Sam's Argument

Sam Harris has written a piece on American gun law called The Riddle of the Gun. He starts off promisingly:

Unlike most Americans, I stand on both sides of this debate. I understand the apprehension that many people feel toward “gun culture,” and I share their outrage over the political influence of the National Rifle Association. How is it that we live in a society in which one of the most compelling interests is gun ownership? Where is the science lobby? The safe food lobby? Where is the get-the-Chinese-lead-paint-out-of-our-kids’-toys lobby? When viewed from any other civilized society on earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis.

Quite so. But it soon becomes plain that he may be a victim of that collective psychosis, when he says:

I am surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs.

Is he really? I doubt anyone intelligent thinks that. Nevertheless, Sam is one of the clearest thinkers on any subject, even if he is occasionally wrong, so I think it should be fruitful to look at any argument he presents, since it is likely to be among the best the pro-gun lobby can offer. His counters to the 'liberal' position are unconvincing, to say the least, so what does he say positively in favour of guns?

He presents an argument here:

Given the level of violence in our society, the ubiquity of guns, and the fact that our penitentiaries function like graduate schools for violent criminals, I think sane, law-abiding people should have access to guns. In that respect, I support the rights of gun owners.

It's pretty splintered, but I think his argument goes something like this:

P1 We live in a society with a high level of violence.
P2 There are guns everywhere.
P3 Our prisons manufacture violent criminals.
P4 Everyone should be responsible for their own defence.
P5 The only way to defend oneself from a violent criminal in a violent society where guns are everywhere is with a gun.

C Everyone sane and law-abiding should have access to guns.

Well, I don't think this is even valid, and maybe it can be tidied up some more, but it will do for starters.

P1 he undermines himself by defending the levels of violence in US society when defending gun ownership:

Fifty-five million kids went to school on the day that 20 were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Even in the United States, therefore, the chances of a child’s dying in a school shooting are remote. 

He is well aware of the dangers associated with our perception of risk:

As my friend Steven Pinker demonstrates in his monumental study of human violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, our perception of danger is easily distorted by rare events.

Now it may be that he has good reason to own a gun and to train to use it correctly, but his situation should not be used to justify a position for the rest of the population. The statistics show that Americans are unlikely to be injured by a gun, as he knows, which militates against P1. The statistic we're trying to explain and remedy, as he also knows, is the discrepancy with the rest of the developed world. It seems very plausible to me that this gap could be reduced by making it more difficult for people in the US to own guns. So the 'ubiquity of guns' is the very thing that could be addressed, not used as P2 in his argument in favour of their ubiquity.

P3 may well be true, but is hardly different to other countries.

P4, it strikes me, is obviously wrong, in a civilised society. Not everyone is capable of defending themselves so are we supposed to let the young, the old, women, the ill, the underprivileged and the just plain incompetent gun users, get shot up by violent criminals? Now, maybe I'm being unfair, and he would say the premise is more like: everyone should have the right to defend themselves. The problem is that it's obviously a universal right he's arguing for, so this will still leave a large constituency vulnerable to the mass of armed members of society.

P5 I also think is obviously wrong, and betrays a rather simplistic and shocking vision of the way a civilised society should function. Self-defence does not simply mean shooting someone before they shoot you. As he himself also points out, being armed with a gun won't necessarily act as a deterrent, but can act as an incendiary:

But, emotions being what they are, [a weapon] often doesn’t [preempt further violence] —and the owner of the weapon can find himself resorting to deadly force in a circumstance that would not otherwise have called for it. 

Yes, as a soldier in a war-zone I would think it better that I had a gun. As a civilian in the midst of violent civil unrest, I might think it better that I had a gun. In a society that had broken down a bit, I might think it better that I had a gun. But I don't think any of our societies, including the US, come close to the sort of state that requires that sort of thinking.

So I don't think Sam's argument works at all.

Some more thoughts from Sean Faircloth here, and some cautionary words from Russell Blackford here.

Read more »

The Point of Free Will

I've been enjoying (or is it suffering?) another round of free will posts. Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne state the obvious, that contra-causal free will does not exist, and so conclude, contra compatibilists like Daniel Dennett, that free will does not exist. This is not entirely unreasonable, since free will is commonly considered to mean contra-causal free will. And maybe they're right, that it should be held to that definition; for philosophers to amend free will to some other thing allows theologians the get-out of pointing to many respected philos who believe in a free will that has nothing to do with their bankrupt theological concept of free will.

But I'm really not that fussed about the use of the term. I've previously discussed how contra causal free will makes little sense whether determinism is true or false. But rather than rescuing free will, I do think it's worth rescuing the point of free will; or why responsibility is worth laying.

In another piece Coyne says this:

I still see myself as a meat robot, and I don’t accept free will as meaning “I could have done something different had circumstances been different.” For in that sense computers and nearly all living organisms also have “free will”.

This strikes me as a slightly strange thing to say; the first part seems to contradict the second, since if he's a 'meat robot' then obviously robots too can have free will, and we surely treat many living organisms as if they too have free will. I treat my cats as if they have causal influence over their own behaviour, for example. And there's a sense in which Coyne is suggesting some kind of human exceptionalism; if we allow free will then I see no reason to deny it to computers and living organisms a priori. 

I suppose he means something more, that any computer or any living organism would have free will under the definition offered - it's too liberal. But I think this gives a clue to the point of free will; if a computer or living organism is sufficiently complex that it can change its behaviour because it has an internal guiding mechanism that responds in a certain way to external prompts, then we have a reason to talk about the machine having something like 'free will'. We aren't puppeteers in these circumstances, but nudge button operators.

What difference does this make? If we want to affect our futures, and I assume we all do, we need to differentiate between objects that can be remonstrated with and those that can't. Now, although I do remonstrate with my computer, I understand it's pointless: I could change how it operates, but it could not reflect on its actions. However, a more complicated computer, like Marvin, might be worth remonstrating with, if it has an internal guidance and reflection system open to external prompts and information. Similarly, experience shows that my cat is worth remonstrating with too, even if it's less effective than with fellow humans; she doesn't have all the tools or understanding available to most humans. But notice, there are humans who also can't be remonstrated with, so membership of homo sapiens does not determine who is in this group.

In another Coyne piece, in response to some issues that Russell Blackford raises, he says this:

When Russell says “I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise,” he seems to mean only, “had I been somebody other than Russell Blackford at that moment, I might have done otherwise.” And in what sense is that free will? It’s one thing for people to chastise somebody for making a “bad choice” (an emotion that feels natural but is at bottom irrational), but it’s a different thing to think that somebody actually can act in different ways at a single time.

To me, this highlights the very point of free will; to identify the nature of particular agencies, so we can take an appropriate course of action in the light of that nature. I don't think Russell, or anyone, would have behaved differently under the same circumstances (that would just make us randomly-acting beings) - but the difference between how Russell behaves and how another person behaves under the same circumstances reflects a freedom to act differently which is open to all agencies. So we can then apply a 'blame' in proportion to the 'culpability' of each agency going back in the causal chain. I use scare quotes to recognise that the agencies weren't 'free' from their own causal determinism, but we can now usefully employ this information to address any problems caused, or reward any benefits resulting, in the knowledge that the responsibility reflects an agency's ability to self-regulate. We wouldn't allocate moral responsibility to the snow in deadly avalanches, but we might to folk who detonate charges setting off deadly avalanches, because the former has no agency that would respond to remonstration, but the latter has. And such allocation would actually require determinism, or, at least, if there are any indeterminate events, these would be irrelevant to any such moral calculation.

So, in summary, I'm happy to jettison free will; I'm just not so happy to jettison the point of free will, if this is what it is. It does appear that Sam Harris, at least, agrees:

...I argue that people are mistaken in believing that they are free in the usual sense. I claim that this realization has consequences—good ones, for the most part—and for that reason we should not gloss over it by revising our definition of “free will” too quickly. Dan believes that his adjustment of the concept has allowed him to provide a description of human agency and moral responsibility that preserves many of our intuitions about ourselves and still fits the facts. I agree, for the most part, but I think that other problems need to be solved.

Read more »

Harris on Divine Morality

This debate, Does Good come from God?,  is an interesting contrast of styles. Some have 'awarded' the debate points to William Lane Craig, since he responds more formally to Sam Harris's points, while Harris sticks, mostly, to his agenda, and doesn't really expose WLC's argument. This may be because he didn't want to spend too much time on WLC's nonsense so as not to legitimise it.

But, while not formally objecting to WLC's particular argument, Harris did rather brilliantly expose the poverty of the divine command theory. In his original statement, Harris sets out his stall: because there is a worst possible state of affairs that we want to avoid, we can therefore safely assume that morality is the attempt to make the world better than that. And so, human flourishing determines morality. This is a pretty controversial position to say the least, and not necessarily true; I'm just putting that up there to set the scene for Harris to address WLC's Christian world view:

Ask yourselves: what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell?

So Lane Craig has laughed at the idea that well being could be a sufficient determinant for morality (which it may well not be), but his philosophy is built on the very same idea. And Harris goes on to show how the nature of Christian consequentialism can logically lead to immoral behaviour, and because of that, *is* an immoral doctrine to hold and preach.

Well I'm told it's rather hot there, for one. Dr Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality.The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well being of human souls. Now happily, there is absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this theistic framework in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Nine million children die each year before the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami, of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days, killing only those under five. 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, seventeen or so a minute, that means before I can get to the end of this sentence some few children will have died in terror and agony. 

Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered.

According to Dr Craig, this is all part of God's plan. 

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. Is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr Craig's view, many of these people will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Think about that. Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and the missed the revelation. 

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison. 

So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus; he engineered the circumstances of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. 

On the other hand, on Dr Craig's account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in heaven, after death. One thing should be crystal clear to you, this vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

Please notice the double standard that people like Dr Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil. We're told that God is kind and loving and just and intrinsically good, but when someone like me points out the rather compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that God is mysterious. Who can understand God's will? This merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. If something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive changes in his life, then we're told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious. This is how you [Christians] play tennis without the net. 

And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome, when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith is the perfection of narcissism; God loves me, don't you know? He cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we were giving up hope he found a banker who was willing to give my mother a mortgage. Given all that this God of yours doesn't accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instance, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently for the suffering of other human beings. 

And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery; why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft? Now, of course, there are ways of not taking these questions to heart. According to Dr Craig's Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties, God does not have to be good, whatever He commands is good, so whenever He commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behaviour becomes intrinsically good because He commanded it.

Here we're being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. Psychotic because it's completely delusional, there is no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled over by an invisible monster, Yahweh. But is is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings, that so easily rationalises the slaughter of children.

I should point out here that the well-being of humans is being ignored by theists in this world, because of the pre-occupation with the afterlife, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

Just think about the Muslims, at this moment, who are blowing themselves up convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr Craig can say against their behaviour in moral terms apart from his own faith based claim that they're praying to the wrong God.

If they had the right God what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Now, I'm obviously not saying that Dr Craig or religious people are all psychopaths and psychotic, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own. if you wake up tomorrow morning, thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you've lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic.

A good demonstration of how religion legitimises ridiculous beliefs.

And I'm not the first person to notice that it's a very strange loving God that would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. If you lived two thousand years ago, there was evidence galore and he was just performing miracles but apparently he got tired of being so helpful. And so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine's implausibility, and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all too human origins of scripture, it becomes more and more difficult. It's not just the generic God that Dr Craig is recommending, it's God the Father and Jesus the Son. Christianity, on Dr Craig's account, is the true moral wealth of the world.

I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame: Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice, it is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son - John 3:16. The idea is that Jesus suffered crucifixion so none may suffer hell. Except those billions in India. And billions like them throughout history.

This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children in the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Just think about that. In vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes, people like ourselves thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible.

If there is a less moral framework than the one Dr Craig is proposing, I haven't heard of it.

Well said, Sam, imho.

Read more »

Moral Inscrutability

Russell Blackford has written a good blog post summarising the philosophically-minded objections to Sam Harris's is-ought pseudo-dismissal. I'm basically in agreement with Harris, although note the (valid) objections of a number of philos about the meta-ethics - I just don't think they matter *that* much! But Russell makes a good point when he summarises Harris's argument comparing his putative moral science to medical science:

Unfortunately, we are nowhere near to having the sort of general agreement as to the goals of, well, moralising, if you will, that we do with practising medicine or science. So it's no use arguing:

P1. The ultimate goals of medicine and science are contestable
P2. We can practice medicine and science with no terrible difficulty.
C. We can, with no terrible difficulty, practice anything whose ultimate goals are contestable.
Hence, we can, with no terrible difficulty, practice a "science of morality".

The correct conclusion, at "C.", is that we can, with no terrible difficulty, practice some things whose ultimate goals are contestable. As far as this argument goes, whether morality is one of those things is left as an open question. It really depends on just how much debate there is about a practice's ultimate goals, and how this pans out in practice. Unfortunately, the ultimate goals of morality are so controversial, and so disputed at such a deep level, that it's not surprising when much of what goes on in moral philosophy relates to trying to get agreement on the ultimate goals.

I think this is right, at a foundational level. However, Russell agrees that applying ethics is something that can be done:

But Harris doesn't actually need to make an unheralded breakthrough in metaethics to establish his main point about the possibility and desirability of criticising moral systems. If those moral systems are harmful to human wellbeing ... then criticise them for it! I think hammers exist to drive nails and that it's approximately correct to say that moral systems exist to conduce to human wellbeing and, to some extent, the wellbeing of other sentient creatures.

And of course each society establishes a way of living that announces their conception of the best morality - it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

The meta-ethical problems arise, it seems to me, from the inscrutable origins of our morality. Because we have evolved in the environment according to events that are impossible to retrodict, let alone predict, we find it very difficult to determine the cause of every animal's every trait. The morality we have (signs of which appear in other mammals) has been a necessary development for our survival, or is a consequence of another feature that was necessary for our survival. But it's still just a *feeling*, so consequently isn't an *infallible* guide to what is right for us. It's not a bad starting point, but because many think they have nothing else to go on, they trust their 'gut' feeling over all else.

The religious turn morality's *fallibility* (observed empirically) and turn it into *arbitrariness*. To bolster their flagging confidence in 'what is right', they invest a God with good and call it absolute and objective. Much analysis down the years has yet to show that this approach is tenable or, indeed, plausible. One would think that a good-invested God might have an effect substantially different from an evil-invested God, but it's difficult to see how either could result in the universe we have.

The rationalist can accept that we have a sense of what is good without it being absolute, so tempers it with a good dose of reason and evidence; like everything else in life.

Read more »

Burka or bikini?

People seem to burst a blood vessel when someone suggests it might be possible to study morality *scientifically*; I've no idea why, other than one's natural distrust for authority or, perhaps, authoritarianism. But of course morality is, and has been, studied scientifically by many; societies down the ages have listened to a mixture of experts, charlatans (including the religious who claim bogus authority) and the zeitgeist, and then enacted a 'universal' morality through their varying legislatures. This is all seen as perfectly normal, but if Sam Harris suggests an entirely *informed* approach, accusations of moral hegemony are made. A bit of moderation is needed, I feel. Here's his talk at TED 2010:

Surely the is-ought problem is overstated? Isn't the point that you can't get to an ought *simply* from a fact about the world; one has to add a 'want'. But 'wants' are facts about the world too, so to say that studying how things are is not going to inform our morality seems astounding to me. How else are we going to decide what's right?

Now, I'm a little uncomfortable, as is no doubt everyone, at the idea of ethical experts set up as some kind of moral arbitration court, determining a universal morality. However, that's not how *science* works. If instead a moral *science* could be established, with ethicists publishing papers and data in support, a moral *consensus* could be worked towards. Of course this is roughly what happens now, only there is nothing formal in the process and entirely unevidenced approaches to morality are considered, which allows arbitrary *prejudices* to become enshrined in our morality.

I don't think it's too much to ask to try to prevent that.

UPDATE:

Sam is inviting criticisms of his talk here. Most take issue with the meta-ethical issues raised, I think, questioning the quest for happiness he assumes, and so on; that there are, at bottom, moral axioms that are inscrutable to science. This seems to be accepted by many, although I'm not sure (as ever) we can ever know that. As with all other areas of enquiry, I think it's best to carry on *as if* we will be able to uncover some argument supported by data that allows us to scientifically decide such issues. In any case, it's sufficient, and scientific, in the interim to take putative axioms and examine situations based on those. More than that, it's what we do *now*! And matters that may have been considered axiomatic in the past have been examined scientifically and been questioned, and then pronounced non-axiomatic, so I don't see that these things are immune from study, even if one considers there will always be an axiom at bottom.

Of course, I'm no ethicist, as no doubt an expert could tell!

FURTHER UPDATE:

Sam has posted a response to some of the most common criticisms.

Not had a chance to read it yet!

Harris seems to adopt an ontological Epicurean approach, making pleasure seeking axiomatic, as opposed to the functional, purpose-driven Aristotelian approach. I think it's an interesting observation that, IMO, the Epicurean view appears more in line with what we've discovered about reality than the other, and this shows how science *can* inform morality, and continue to inform it.

Sam says, more eloquently of course, what I try to say above:

One of my critics put the concern this way: “Why should human wellbeing matter to us?” Well, why should logical coherence matter to us? Why should historical veracity matter to us? Why should experimental evidence matter to us? These are profound and profoundly stupid questions. No framework of knowledge can withstand such skepticism, for none is perfectly self-justifying. Without being able to stand entirely outside of a framework, one is always open to the charge that the framework rests on nothing, that its axioms are wrong, or that there are foundational questions it cannot answer. So what?

"No framework of knowledge can withstand such skepticism..."; I'm *inclined* to agree, and it's where I've always struggled with the is-ought distinction. Combined with the fact that, apparently, even though we cannot determine scientifically what we *should* do, that does seem to be what we always *have* done. Sure, people have posited odd moralities that have taken hold, but no adult accepts *any* normative advice without some thought, and no society does it without debate.

So, as I said above, let's do it better. I think that's what Sam's calling for. I've been persuaded by Dennett and others that the mystery of 'consciousness' is that we think it's mysterious; it's possible there is something similar going on with morality; the mystery of it is we *think* it's mysterious, not that it *is* mysterious. However, I will need to read more moral philosophy to even begin to justify such a statement.

Read more »