We told you so

When Sam Harris first broached the topic of his latest book in a YouTube video, Sean Carroll made a thoughtful criticism of the talk, and Harris replied via Twitter: "Please know that I will be responding to this stupidity." He did reply, though never successfully addressing the arguments offered against his position. He's studiously ignored the most salient criticisms of his thesis since then (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here, and here), perhaps hoping no one would notice the giant hole in the middle of his argument.

Now that his book's come out, it turns out he didn't address those obvious criticisms. The New York Times review notes the biggest problem:

how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasnât, then the premise of Harrisâs all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

This was at the center of what a lot of people were complaining about, and Harris never addressed it before. Apparently his book doesn't either. And it seems that the other obvious problems with the short version we got before are not addressed in the book either.

Reviewer Kwame Anthony Appiah continues:

In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, whatâs wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?

Itâs not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.

Thatâs the case even with something as basic as whatâs meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an important value. So does it count against your well-being if your happiness is based on an illusion â say, the false belief that your wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come down. But if he thinks that well-being has an objective component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact.

Harris was a philosophy major at Stanford, but he is inclined to scant most of what philosophers have had to say about well-being. There is, for example, a movement in contemporary philosophy and economics known as âthe capabilities approach,â which takes seriously the question of identifying the components of well-being and measuring them. But neither of the two leading exponents of this approach â the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum â gets a mention in the book.

The most compelling strand in âThe Moral Landscapeâ is its unspooling diatribe against relativismâ¦

You might suppose, reading this book, that this anti-relativism was controversial among philosophers. So it may be worth pointing out that a recent survey of a large proportion of the worldâs academic philosophers revealed that they are more than twice as likely to favor moral realism â the view that there are moral facts â than to favor moral anti-realism. Two thirds of them, it turns out, are also what we call cognitivists, believing that many (and perhaps all) moral claims are either true or false. And Harris himself concedes that few philosophers âhave ever answered to the name of âmoral relativist.â â Given that, he might have spent more time with some of the many arguments against relativism that philosophers have offered. If he had, he might have noticed that you can hold that there are moral truths that can be rationally investigated without holding that the experimental sciences provide the right methods for doing so.

â¦a real contribution to the old project of a ânaturalized ethicsâ would have required a fuller engagement with its contradictions and complications. Instead, the landscape that the book calls to mind is that of a city a few days after a snowstorm. A marvelously clear avenue stretches before us, but the looming banks to either side betray how much has been unceremoniously swept aside.

I'm sure this will also be dismissed as "stupidity," which will only validate the view of those who think Harris is a crank. A lot of us tried to point out the basic, obvious, trivial flaws in Harris's logic, and he blew off our concerns, calling them stupid and treating anyone who disagrees with him as if they have no credibility or insight. But we do, and the more widely he repeats the same crankish arguments, the more widely he'll bring discredit upon the range of views he's trying to advocate, including his atheism.

To paraphrase St. Augustine: even a non-[atheist] knows something about morality, and science. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a theist to hear an atheist talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in an atheist and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of non-theists think our writers hold such opinions, and nontheists in general are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find an atheist mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions, how are they going to believe us in matters concerning science, metaphysics, and morality, when they think atheist writings are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of atheism bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not atheists.

Harris, the reviewer notes, stakes out a strong position in favor of truth, which is good. But it leaves me wondering why he'd be so cavalier about the accuracy and validity of the arguments he makes. Does he think errors obvious to people watching his talk and his posts on HuffPo and his own website will not be obvious to folks reading his book? Does he think there's no truth to the arguments of the many philosophers he dismisses? Does he think it's honest and truthful to omit any mention of philosophers who he disagrees with (rather than engaging obvious ripostes from their philosophies, and showing people why he rejects them)?

I'm sure there are lots of people in his general camp (even beyond the New/gnu/Extreme/Affirmative Atheist camp) who would like him to be right. How awesome would it be to say to an anti-abortion activist: "sorry, your moral system is scientifically disproven, like geocentrism"? But talking about abortion gets to the core of Harris's problem: to whom we accord moral status (is an 8-cell embryo morally equivalent to an adult human?), how much status we accord to sentient non-humans (we accord chimps fewer rights than humans, but where does an 8-cell embryo fall on that axis?), and how we balance different people's needs (must we let a woman die to protect the life of an embryo?) are all questions that are fundamentally about values, and that are not ultimately scientific, and however much Harris wishes otherwise, he can't answer them.