If there is a moral landscape, is Sam Harris’s book a map?

In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010), neuroscientist  Sam Harris argues that science is uniquely qualified to answer moral questions. A committed materialist atheist, he offers to steer a course between two widely held views: dogmatism (God has woven moral good and evil into the fabric of reality) and relativism (giving voice to “one’s apish urges, cultural biases, and philosophical confusion”).

Mostly, he wants to rescue atheism from relativism: “If there’s no God, everything is permitted.” For this purpose, he posits morality as “an undeveloped branch of science.” The view that science should play a key role in deciding morality and law is not unique; it surfaced as early as 1911. In an editorial, Scientific American excoriated “The absurdity of legislation to cure social evils without scientific facts to base that legislation upon.” More on the earlier absurdity later.

Harris’s project starts with the following basic assumptions: “… science should one day be able to make very precise claims about which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and which are worth abandoning.” He contrasts his view with that of atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor, who says,

Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition.

Harris responds, “the scientific study of morality and human happiness is well underway. This research is bound to bring science into conflict with religious orthodoxy and popular opinion . . . ”

Okay, one wheel just fell off. If the research “is bound to” bring science into conflict with religious orthodoxy and popular opinion about what produces happiness, why should the researchers believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong?

The title, The Moral Landscape, refers to a hypothetical space between the “heights of potential well-being” and “the deepest possible suffering.” Harris advocates a form of utilitarianism (well-being as the goal), but his thinking seems confused. For example, at p. 62 he calls himself a “consequentialist,” yet by p. 66, his sympathies lie with “moral realism.” The two are incompatible in many circumstances: A consequentialist may say that one is justified in stealing from an unjust employer; a realist would say it was not justified to steal, period. In any event, well-being is, Harris says, “perpetually open to revision” due to new circumstances and findings. So Harris is a relativist after all.

Many atheists write good philosophy; Raymond Tallis and Thomas Nagel come to mind. But Harris, unfortunately, has not thought long, deeply, or broadly enough to be numbered among them.

Harris’s arguments against moral relativism (despite his own, perhaps unrecognized preference ) are mostly beside the point. First, most people who call themselves moral relativists are not in fact relativists at all. The same woman who insists that everything is relative can be passionately pro-abortion; the same man who insists that there is no way of knowing what is true may want any teacher who doubts Darwinian evolution fired on the spot. What they both mean is that they are interested in defending only those moral propositions that appeal to them emotionally. Theirs is a character problem, not a philosophical one, and Sam Harris’s guidance would be completely lost on them.

About dogmatism, Harris is no fit judge. A “new atheist” who indulges himself in strident bigotry against other viewpoints, he announces that faith-based religion is a “great engine of arrogance and bigotry”. He is glad to tell his readers that he is considered “intolerant” by other thinkers. To give some idea how he would handle a contentious issue, he announces that there can’t be reasoned doubt about evolution: “Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself.”

He’s pretty one-sided in other ways. He slams conservatives far more than liberals, and justifies himself in doing so. But by p. 102 it turns out that there is no point talking about morality anyway because free will is an illusion! In that case, what’s needed is not morality but moral engineering. Yet moral engineering has been tried, and is well recognized as one of the many branches of tyranny. The overall impression Harris creates, alas, is that he is not of much use at guiding us through the moral landscape because he doesn’t know it very well himself. He is one of a great number of fashionable authors these days who mainly know what they don’t believe. They are of as much use as the fellow who can tell you fifteen ways not to get to Chicago, but can’t tell you the one best way.

Now, about that century-old editorial: It was called “The Science of Breeding Better Men.” It extolled eugenics:

Editor’s note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a eugenicist ideal brought home the practical shortcomings of the philosophy.

But, in its day, eugenics was science. People who opposed it on moral grounds were “anti-science.”

It’s tempting to conclude that Harris reaches to science to uphold a morality that does not commend itself to reason or conscience.