what sense can an action be morally good? And what does it mean to make a good action better? For instance, it seems good to me to buy my daughter a birthday present, all things considered, because it will make both of us happy. Few people would fault me for spending some of my time and money in this way. But what about all the little girls in the world who suffer terribly at this moment for want of resources? Here is where an

ethicist like Peter Singer will pounce, arguing that there actually is something morally questionable, possibly even reprehensible, about my buying my daughter a birthday present, given my knowledge of how much good my time and money could do elsewhere. What should I do? Singer's argument makes me uncomfortable, but only for a moment, because it's simply a fact about me that the suffering of other little girls is often out of sight and out of mind, and my daughter's birthday is no easier to ignore than an asteroid impact. Can I muster a philosophical defense of my narrow focus? Perhaps.

It might be that Singer's argument leaves out some important details. For instance, what would happen if everyone in the developed world ceased to shop for birthday presents and all other luxuries? Might the best of human civilization just come crashing down upon the worst? How can we spread wealth to the developing world if we do not create vast wealth in the first place? These reflections, self-serving and otherwise, land me in a toy store looking for something that isn't pink. So yes, it is true that my thoughts about global well-being didn't amount to much in this instance,

and yet most people wouldn't judge me for it. But what if there was a way for me to buy my daughter a birthday present and also cure another little girl of cancer at no extra cost? Wouldn't this be better than just buying the original present? What if there was a button I could push near the cash register that literally cured a distant little girl somewhere of cancer? Imagine if I declined the opportunity to push this button, saying, what is that to me? I don't care about other little girls and their cancers. Of course,

that would be monstrous, and it's only against an implicit notion of global well-being that we can judge my behavior to be less good than it might otherwise be. It is true that no one currently demands that I spend my time seeking in every instance to maximize global well-being, nor do I demand that of myself. But if global well-being could be maximized, that would be much better, by the only definition of better that makes any sense. by the only definition of better that makes any sense. I believe that this is an objectively true statement about subjective reality in this universe. The fact that we might not be motivated by a moral truth doesn't suggest that moral truths don't exist. Some of this comes down to confusion over a prescriptive rather than descriptive conception of ethics. It's the difference between should and can.

Whatever our preferences and capacities are at present, regardless of our failures to persuade others or ourselves to change our behaviors, our beliefs about good and evil must still relate to what is ultimately possible for human beings. And we can't think about this deeper reality by focusing on the narrow question of what a person should do in the gray areas of life, where we spend so much of our time. It is rather the extremes of human experience that throw sufficient light, by which we can see that we stand upon a moral landscape. For instance, are members of the Islamic State wrong about morality? Yes.

Really wrong? Yes. Can we say so from the perspective of science? Yes. If we know anything at all about human well-being, and we do, we know that the Islamic State is not leading anyone, including themselves, toward a peak on the moral landscape. We know to a moral certainty that human life can be better than it is in a society where they routinely decapitate people for

being too rational. When I wrote The Moral Landscape, I didn't appreciate how much ethical philosophy was conflated with concerns about personal motivation and public persuasion. For instance, it's widely imagined that a belief that one act is truly better than another, that is, that moral truths exist, must entail a commitment to acting in the prescribed way, that is, motivation. It must also rest on reasons that can be effectively communicated to others, that is, motivation. It must also rest on reasons that can be effectively communicated to others, that is, persuasion. If, for instance, I believe that I would be a better person and the world a marginally better place if I were a vegetarian

—this is a possible moral truth— then many people expect that I must be motivated to exclude meat from my diet, and I must be able to persuade others to do likewise. The fact that I'm not sufficiently motivated to do this suggests that my presumed knowledge of moral truth is specious. Either no such truths exist, or I do not in fact know them. The common idea is that for a moral claim to be objectively true, it must compel a person to follow it. Real values must cause action, not contingently, not in combination with other motives, but absolutely, and they in turn constitute rational reasons for such action. Otherwise, the philosopher David Hume would be right, and the only way for claims about moral

truth to be effective is for them to be combined with some associated passion or desire. Reason alone would be useless, but this paints an unrealistic picture of the human mind. Let's take a simpler case. Let's say that I want to lose 10 pounds. As it happens, I do, and I have absolutely no doubt that losing 10 pounds is possible. Okay, this is a biological truth. I also know that I would be marginally happier for having lost those pounds. This is a psychological truth. I'm also quite certain that I understand the process by which pounds can be lost. I need only eat less than I generally do and persist until I've lost the weight. This is another biological truth.

These beliefs are cognitively valid in that they describe objective truths about my body and mind and about how I would feel in a possible future. I am totally unconflicted in my desire to lose the weight in that I absolutely want to lose it. Unfortunately, that's not all I want. I also want to eat ice cream,

preferably once a day. The fact that I am not sufficiently motivated to shun ice cream says nothing at all about my unconflicted desire to be thinner or the accuracy of my understanding of how to lose weight. My desire for ice cream is an independent fact about me, and gratifying this desire has consequences. The point, of course, is that we can know what is true without any doubt, and yet our knowledge is not guaranteed to produce behavior that is aligned with that truth. Such failures of will do not suggest that the relevant truths are just fictions. At this point, I think we should differentiate three projects that seem to me to be easily conflated, but which are in fact distinct and independently worthy endeavors. The first project is to understand what people do in the name of, quote, morality.

We can look at the world, witnessing all of the diverse behaviors and cultural norms and institutions and morally salient emotions like empathy and disgust, and we can study how these things affect human communities, both now and throughout history. We can examine all of these phenomena in as non-judgmental a way as possible and seek to understand them. We can understand them in evolutionary terms, and in any present generation we can understand them in psychological and neurobiological terms. And we can call the fruits of this effort a, quote, science of morality. This would be a purely descriptive science of a sort that many scientists have begun to build. And for most scientists, this descriptive project seems to exhaust all

the legitimate points of contact between science and morality. But I think there are two other projects we could concern ourselves with, which are arguably more important. The second project would be to actually understand how good human life could be. This would require that we get clearer about what we mean and should mean by terms like right and wrong and good and evil. We would need to understand how our moral intuitions relate to human experience altogether and to use this understanding to think more intelligently about how to maximize human well-being. Of course, philosophers may think this begs some of the important questions, and I'll get back to that. Again, the lurking question is, what makes well-being. Of course, philosophers may think this begs some of the important questions, and I'll get back to that. Again, the lurking question is, what makes well-being important?

But assuming for the moment that it is important, understanding how to maximize it is a distinct project. How good could human life be, and how can we get there? How do we avoid making the mistakes that would prevent us from getting there? What are the paths upward on the moral landscape? The third project is a project of persuasion. How can we persuade all of the people who are committed to silly and harmful things in the name of, quote, morality to change their commitments and to lead better lives. I think this third project is actually the most important project facing humanity at the moment. It subsumes everything else we could care about, from arresting climate change, to reducing the risk of nuclear war, to curing cancer, to saving the whales. Any effort that requires that we collectively get our

priorities straight and marshal our time and resources would fall within the scope of this project. To build a viable global civilization, we must begin to converge on the same economic and political and environmental goals. Obviously the project of moral persuasion is very difficult, but it strikes me as especially difficult if you can't figure out in what sense anyone could ever be right or wrong about questions of human values. Understanding right and wrong in universal terms is Project 2, and that's what I'm focused on. Now, there are impediments to thinking about Project 2, the main one being that most right-thinking, well-educated people, certainly most scientists and public intellectuals,

and I suspect most journalists, have been convinced that something in the last 200 years of our intellectual progress has made it impossible to actually speak about moral truth. Not because human experience is so difficult to study, or the brain too complex, but because there is thought to be no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever really right or wrong about questions of value. My aim in the moral

landscape was to undermine this assumption, because I think it is based on several fallacies and double standards, and frankly on some bad philosophy. And apart from being just wrong, this view has terrible consequences. For instance, in 1947, when the United Nations was attempting to formulate a universal declaration of human rights, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward and said that it just couldn't be done, for this would be to merely foist one provincial notion of human rights on the rest of humanity. Any notion of human rights is the product of culture, and declaring a Any notion of human rights is the product of culture, and declaring a universal conception of human rights is an intellectually illegitimate thing to do.

This was the best our social sciences could do with the crematoria of Auschwitz still smoking. It has long been obvious that we need to converge as a global civilization in our beliefs about how we should treat one another. For this, we need some universal conception of right and wrong. So in addition to just not being true, I think skepticism about moral truth actually has consequences that really should worry us. Definitions matter, and in science we're always in the business of making definitions that serve to constrain the path of any conversation. There's nothing about this process that condemns us to the epistemological relativism or subjectivism that nullifies truth claims.

For instance, we define physics as, loosely speaking, our best effort to understand the behavior of matter and energy in the universe. The discipline of physics is defined with respect to the goal of understanding and energy in the universe. The discipline of physics is defined with respect to the goal of understanding how the physical world behaves. Now, of course, anyone is free to define physics in some other way. A creationist could say, well, that's just not my definition of physics. My physics is designed to match the book of Genesis. But we are free to respond to such a person by saying, you really don't belong at this conference. That's not the physics we're interested in. Such a gesture of exclusion is legitimate and necessary. The fact that the discourse of physics is not sufficient

to silence such a person, the fact that he cannot be brought into our conversation and subdued by its terms does not undermine physics as a domain of objective truth. And yet on the topic of morality, we seem to think that the possibility of differing opinions puts the very reality of the subject matter in question. The fact that someone can come forward and say that his morality has nothing to do with human flourishing, that it depends upon following Sharia law, for instance. The fact that such a position can be articulated has caused people to think that there's no such thing as moral truth. Morality must be a human invention, because look, that guy has a morality of his own. The Taliban don't agree with us.

Who are we to say they're wrong? But this is just a fallacy. We have an intuitive physics, but much of our intuitive physics is wrong with respect to the goal of understanding how matter and energy behave in this universe. I'm saying that we also have an intuitive morality, and much of our intuitive morality may be wrong with respect to the goal of maximizing human flourishing and with reference to facts that govern the well-being of conscious creatures generally. I'll now deal with the fundamental challenge to the thesis I put forward in The Moral Landscape, and argue, briefly, that the only sphere of legitimate moral concern is the well-being of conscious creatures. I'll say a few words in defense of this assertion, but I think the idea

that it even has to be defended is the product of several fallacies and double standards that we're not noticing, and I'll mention a few. I'm claiming that consciousness is the only context in which we can talk about morality and human values. Why is consciousness not an arbitrary starting point? Well, what's the alternative? Just imagine someone coming to you. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast.

The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.