Why Sam Harris is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape" (in 2020)
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- Опубліковано 12 лис 2020
- Sam Harris' book is very influential, and rightly so. However, there might be something we need to dive deeper in order to see what is really at stake here.
This video is shot in 2020, which might be a bit late to the existing conversation, but better late then never!
#philosophy #samharris #moraltruth
We also talked about Jordan Peterson, William Craig, since they had some interesting debates with Sam Harris.
This is a very interesting conversation, because it might imply that there is something important missing in the existing conversation on morality.
What do you think?
Dr Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Program at the University of Macau. He wrote the book: "The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality", which focuses on morality and amorality.
(If you buy this book, or any other by Hans-Georg Moeller, from the Columbia University Press website, please use the promo code CUP20 and you should get a 20% discount.)
Clips mentioned:
"The Logical Incoherency of Atheist Sam Harris":
• The Logical Incoherenc...
"The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig":
• The God Debate II: Har...
"Jordan Peterson Discuss Sam Harris' View On Religion":
• Jordan Peterson Discus...
"Jordan Peterson - The Origins of Morality":
• Jordan Peterson - The ...
Isn't the phrase "ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance" just a poetic definition of "arrogance"?
I think confidence and ignorance could describe a type of arrogance, but not all types of arrogance.
@@mattbritzius570 Kruger and Dunning: "Are we a joke for you?"😜
@@hape3862 lol
Arrogance is confidence made annoyingly evident. The term arrogance makes no determination on correctness. One can be arrogant and be wrong or right (and anyone who doesn't realize this is far less intelligent than I am).
@@mh4zd Exactly, being arrogantly correct or arrogantly knowledgeable is perfectly possible.
Damn this guy is good. In a relative sense of philosophy.
Damn, this guy is participating in the good!
To my mind, Sam Harris probably lost the right to claim excellence in the field of moral theory when he said that torture is okay. Surely the most 'absolute' form of 'never okay'...
@@Microtherion Sam Harris' reasons for wanting science to be able to deal with morality are 100% emotional.
It's like when you come to the end of Aristotle's philosophy, where the teaching is "pHiiLoSoPHeRz aRe the HaPPiiEsT", or Hegel's, where the teaching is, "eVeRyOnE iiZ GoD, BuT eSPeCiiaLLyy mE" . . .
No one understood this better than Socrates. He found that every artisan (specialist) knows a lot of useful things, but tends to overreach their knowledge in an arrogant, vain attempt to make it into a metaphor for everything. To the farmer, all life can be reduced to farming. I think that modern scientists are an example of this. Of course, the arrogance of a scientist is totally unquantifiable, which gives them a lot of room for plausible deniability.
@@lukehall8151 I'd certainly agree with most of that. (To be honest, I probably prefer Aristotle to Socrates, although we only 'know' Socrates via Plato, of course - and he had precisely the insight you're referring to either way). Something odd I've always noticed - which is more characteristic of 'professionals' of one kind or another, rather than workers (or even non-workers!) - is that they can take tremendous offence even when I agree with perhaps 60 or 70 per cent of their argument, but note some further factor they've overlooked.
Real people say 'Oh, that's a good point - we'd better think about that too'. Professionals tend to say 'How dare you? Do you really think I'd have overlooked something as obvious as that? Also, you're wrong'. It's often when I happen to have picked up something magpie-style, just through general interest, so I'm not really 'qualified' to know such things. When people 'become what they do' to an extreme degree, I'd almost say that they gradually become less intelligent. They can only argue with those they consider their 'peers' - and depending on just how arrogant they are (in Harris' case, very), they can eventually only argue with themselves...
@@Microtherion Exactly. People forget that a doctor is qualified because of the knowledge he got in the books and lectures, etc., at medical school, not the degree.
On jordon Peterson - “Some people say he’s a philosopher” so true lmao
That had me in fits 😂😂😂
Who does? The line between philosophy, theology and psychology is murky, but it's plainly obvious Peterson is closer to even theology than philosophy, and for good reason.
Isn't Peterson a psychology professor? I love listening to his podcasts in the morning. His way of talking inspire me to get off my ass and get to work.
I can agree that Peterson lectures are not philosophy lectures though, and they don't have to be. Inspiring people to take on responsibility and it's ok to face suffering with courage is plenty good.
@@mactheo2574 He tells you that but also adds his mental gymnastics on why the responsibility is on you and not on those that enabled the morally corrupt world we live in. These people should not face any consequences but you as a person has to do better to adapt to the situation we are in. Not the other way around, "I" need to better myself while people in power can do what they do. "Women can't get a job, work harder! Oh you are a person of color, work harder!" And so on. However, not once will he say "People in power makes decisions that people of color, sexuality, gender and so on, can get a job or have the same rights as them".
The line between Theology, Philosophy and Psychology is murky?
No it's not, fuck knows what you're reading.
It's very rare for me to have those amazing moments when someone perfectly puts into words something that I vaguely believed myself. This is the first time I've had such an experience in a long time.
this is the power of philosophy and the great philosophers have all done this for me, as well -- try to go and read them all and see who you like most and who you disagree with most!! it's fun :)
You just put into words the exact feeling I was struggling to put into words, thank you :)
Don’t forget Buddha. I believe he would disagree with the statements at 20:30-21:00. There is an absolute flourishing but counter-intuitively it is an internal phenomena, it isn’t measured externally by money, material objects, physical health etc. It can be described and pointed at (enlightenment) but cannot be understood until experienced. It is desirable and attainable by all. It does make external flourishing seem trivial because you realise it is not connected to internal flourishing/well-being, but it doesn’t take away from external flourishing, if anything it adds appreciation/gratitude.
This video reaffirmed what I felt when reading Max Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own, and I suggest you read him as well. Although the validity of his solution of anarchism is contestable, he makes very enticing points for amorality. In my view, amoralism is the true humanism - an acceptance of humanity for what it truly is, as opposed to humanist answer of everyone needing to become the "ideal Man".
Confirmation Bias and proud of it. That iss also a way if handling things.
To quote another philosopher "only a sith deals in absolutes."
Lol. "Only" a sith deals in absolutes huh?
I literally only realised that line was a joke, just now 😁
My favorite absolute.
Fascinating! Please make more videos about whatever
Agree jaja
Yes!!!!
Just like Zizek said, "If there's a God, then everything is permitted." Same with morality. If you believe you're morally justified, you'll do anything, let's demoralize our reasoning.
esp north americans seem to be so messed up with their childish ideas of religion that it bleeds into the best of them.
Who’s spacek?
What a profoundly idiotic statement.
What is bad about doing "anything"?
You presuppose some moral values and say that having any moral values is bad at achieving them.
I see that mistake everywhere people talk about ethics.
@@MrCmon113 Anything means doing something bad. But that doesn't have to be bad in a moral sense, it could be an objectively bad thing in terms of science or economics or whatever
It was Dostoyevsky
Love that trolley problem depiction: the track loops, so you only have to choose the order in which the people on the track die. much simpler
Trolley problem must be the one of the dumbest moral conundrums around.
No wonder they are so prevalent in analytical school of thought.
@@bozoc2572 how it's dumb? Plz explain
I think the trolley problem shows that we may be forced into a situation where we think in moral terms. I agree with Moeller when he says that moral language is used to justify a judgment but we may make several intermediary judgments during moral deliberation so that it's either impossible or "computationally" difficult to think in strictly amoral terms.
Before hearing Moeller's interpretation of Wittgenstein's "Lecture on Ethics" I believed Wittgenstein's view was that absolute moral language is necessarily senseless statements of subjective truth. But I had thought that Wittgenstein agreed with, say, Kierkegaard that such subjective truth is existentially important. I'm still not entirely convinced that it isn't. Take the case of self-driving cars and the trolley problem. Even if the solution is fundamentally subjective, it's necessary in order to put an autonomous entity on the road.
To me, I'd consider these to be moral claims, since he's saying we ought not use certain modes of thinking (i.e. dogmatic, absolute ones) because these modes are dangerous and cause problems. But I'm guessing that the way he's defining morality is restricted to absolute claims about right or wrong, so anything else is considered amoral.
Where's the line between something being merely normative and something being moral?
@@alexandram7257That's an interesting question, because there are a lot of normative claims that I would consider to be amoral, like "The Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones." I think it depends on whether or not the claim is making value-judgements that are connected to principles about what behaviors (or practices, policies, etc.) are right and wrong. Someone who says the Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones is implying that they believe the Beatles music has more value in some way, but they're not implying that you would be *doing* something wrong or harmful or unsacred by enjoying The Rolling Stones more.
If morality means whatever anyone defines it to be than it isnt real, it doesnt exist, you can make any claim & define morality to justify or attack it.
Hi mate, I believe It is not a moral statement syllogistically. Example: (If) you want your epistemology to be consistent - (Then) you (Ought) to align your religious paradigm with your meta-ethical paradigm. The (Ought), or more precisely, the (If - Then) is a hypothetical imperative, not a categorical imperative, therefore not a question of morality. But I agree that his definition of "amoral" slightly differs from mine
32:46 "... if we're no longer allowed to criticize religion cause we may offend people..." - I don't think the main criticism that people (mostly on the left) make of Sam Harris' ideas on Islam is based on fear of offending somebody. I think it is based on the fact that Sam Harris' stance against Islam is absolutistic and essentialist: 'Western civilization' good, Islam bad (so, in particular, Muslim people bad and, by extension, cultures of the middle East bad/inferior/ less developed). Paraphrasing, Harris says: "Islam (and by extension the cultures of the middle East) is an existential threat to Western Civilization". So people get nervous by his shallowness. If he just said "the fundamentalist part of Islam is a serious threat to the security of some Western countries", that would be very different. It would also open the dialogue on *why* those fundamentalist branches get activated against specific Western countries; which has often to do with the foreign policies of those Western countries...
yes. i think harris purposefully leans into this, or has leaned into this, to attract a conservative audience, but at some point (and he has already started doing this, by distancing himself from the "intellectual dark web" etc) he must disassociate himself from this due to the heavy religious dominance within the conservative right.
however, the debate HAS been muddled, because relevant critique of religion certainly has been mixed with racism
i don't see why it's so difficult to realize that "criticising islam" (or christianity, whatever) is just too vague a term, though. there are too many personal interpretations of islam from people who are not very religious but identify as muslim, and then differences between very religious schools of thought. since these ideas do not align with each other, you can't really "criticize islam" as a single thing. it's just about being more precise with your language, since it signified what you are actually talking about
Fundamentalist part of islam is islam nonetheless and something that's prevelant in most countries that claim to be Islamic
@@Rohit-ne2el that does not respond to my argument. did i say states like iran and saudi arabia are not fundamentalist?
@@molnet999 would have been great if there actually was a question in all those statements you made
I think more broadly the primary function, almost by definition, of philosophical thought is to wrestle with fundamentally unanswerable questions. Because many religious thinkers and movements think in absolute answers and are incredibly popular, there is something to be said about the value of critiquing that. Though I don’t think that is it’s largest utility but rather a nice biproduct of it.
I don't think that the argument of not pursuing a goal because it can make everything else obsolete, or trivial, is a sound one.
I don't really feel that one either.
To me it's sounds like an attempt of making a moral statement for the postmodern or moral relativistic concept of the superiority of the concept of subjective moralities over concepts of objective or universal moralities. "If you state that your goals/values/morals are good you implicitly state that other peoples goals/values/morals are less good". "And that is problematic" or read further: "That is bad or leads to other bad things or shouldn't be done".
He hints on his values with: "people killing people is bad", "people causing division is bad". And it seems to me at least, that he believes he can attain these goals, or help society attain these goals, by formulating and communicating these ideas of this so called amoralism. But doing so with this video he contradicts his teachings and devalues other subjective, objective/universal moralities or other peoples actions.
With these value statements he is implicitly saying or acting out that his values are better than those of some murderous dictator. How could he even imply such a thing and devalue other peoples morals and actions?
Even the uploading of this video with such moral statements embedded devalues other peoples values and actions. Say for example someone believing in objective moral values or just different subjective moral values.
I share these goals of less killing and less division, but I don't think that disseminating this framework of thought helps especially when it's so contradictory.
Postmodernism and/or amoralism goes too far when it's proponents deliberately or by accident hide, don't acknowledge or deny the values they are communicating, advocating or even aggressively pushing onto other people disguised as truths or facts or logically more solid philosophical concepts.
Hell. In postmodern terms even speaking about just one framework of moral epistemology in a video is already a value choice and should be criticized to pieces and everything established sent back to chaos as disseminating such an idea is an attempt of stating that there is something more true or more valuable in it than in other concepts.
@@dragonsaul That really explains the problem in a persuasive way!
Yeah, it's mostly saying "if this was the case, then I wouldn't really like the world, so it better not be". Sometimes the world works in ways you don't like.
> To me it's sounds like an attempt of making a moral statement for the postmodern or moral relativistic concept of the superiority of the concept of subjective moralities over concepts of objective or universal moralities. "If you state that your goals/values/morals are good you implicitly state that other peoples goals/values/morals are less good". "And that is problematic" or read further: "That is bad or leads to other bad things or shouldn't be done".
But this is exactly in fact what postmodernism tends to do. For example, my argument against colonising and invading other populations to push your culture on them would be that while different cultures and customs definitely CAN have different moral worth - I could not possibly endorse a culture that for example thinks human sacrifice to the Gods is a necessary and good thing - in practice, any attempt to change those cultures by force results in even worse immorality (both because forcing people to change their beliefs is in itself bad, as it interferes with their freedom, and because the whole invading and plundering bit is also very bad, not to mention no one then turns out to be so incorruptible to really carry it out just for the sake of those they're invading rather than simply trying to make a pretty penny off it). However, staunch postmodernists will seriously argue to you that you just have no right to judge cultures in _any_ way just because they're other cultures, leading to the absurd contradiction that somehow for example misgendering a trans person is horrible bigotry but at the same time so is criticising a culture that kills LGBT people by stoning.
I also think it's what people like Sam Harris tend to push against. It's important to have perspective and not hold one's moral beliefs perfect and so absolute that they warrant being pushed onto others at any cost. That's the mindset of a fundamentalist. But at the same time, no one can truly claim to be a perfect moral relativist, because such a person would have no morals at all. I can only be a perfect relativist when it comes to actions that people take that only affect themselves. But another thing that postmodernism and left-wing thinking in general puts (rightly) a lot of focus on is how entangled our actions are in a complex society, with almost everything affecting someone else in some form, so obviously it becomes natural that morals can't ever be so simple as "you do what you like, and let me do what I like". And to that end, drawing lines at cultures or nationalities or whatever is arbitrary as anything else. As long as you think you have anything to say that is more right than someone else does (and boy do these types usually have A LOT of that!), you aren't a perfect relativist, so don't pretend to be.
I find the analogues between morality and religion to be the most convincing argument for amoralism, and I can even extend it to contemporary examples.
A frequent criticism atheists have of religion is the rejection of religious morality, whether it's sin or haram or whatever. By grouping cursing God's name with murder, we not only ensure that people will try to not commit acts of blasphemy but also going as far as occasionally killing someone for blasphemy as good. So by having this a moral code, we not only end up killing more people but think it's the right thing to do.
A similar example exists in the contemporary criminal justice code of your average liberal democracy, where we group the consumption of marijuana with murder under the label of "crime" and as a result we view it as good for police officers to occasionally use lethal force in apprehending someone for the consumption of the vice extract of a green plant. This is commonly believed for some specific examples as obvious as marijuana, but more radical groups (prison abolitionist movement) believe this logic can extend to the whole criminal justice system, which is the sort of thing amoralism seems to be about.
I think this is roughly what the professor meant when he said we shouldn't pursue the goal of an objective morality. "Objective Morality" is the holy grail that, if history is a good indication, will lead us to justify the suffering we wanted to prevent.
Morality is a social construct, and is, therefore, always in flux. It depends on what might be gained, and what might be lost by adhering to it. It depends on empathy, but empathy can be fungible depnding on the circumnstances. Morality, like freedom, is at best, a negotiation based on how well our own needs are currently being satisfied. Humans often prefer order over principle. When order is at risk, morality becomes negotiable. I think the philosophy of homicide detectives sum it up best: "Under the right circumnstances, anybody is capable of anything."
Not all morality is a social construct. There are inherently bad actions that are bad no matter the context. Torturing a baby is a easy example of that. You can argue that, in a case where someone threatens to kill your own baby if you don't torture this other baby, then it isn't bad to do it. However, the tortured baby still has no participation whatsoever in the killing of your baby, so, torturing this innocent baby will remain a bad action even if doing so prevents the death of another baby.
@@anameyoucantremember You ignore the fact that babies have been tortured as a rite of passage, or an ordained sacrifice for centuries. Morality is anything most people agree on, and that has changed dramatically throughout history.
Are you indifferent to babies being tortured?
@@itheuserfirst3186 The construct seems to be separate from moral truth such as @A Name You Can't Remember mentioned. It seems true to me that humans have socially agreed upon their morality, yet I also think that the logical basis for torturing babies to be wrong is also true despite what the general populous of any time might think.
@@vascanatomy9443 you do realize that leaving baby's to die from exposure was a world wide thing just ask Aristotle
Ive been caught in this conundrum around “the importance of morals” and this helped me make a lot more sense of morality and regular ppl's obsession with it.
Great video! One thing that struck was that if you were subscribe to the amorality idea proposed by the professor, you would effectively revert to a discussion of the improvement of wellbeing as used by Harris. You wouldn't be claiming that are your actions are absolutely moral or objectively good but you would be effectively using a form of calculus to make decisions.
A truely universal presupposition of all "moralities" is "Obey".
Does anyone else think it would just be easier if we tweak the definition of "morality" to include more subjective language, like: "relative to their goals", or "in their subjective opinion"?
This way there really wouldn't be debate about whether objective morality exists, because no matter how large a scale you try to look at it, morality will always be able to be framed in a subjective way, or relative to something. I have yet to hear anyone make this simple argument and would love to know if someone knows anyone who has, because in my opinion, this shatters any argument for whether objective morality exists.
Hi mate, I think if it is considered to be "goal" driven, then it cannot be a moral claim. This was (I think?) Kant's addition to Humes guillotine. The hypothetical imperative, known as the (If- Then) Claus, that bridges the gap between Hume's (Is - Ought) problem.
I have never understood what objective or subjective morality are supposed to mean. What's worse is that people often break their own rules, such as saying "morality is subjective, so you shouldn't follow your morality".???
From the other camp I hear that it's God's opinion so it's objective.
From what I gather a moral statement is just a statement with an implicit clause "in order to".
And others having other goals in no way causes me to care about the well being of conscious entities any less.
@@MrCmon113 yeah I have a hard time understanding other people's understanding of the word objective and subjective. Like this may be a hot take but I don't believe math to be objective in the sense that most people make it seem to be, like that it holds truths that will be true even if I'm not there.
If I can't get someone to understand 1+1=2, then it's not purely objective and takes an experience to comprehend and understand it, so has to be subjective on some level. Sure I can force my use of the knowledge of 1+1=2 by manipulating physical objectives with the framework in mind, but can't I do the same with morality? Like I get the conclusion of punching someone = bad, but another person isn't guaranteed to understand that. So I can force my use of this knowledge of the punching someone= bad framework in mind by manipulating physical objects with it in mind. Both these frameworks are guaranteed to produce results, that can be repeated for validity, but can only be proven to be "objective" valid through a subjective experience. The problem that arises with morals is that it's dealing a lot more with the non-physical experience of a human so it is harder to get as rigorous with scientific testing as math is. Therefore most people understanding of the internal experience is not as similar of our understanding of the external experience, and lead to people's morals being a lot different
@@sarimsakliyogurtlumantikli1212
You completely throw your notion of what a moral value is over board when it comes to God.
First it's an individual's attitude towards an action/situation, then it's some magical attribute of an action/circumstance.
"always on the brink of a religiously fundamentalist society" - this statement aged in a really "good" way
if only it were even true 3 years ago
A deontological virtue is, in some sense, the valuer making a "mountain out of a mole hill." Certainly we can ignore their claim that the valuation is "absolute" and just point out how it is useful to the speaker (or their religious identity). Then we can ask whether the speaker is motivated by some sort of mutually beneficial spirit. Sometimes people tell us to do something which is in their favor, but not theirs. (I.e., "Pay your taxes!" When the speaker is cheating on their taxes.)
We can break down valuations as individually subjective preferences and then look for commonalities---or inherent structures which are mutually beneficial.
The relative use of "good or right" are the only uses of "good or right" and so we shouldn't define "good or right" out of existence. These aren't amoral. We can't let a bad "absolutist" definition through out morality.
Certainly we can examine Christ's "Great Commandment" as a parallel to the gold rule---and discuss it in a game-theoretic sense of how human beings optimize their communal behavior---regardless of the absolutist language to the commandment.
I agree with everything here, except for the last bit about the trolley problem which I think was poorly presented.
The trolley problem is not about choosing to kill 1 or 5 people, if it was it would be no dilemma. You would kill the 1, no problem.
Instead the trolley problem is about how to view moral responsibility relative to action and inaction, the train is already on the track which will kill 5 people. Someone other than you set that up so they would die. So if you do nothing they die, but if you change the tracks to save them you actively kill 1 person. The dilemma is about whether the inaction leading to 5 deaths carries more or less personal responsibility than the active killing of 1 person.
How does the trolley problem relate to real life? Is this abstraction, correctly understood, really as useless as Hans claims? Not at all.
Thousands of people die due to inaction every day, in fact you could go ahead and save lives in a matter of minutes by relatively trivial acts of charity, but most of us won't do that. We don't condemn this lack of action to any significant extent, despite the high death toll it has. But actively causing a death is considered one of the worst things you can do. The law reflects this too: letting people die is normally not a crime (and in the few situations where it is it's rarely prosecuted), but killing someone is. Perhaps the situation where you have to choose between lethal inactivity and killing someone isn't exactly real, but the confused moral intuitions that it highlights very much are.
Peter Singers child in the pond highlights the same problem, and I think this way of challenging moral intuitions is quite effective.
I just found a gem. May I bother with a request? May we have a booklist recommendations?
The idea of amorality as a coherently defendable ethical position is something I am going to take a dive into. This seems to be a possibly very fruitfull avenue to persue. Really refreshing stuff. Glad to have stumbled on this video.
How can amorality be an ethical position? As a view of ethics, it can only be a meta-ethical position.
@@davidrobinson7684 I stand corrected.
This position assumes that morality is immoral
It doesn’t work
If you're amoral, why would you feel the need to _defend_ the position? Sounds like you think that amorality does more good than the opposite, and you want to persuade others of it. Almost as if _that_ was your morality.
I think the argument he makes is for _minimal_ morality, surely. Strip it down to a barebones skeleton, throw away the excess. No point in moralising over what people wear, how they speak, how they have (consensual) sex, and all that stuff that would have been instead heavily regulated in many past societies. But any assumption about this way being better than the alternative is already a form of morality.
@@HaganeNoGijutsushi well, I don't tend to do philosophy in UA-cam comments. What I will do, is read the book -that has been waiting for me for some time now. After I get through politics of affect by Massumi. Have a nice day.
Excellent contribution. I am always frustrated by the low level of logical coherence in discussions of the likes of Harris and Peterson, as they are not challenged for their inconsistencies. If the 'morally right' would exists in an absolute way, it would require an absolute measure of the well-being it creates. This immediately creates several big problems. First, how can I evaluate objectively the well-being of a person. Even if I could the second problem would be, how can I evaluate objectively the sum-total of well-being of a group of people effected by a morally charged actions. In this situation A might suffer a decrease of well-being and B might experience an increase. How can I add these up? Also, the same change of a situation for A and for B might mean different changes in 'well-being' for the two. The third problem is that for an objective evaluation of the amount of well-being created by an action, I would need to be able to assess this for all future times, which is impossible of course.
I am really baffled how any one would come to the conclusion that moral right or wrong can be anything but subjective (even if shared by a large group of people) and relative.
I dont think Sam argues that wellbeing can be accurately measured and what causes these desirable states can be measured. All he's saying is that if certain states of experience are better then others then we should pursue them for the most people possible for most of the time. Just because we dont have a perfect wellbeing calculator does not make this non valid. In fact we may never know what causes more wellbeing and less wellbeing and this framework could still exist with us suffering or us experiencing the joy of causes we dont know. Luckily I think we can make assumptions based on scientific observations of our own actions. Does torturing people create more wellbeing than loving people? Based on your experience what do you think? I think Sam was just showing that god morality where a god dictates what is right and wrong is usually very divorced from reasoned discussion of felt wellbeing and suffering. Im curious where you would disagree? Is it when he labels it objective?
@@funut2541 Of course I do not deny that societies rely on sets of moral/ethical principles to work harmoniously (as far as possible and what ever harmoniously might actually mean). Which implies that some principles will be more apt and others less apt to fulfill this function in general. However, to charge these principles with labels like ‘natural’, ‘objective’ or ‘absolute’ is at best ill-defined and more probably just misleading.
Let us take the example of torturing people. In medieval times torture was believed to be a very powerful instrument in discovering the truth. A medieval prosecutor would accordingly deem the statement “No person is allowed to be tortured” as being ‘objectively’ immoral, as it prevents him of discovering the truth (e.g. regarding a crime). Now, I do not need to remind you that the practice of “enhanced interrogation” by the USA shows we do not need to go back so far in history to discover that some people believe that torture is not ‘objectively bad’ or ‘absolutely immoral’. Even though I do not agree with them, how can I claim that my view (that torture is always immoral) is ‘objectively’ correct. I can’t! I can give good arguments yet are these really ‘objective’? Even is the vast majority of people agree with me, does this make it 'objective'. I think not, objectivity means that an assessment can be made 100% independent of who is doing it.
Now, we have laws which are casting general principles of moral and ethics into formal (prosecutable) norms and we hope that these laws have been devised by reason and not arbitrarily (not everybody will probably agree here and it might not be universally the case). In this sense the statement that we can derive normative principles (what you might call morality) from reasoning what is beneficial for the society, is just a triviality.
@Oliver Gröning Thank you for taking the time to read my comment and respond. I agree with a lot of and and also disagree with some of it. I absolutely agree that a whole society can be absolutely confused on what the right moral framework is, and in fact we may be blind right now to what we should do to make our global society harmonious. I do also think cultures and the world change a lot in there morals very drastically in very short amounts of times and a lot of the time for the worst. We could even be wrong about Torture being bad. I dont think Sam would agree with the statement just because a majority of people believe a moral framework is true means its objective. After all his moral framework as an athiest is in the minority.
And I think the whole reason for him writing his book was to shift the forever going conversation on morality to less about does god say this moral to does this morality lead to more wellbeing. I dont think he claims to have an absolute morality in hand and he even states constant open mindedness towards new evidence towards morality is nessacary. I think what he claims is objective is his moral landscape. Which im not so sure is objective but it certainly is pragmatic. The only assumption you have to make is that certain states of the universe are better than others because of experience. Which is not a crazy assumption, and I think it frees you from illogical god given morality. As a lot of people believe religion is the only way to have morality.
Curious to hear your thoughts, and where you disagree...
@@olivergroning6421 Comment format was changed
@@funut2541 Thanks for laying out your reflections on the topic and I actually do not think that we differ a lot.
Your statement that moral frameworks are pragmatic is excellent and brings home my point. We cannot claim that moral frameworks are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘objectively true’ or ‘objectively false’, ‘natural’, ‘absolute’ or ‘universal’. We can only expect them (not even knowing for sure) to be pragmatic. The reason is the plasticity of these frameworks regarding time, circumstances, social context etcetera (you might read the Dissoi Logoi in this respect). By rational reasoning we can come to informed conclusions what might be pragmatic and what might not (here I guess I agree with Harris), but we will not come to a degree that allows us to call something ‘objectively right’ or ‘objectively wrong’ (here I think I strongly disagree with him ).
Let me illustrate this with the (I hope not too controversial) example of abortion. In this case, two fundamentally important principles clash. i) The protection of unborn human life and ii) the self-determination of women regarding one of the most central aspects of their life (having a child). It is not possible to fully respect one of them without compromising the other. Many countries adopt the time-phase solution in this regard, where a compromise is made that in the early stage of the pregnancy the self-determination of the woman overrides the protection of the unborn and in the later-stage it is the other way round. Now, I do not think it make sense (or is useful) to call the time-phase solution ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is neither. It is a pragmatic compromise in an effort to produce good outcomes.
Why do I insist so hard on this? Because I believe that suggesting that moral frameworks can be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (in contrast of just being ‘useful’ or ‘pragmatic’) is misleading because of different reasons:
a) It could mean that by a once-off scientific effort we could identify the ‘right’ set of morals and we are done. This would negate the necessity of a constant introspection, discussion and adaption on how we what to live in our changing societies. (an argument also made by Prof. Moeller)
b) It would shift the authority to a philosophical stance, whereas a great deal of moral definition in a modern society is political (and should be political).
c) It actually plays into the hands of the proponents of God given morality. They could argue that the existence of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ morals is what the were arguing all the time and is due to the fact that these morals are God given and therefore absolute. The circumstance that they are scientifically accessible or identifiable (as Harris states) is only the proof that they are not only God given but also rational and therefore good.
So if Harris' intention is to rationalize the origins of moral frameworks, he is subverting this project by insisting that a moral ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ objectively exists.
That is (with no claim of correctness) how I see the issue.
Thank you for this video. You have highlighted some thought-provoking perspectives on this matter that brought up further questions. I will provide a bit more context before stating the questions (please bear with me):
Re: The role of empirical science for normative judgement
Insofar as empirical science is in the business of "facts" and hence operates within relative boundaries of possibilities and impossibilities (Kant's Bedingung der Möglichkeit), i.e. epistemic inferences ("facts") drawn under certain conditions. How can science leap from one ontological mode to another? How can I infer a "value" from a fact? How can this fact~value dichotomy be overcome? I can, at best, make "ought"-statements from an empirical stance only when I also state the conditions from which they were drawn and that specify my intent and goal ("As our data indicates: IF you want to reduce infection rates, THEN vaccination SHOULD be regarded as a necessary and mandatory mean. However, IF you want to preserve and cultivate constitutional and individual rights, THEN vaccination SHOULD NOT be considered mandatory"). How do we, then, reconcile Is~Ought or facts~values? You refer to Niklas Luhmann who is a cybernetician; do I not need both modes (Is and Ought) for Autopoiesis and systems to work self-organize and self-regulate? How do we wrestle with David Hume, Max Weber or Hillary Putnam on this matter? As far as I can tell, facts can at best be necessary but insufficient for normative judgement.
Re: Laws instead of moral
You stated that using a context-specific legal language (such as "your drunk driving yesterday has lead to such consequences") has advantages over an absolut moral language that demonizes the person (and not the actions). I agree a lot with that statement. From my clinical experience working in psychotherapy and counseling, tying actions (i.e. intentional behavior) to specific contexts help to preserve "potential" (e.g. in couples therapy). If I am a horrible person in an absolute sense, there is no room for improvement or change at all and also factually wrong because chances are high I have been good somewhere in my past as well.
HOWEVER, there exists a relationship and a commonality between morality/ethics and law. Even if I choose legal instead of moral language, I still haven't gotten rid of its normativity. In both cases we still have accepted a normative premise (if I may use a bad syllogism: fatal car accidents = bad, therefore should be avoided. Drunk driving can cause this undesired state, hence drunk driving = bad).
Further: "Just as the constraint of syntax allow meaning to be expressed, constraints on behavior thus make meaningful actions possible." - Alicia Juarrero. Our legal systems has a cultural historicity. It has developed from i.a. moral and religious commandments. So morality is implicit in the underlying substructure of culture that gives meaning to actions (and therefore laws) in the first place.
Considering both contexts above (and maybe from an action theoretical perspective), would you still distinguish between ethics and law? What are good arguments for their distinction?
Re: Amorality as superior to morality
You mentioned that Luhmann sees trouble in morality and that framing things in a moral sense can actually cause immoral consequences. I can follow this argument. However, what are arguments FOR morality? Rollo May once said "Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is". Granted the advantages of amoral language (as above), I also see a lot of harm happening when not taking a moral stance or not having a developed morality, e.g. in my patients. Both amoral and immoral. Apathy and moral relativism often create nihilistic tendencies and further depression in many of my young patients (young adults and adolescents often). Care, responsibility and meaning in life (in a sense of Heidegger and Viktor Frankl) often pose an antidote to this kind of suffering. As a further example, I also often see an undifferentiated view and ignorance/omission of "evil" as a decisive factor in patients with PTSD. Same goes for soldiers. In my experience, a well developed morality often helps protect people from sheer and devastating trauma. Morality is also necessary for that matter to understand emotions such as guilt. And guilt is an important indicator for a mismatch between "current self" and "ideal self" that pinpoints room for improvement (of course the opposite is true as well, just take the Freudian Über-Ich that can become pathological). Morality can then also become the driving factor of my development.
What is, then, the alternative to morality and can there be any alternative? An idea I often explore with patients and that I borrowed from Nietzsche is: when dealing with (moral) dilemmas, whether they be internal or external, often ask yourself not what is "right" or "wrong" but what is "courageous" or "cowardly" (something beyond good and evil). In my experience, moral relativism is often (not always) a disguise for fear, cowardice and conformism, because you need to have courage and (a leap of) faith in order to take a moral stance.
Re: Evolutionary game theory
I often view morality as the phenomenon that mediates between "I" and "other(s)" emphasizing a "we". One end of the spectrum would be egoism, the other altruism. In some sense, there is a regulatory and optimization idea behind this. With scientific and theoretical notions such as "reciprocal altruism" or evolutionary game theory, what do you think is the relationship between them morality? Can e.g. evolutionary game theory explain the phenomenon of morality? Also, do you think these reductionist takes on morality are helpful? Of course morality is more than just mathematical modeling of interactions. But do they fairly represented the idea of morality?
There is an implicit morality behind every decision we take, to deny this and appeal to amorality/law as you have said is just an another form of morality. Most people just decide whether something is good/right according to the environment that surrounds them. I don't see any way out of this status without an outside touch such as divine commandments.
5:42min I do not quite agree with "W" when someone points out "you are a p.o.s" or "a bad person" it means that their relation to the foundational standards needed for human interaction have ceased to hold and the person that adheres to such a degree of non-identity has allowed him, or, herself such a degree of exploitative violence that whatever else they have done does not make up for what they have destroyed. I am thinking in Kant avec Sade (Lacan) cases. The universal affirmation of "you are a bad person" applies to things that have always been justifiably rejected such as exploitation, and kidnapping to torture etc. A set of modes of deploying ungrounded incestual violence.
One can take the case of Imperial Rome and the constant revolts of those that disagree with them that they had to allowed themselves to be exploited out of existance. They might have had plenty of rituals addressing themselves as, in the case of Alexander, the "son of Zeus". or for Roman emperors the sons of the Roman mythology equivalences "Jupiter", but they had to face revolts after revolts. The other group of people were not served all that way for such beliefs when it came to assess what types of human interactions were worth having. The chains, and policing of the people they kidnapp also attests to concrete modes of disbelief of their end. A sort of systematized failure of faith as it were.
LW mentions incestual violence nowhere in that essay. It’s quite a good read, unlike Harris’s pamphlet.
When I saw this I thought "James Acaster's really aged"
And has become inexplicably German
@@monkeymox2544 would be on brand, honestly
Mr. Moeller, I very much appreciate the fresh, and insightful content!
I wanted to ask if you could perhaps do a dedicated video on utilitarianism and expand your critique of it? I would be interested to learn if you see any use or value for it in modern societies.
To me utilitarianism or at least utilitarian thinking seems to become more influential and in some cases it seems to me that some broad idea of the general good might be needed. Countries like New Zealand have adopted metrics related to population happiness for instance, with the goal of increasing it, so this might be one use scenario. You also have movements like Effective Altruism started by Peter Singer but supported by Sam Harris and this seems to also be rooted in utilitarian thinking.
Here is a comment that I left on another video a while back which is somehow more relevant here:
This reminds me of a video I saw of Sam Harris confronting Jordan Peterson about his definition of truth, which he essentially defines as "anything which helps us survive, whether or not it is a delusion." Harris presents a scenario in which a man kills himself because he was given evidence that his wife cheated on him, Peterson is then confronted with the logical paradox that by his own definition that would mean it was "untrue" that the man's wife cheated on him, because it was detrimental to his survival to accept the empirical fact that his wife _was_ having an affair, to which Peterson has a naval gazing meltdown about the definition of every word Harris used in this hypothetical.
But I noticed a flaw in their thinking. Harris' and Peterson's trouble reconciling Peterson's definition of truth with the scenario only comes about because _both_ men take for granted that the man's suicidal response is *valid* under the circumstances. When the question is not whether or not it's true that the wife cheated on the husband, that is an arbitrarily factual statement - but whether or not "cheating" is "true" in the sense that it is worth dying over. Since anything that is detrimental to survival is either "not true" or "less true" by Peterson's definition, this should logically mean Peterson having to accept the idea that a married woman sleeping with another man *_should not_* be of any significance to her husband, because embracing that "delusion" could get him killed.
I suspect this would not play well to Peterson's audience, given their rhetoric online, so Peterson is cornered by the example, and finds no exit.
Such a thinking on scale endorses delusions and dishonesty to potentially dysfunctional degrees. This darwinian essentialism when made explicit becomes erosive. It's not a good system no matter how pragmatic on personal scale in th short term. Jordan Peterson is a short term thinker.
@@Senumunu That is certainly one way to put it
I think the paradox misunderstands Peterson's intention behind the definition. The intention to me is to allow the 'delusion' of a religion or belief system that provides individuals sufficient stability to flourish. What Peterson is hinting at, and should probably just outright say, is that ultimate truth isn't as important as context dependent truth. The truth that allows me personally to function in my daily life, allows me to survive prosper, is more useful than any type of ultimate truth. In this way, we could disregard the need for ultimate truth altogether, and this probably explains why I've heard people say that Peterson is a closet relativist.
@@matthewshorney268 I still think killing yourself is detrimental to surviving and prospering. You have to understand that Peterson virtually had a meltdown over this. He was more concerned with the laser specific minutiae of what Harris was saying than he was any suggestion that Harris was intentionally or accidentally misrepresenting him. Any argument that Peterson would no doubt make insisting that these belief systems are more beneficial to society in the long term are merely theoretical and unscientific.
@@futurestoryteller I would have to agree that killing yourself is detrimental to your survival... But it wasn't the truth that caused his death. It was the decision to act upon a situation, regardless of whether it was true of not. What if the man had genuinely thought his wife had cheated, killed himself, but all along he'd been wrong. She hadn't cheated. The ultimate truth doesn't really matter here. What matters is the decision to act on a supposed truth, and the level of proof the man decided was sufficient to enact his suicide.
Editing to add that I've learned several important lessons today. Thanks to Dr Moeller for such well explained descriptions. Everything he offered was new information to me and it was so easy to follow. I will now be able to spot when someone tries to use an absolute truth. It was very helpful to have the concept of morals deconstructed too. Huge thanks and appreciation to him. His book must be fantastic reading.😊
It occurs to me that Harris is using this absolute reasoning to justify the positions he takes on the well being methods he wants to sell us. It's an incredible sales technique.
When people want to change their situations in life it is tempting to look for absolute solutions. They can have "faith" in them working and they might think it could guarantee their success.
Harris clearly understands how this absolute reasoning works and took great pleasure when pointing it out in Peterson.
So I don't think we should imagine Harris is unaware of excatly what the limitations/problems of this kind of discourse are. However it sells his books and whatever well being products he might be offering for sale. How deeply disappointing.
I think you're offbase on Harris saying things to sell books. He's put his life in grave danger in much of what he has said in his books and elsewhere. He also has given away his podcast for free for a long time if one didn't have the money. What he tries to do in his book is to come up with a common understanding of ethical behavior, and I think he does an admirable job. It doesn't mean he's "right." I mean who has all the answers about morality. It's easy to say it's relative. But I think the simple premise of Harris's argument, that there is a base form of experience which is devoid of well-being, and then saying it is moral to increase well-being in the world, is a fine start. If we tried to do some of that, we would make the world a lot more, well, if you don't like "moral," I'll say pleasant to live in.
39:40 This doesn't prove anything except for the inseparability of politics and morality.
“What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre
Do you have a list of recommended books?:)
45:29 I always use the example of which side of the road we ought to drive on, and how this blurs the two spheres of morality. As if one drives on the 'wrong' side then one is risking not just upsetting the solution to a coordination problem, but also causing harm. So the law can be a source of morality in this more intrinsic sense.
Good example; I think Plato would like it. The modern Nietzschean/nihilist/militant-atheist is a bit like someone who goes to both London and New York City to deliver his message that "believing that there is a right side of the road to drive on is just way for puny humans to cope with the fact that there isn't", and expects to be seen as profound, rather than a dunce.
Never listen to someone who says 'there are no absolutes.' All such people are philosophical devils, because, if 'there are no absolutes' is true, then 'there are no absolutes' becomes the only absolute, and even then, is false. The devil prefers to go unseen
@@lukehall8151 individuals making claims that there are no absolutes are often the first to admit their very speech is under the same guise and their very actions are as trivial as the next. But their intentions are not to elevate their claim of absolutism to absolute status, but to, in the most subjective sense, deelevate the certainty others have in their own absolute beliefs.
@@bigboy2217 Are you certain that's not a idiotic way to conduct your intellectual life?
@@bigboy2217 And irregardless, the claim that there are no absolutes is an absolute claim, and there is no way out the hypocrisy of that.
@@lukehall8151 I’d just like to say at the end of the day even the most basic structures, such as rationality, seem to have presuppositional values built into them (things like causality needing to be true). I’m by no means an expert, but I like philosophy a lot, and it seems that many especially ethical ideas devolve into some appeal to intuition. Even if that intuition is an appeal to rationality itself as valuable.
Now to move on to your other point, am I sure that’s not a stupid way to live? I completely agree, to actually live your life like a skeptic would be absurd, by definition. I don’t think anybody really is one. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call these people devils for their perspective, thought experiments ought to be treated like a game where everyone’s perspective expands. Even if it’s all appeals to intuition and ultimately meaningless, it’s cool to see how people reason from their intuitions and that’s fine. I never really meant to say that the non-absolutist types were correct, but rather to try to give what I think is their honest perspective of what they are doing in a non malicious way.
This presentation was clear, eloquent and significant. Thank you! Keep on doing what you’re doing, please
This is such a ride for me. One minute I really disagree with you then I suddenly agree
Love this. Helped me understand better why Harris didn't sit well with me. I have one big, big critique, however, of the doctor's explanation that his own intention is to advocate for amorality. He describes the potential dangers of religious zeal. He provides the example of drinking and driving as being illegal but also that drinking alcohol itself is considered immoral in certain religions like Islam. His claim is that by removing the moral and/or religious judgment the decision is made much more effectively that (well, he doesn't actually say this) drinking is bad. To me, this is not an argument for amorality or even an example of what it would be like to remove morality. This is simply another form of moralizing. It is a value judgment; one that supposes that it is not good to for people to die, that it is not good for you to kill people, that it would in fact be your responsibility for the other person's death if they died as a result of an accident that occurred after you drank alcohol and drove. Even further, there is the implication that science is valuable (in that science is the process by which we can conclude that alcohol impairs our function and, therefore, makes it more likely we would crash a car. The doctor is doing exactly what he describes as the function of philosophy. That it is an essential function of the human experience that we critically examine our current predominant modes of moral communication (historically, this has been conveyed through religious doctrine). He is simply conveying his belief in a different morality. Just as religious absolutism and fanaticism is imbalanced and can be dangerous; it can be similarly dangerous to be ignorant of this fact. And this fact, I believe, is that morality and moralizing is an essential function of human nature. Whatever form that takes is irrelevant. There is no escaping it. Religions may be antiquated in many respects. But they provided a vessel for thousands of years as humanity progressed (and survived). The emergence of science and rationality as an ever increasing form of morality or way we make sense of the world does not mean we should forget what religions provided, and how it is hardly different. This would be completely ignoring the major pillars of the religious motivation. And most dangerously it seems to me, Harris and the doctor and many, many others today are ignorant of one critical common thread of the predominant religions of the last few thousand years: the separation of the individual from the ultimate and absolute power in the universe. This is the notion of God. This would be what many psychologists refer to as the Self (separate from the ego). Ignorance of the necessity for this humility to a greater force and acceptance of the irrationality of the human psyche will lead to a dangerous inflation of the importance of ego, the individual, and rationalism.
Your critique basically says what I was thinking about writing, so I thank you for saving me the effort.
Morality is how we treat other people . I am an atheist in agreement with Jesus claim that the greatest commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself. As an anthropologist , I’d say humans originated 2.5 million years ago with the invention of this moral law, the first Law.
Morality is how we treat each other . I am an atheist in agreement with Jesus’s claim that the greatest commandment is love thy neighbor as thyself . As an anthropologist , I’d say humans originated 2.5 million years ago with moral law , the first Law.
As an anthropologist , social _scientist_and attorney ( doctor of jurisprudence) , I hypothesize that law is State enforced Custom/Morality/Culture/ Tradition
I'd love to see a conversation now between Sam and Dr Hans!
i bet there would be a lot more agreement then some people in this comment section might expect
@@kettenschlosdI think you are right. My guess is Sam Harris didn’t learn any profound universal truths while he was trekking around the world eating psychedelics. I think similar to a televangelist he recognized that the majority of people don’t have a clue about the bigger questions and are looking for answers.
The new atheist movement created a space for people who rejected the religious framework but were as willing as the religious zealots to go all in on a different but fundamentalist framework that seemed to come from a place of reason and logic.
Sam Harris did this quite well for a while but for the last 5-7 year he has let his ego get in the way of the grift which is something I love to see.
It appears to me that the purpose of a tennis player is implied but the purpose of a person is not.
Yes, and yet we seem to be unable to not assume such a purpose,. For example: The professor argues against an absolute sense of moral truth and his argument is convincing, and yet, when he talks about the example of children being beaten at school around 17:00, he simply assumes that it is self-evident that it is BETTER (in the ABSOLUTE sense) to NOT beat children. He does this in general, when he argues that moral discourse is BAD (in the absolute sense) because of the (presumably obviously) bad effects it can have.
So he contradicts himself. He clearly has an internal moral compass--a strong one I'd argue, but he is not explicitly aware of it, allowing himself to argue against morality. In that way I do think he is similar to Harris. Harris does this all the time as well.
So: While I think his points are extremely valid--that a certain kind of moral discourse is potentially harmful--the very fact that this concerns him shows that he has an internal moral sense and in more general terms: that such a sense seems to be, for all practical purposes, inescapable for a human being.
@@MarkusBohunovsky This is what I was thinking as well. He struggles when it comes to arguing against inherent moral values then assumes moral values in specific situations, which only goes against what he is arguing.
Why is it an improvement that nowadays teachers don't beat students anymore?
Why is it good throughout history to avoid fundamentalisms?
Why does philosophy generally help us avoid them?
Will there be a time and place where and when they won't be bad?
On the trolley problem. I'd agree with you that it's mostly useless when talking about human interactions and that a situational/relational approach makes more sense. However, the trolley problem has come to prominence again with regard to programming self-driving cars. In this case, it is an abstract condition before the event that is being considered. How would you program a computer that is driving a car to deal with the potential situation where it that cannot avoid hitting at least one person? Insurance companies are keen to know.
51:57 I think that this is the case, but is this not the point of trolley problems? To show that when faced with a dilemma we either have to reject the theory that offers an uncomfortable solution, bite the bullet and follow the action guidance of a given ethical theory, or admit that this is a 'genuine' moral dilemma where the theory holds but offers no unique action guidance in which case we are left with a disjunctive 'either/or' decision. This sort of decision then falls back on secondary non-moral or agent-relative factors, such as the ones mentioned here, personal relationships or preferences (I think Strawson made the case that you may fall back on utilitarian reasoning in a non-moral way).
The problem is that a trolley problem doesn't really show this because it cannot accurately capture how moral calculus is done in agents.
If I have two trolley problems, one with two strangers, an old person and a young person, you'd probably pick the young person with everything else being equal.
If the old person was a saint, and the young person a horrible person, you'd change your choice.
If the old person was your grandfather, you'd probably change it again.
If the young one was your daughter, you'd change it again.
However, there is no inconsistency here.
The issue is that most agents make moral calculus by stacking traits up against eachther under an axis of moral salience.
That is to say, you could be of the view that lying is bad, but not as bad as murder. That age is important, but not as important as relation or moral history.
In so far as most trolley problems cannot show this and try to essentialize moral calculus to one trait while its proponents often pretend its revealing hypocrisy or lacking moral awareness, they tend to be both impotent and disingenuous tools that lead to less clarity on people's moral positions, not more.
@@hian Yes, that is the nature of ethical theories, they are will inescapably have to account for the two spheres of morality, and will have to take into consideration a number of relevant factors.
I work on the morality of self-driving cars - I'm of the opinion that it is an impossible task.
@@neoepicurean3772
Haha.
I would agree. Then again, I'm a moral nihilist, so there's that!
Cheers on that endeavor, though.
Maybe, it's sufficient for car A.I's to be utilitarian =P
@@hian I have been sidetracked (luckily there was no worker on the track) by the pandemic and as my research was in the privacy of location - since I argue if we want to have safe self-driving cars we will probably have to give this up - so when the rush for track & trace systems started I switched my efforts to thinking about the ethics around those.
@@neoepicurean3772
Super interesting. Your work sounds positively fascinating!
07:50 - 09:20 is the specific contradiction that drove me out of religion. God and morality were too fixed and immediate. Nothing I did mattered or could ever matter. I was so young, it produced a traumatic impression... but I've learned a lot in overcoming it. Reading philosophy was instrumental in bringing me to a healthy mental state and eradicating the "eternal No" as Nietzsche called it.
And now you imagine you live in an atheistic and amoral universe that has no intrinsic purpose, what you do does "matter"? Word games.
@@someonesomeguy4459 By being free of imposed --extrinsic-- external purpose (religion), you're free to create your own --intrinsic-- internal purposes.
@@Crispman_777 there are no intrinsic purposes within a materialist paradigm.
@@bradchadley1261 There are no intrinsic purposes correct. I should've said external and internal.
Morality has to be fixed for it to be morality. Otherwise it’s mere opinion. The idea that morality is objective universal and unchanging is, for me,, the best and most unassailable proof of God
I've been following Sam Harris's work for some time and I've got a lot out of it, but I've never been able to swallow his argument that morality is objective and universal either. Interestingly, though, his stance on the non-existence of free will (and therefore the absurdity of moralizing people's behavior) seems to align fairly well with the view you laid out. I'd love to see a conversation between you two.
His argument is based on the premise that if morality is about well being then it's universal which makes sense to me at least.
For religious people morality is about following God's commandments. But even here people only follow God's commandments because it ensures infinite well-being in after life so in a sense this definition of morality is also based on well-being.
I agree that it has an intuitive echo of truth to it, but saying that acting for the wellbeing of people is by definition good and therefore a universal truth is something of a tautological argument.
Consider that in forming his position on the non-existence of free will Sam considers proposed evidence for and against it, he enters into debate. In making a decision that free will does not exist, is he not using free will to reach his conclusion?
Very interesting inteview. I fully agree with Moller re the dangers of morality and morally charged thinking when it comes to collectives. A couple of questions that come to mind: the very thing that Moller rightly provides a critique for might actually be necessary in the context of struggles between groups. I would argue that Marx deterministic view of societal development, for example, while certainly not scientific in any sense, was a necessary component of the labour movement. It seems to me that people need the kind irratonial certainty provided by religious figures of thought to act and be motivated against what otherwise might seem to overwhelming odds. A "rational response" at the time, and there were voices arguing this, would have been to favour accomodation not confrontation, for example. If that had prevailed, we would have never seen the social democratic century that we are now quickly leaving behind. Philosophy, by its very nature, tends to favour moderation, calm deliberation etc. Political struggle, on the other hand, needs an irrational willingness to confront power and the willingness to sacrifice ones'own life. Another question which comes to mind is the undeniable importance of morality in the life of individuals. It seems to me that there is a problem with the attempt to take an amoral view for indviduals. While I agree that there is no such thing as absolute morality etc., individuals actually need the freedom to act on their moral believes, always with the risk of making mistakes. But the ability to take a moral stance towards the world and to some extent at least act on those believes is at the very core of what it means to be fully human. I have the impression that this is something that many people are not free to do in the so called free world. Moller is German, I assume, so he should know what amoral conformism can lead to.
I wasn't looking at the video and I thought 19:10 was a segment of Dick Solomon's speech from 3rd Rock from the Sun :D He sounds exactly like John Lithgow!
Would love a video on BLAME!
Glad I'm not the only person who was utterly distracted by its presence in the background
Secularizing religious absolute morality is one thing, but Peterson didn't just say that. He said specifically "Christian values", and used things like not raping not murdering as examples. This is laughably ridiculous from both a historical and theological perspective. Peterson has a way of trojan-horsing his own beliefs in seemingly sound broader statements, a little motte and bailey if you will. I'm glad that you still mention you disagree with Peterson's takeaway from that but still think you omit some important aspects of the entire argument to focus on a singular point there
I think it has to do with the way the interviewer asked the question. I don't think the professor cares that much about what Peterson thinks.
I think the professor didn't see the clip.
@@excitedaboutlearning1639 I got that impression as well, and honestly the editing in this video seemed rather manipulative at 27:10, as if the professor is agreeing with Peterson's laughable stuff about how not raping = (specifically, uniquely) Christian values.
@@CeramicShot we should also note that the ancient Egyptians have far more stories were antagonists are rapists than Christians do. In fact. I don't think there is a single story in the Bible about heterosexual rapists being bad guys. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Do you have a link to some discussion on how Professor Moeller is wrong? It would be a most pleasant thing to hear.
The immorality/amorality divide seems like the same distinction that Harry Frankfurt makes between Bullshit and Lies. The common distinction seems to be the removal of valence from the equation.
I like the trolley problem. I kind of decided that the usefulness of these thought experiments or paradoxes is that they get you to question your own beliefs. If you're not a deep thinker, as I am not, they can serve to help you realize how absurd certain ideas can be, i.e. the impracticality of pure utilitarianism.
The impracticality of classical* utilitarianism. Negative utilitarianism is the perfected version. And don't go on about the non-argument that is the "red button scenario"
The trouble with the Trolley Problem is that it ignores the law as it applies to the person pulling the switch. If I pull the switch I, personally, am guilty of killing one person. If I do not pull the switch I am not a party to the tragedy that follows, other than as a witness.
Impractical in what way? If you don't care about the well being of others what is bad about sth being "impractical"? This is how most conversations aboutvethics go. You criticize the existence of some moral value by presupposing that moral value.
kind of sounds like you’re saying wittgenstein is a defender of constitutivism (think: korsgaard). i’m not sure about that. perhaps it’s a coincidental similarity in thinking.
Wittgenstein is a defender of him being not understood, as there is something with language, that makes it impossible to understand via language what the communicator is saying.
he first was a defender of wanting to be understood and later he realized it's somewhat impossible regarding some forms of understanding
My reading of Wittgenstein in some sense in ultra tl; dr is everyone: "you can't understand me"
I really enjoyed listening to Dr Moeller's thoughts. Subscribed.
I also don't think the two ways of using the terms "good" and "bad" are inconflatable, although I do think there is also a point you made. I think part of Harris' argument is that we need to make abstract inferences (e.g. proof by induction) to come to hard truths. I would like to propose to you that you could view the idea that you can use language in a very precise way, up to a certain extent, to concretely implement moral truth. If you, and I know this may sound strange, just hear me out please... If you define morality as a scale of wellbeing, where wellbeing may be measurable in terms of certain abilities and feelings, you get something comparable to a number line. It may be hard to measure wellbeing, but that's why we need to define and redefine it as well as we can, and that's what Harris is laying out a framework for. I would argue that there is a religiosity in that framework he proposes, that is, it's not 'new', but there is in it a deep sense of basic categories like 'up' and 'down', such as we have with numbers. The biggest problem may be that we may be afraid, perhaps because we intuit that the higher you go the bigger the fall, but at the same time we get bigger too.
In other words, I think that Sam Harris is looking for something like the Peano Axioms for morality.
Something keeps bothering me about the title of this video. Feels too...accusatory perhaps. I'm not sure though. Have you asked Dr. Moeller what he thinks of the title? (I think my qualms might also apply to the title of the Philosophy Tube video.)
Hi Quinn Culver. You are right about this, for the earlier videos, Prof. Moeller said I could do whatever with it, when I asked for opinions on thumbnail and titles. I think he was practicing "無為"-inaction/effortless actions here, for a few reasons.
But starting from the commodification of philosophy video, he now would look at them closely, since the channel has become a bit more popular, because we don't want the profile/image to be misunderstood. (btw, in the future, we will have videos on the topic of profilicity.)
Prof. Moeller didn't ask me to change the title/thumbnails for the old videos, I think because he is kind and thoughtful, that he doesn't want to make me feel bad by changing the old choice of titles/thumbnails. I think I am sort of the bad guy here, trying to make the thumbnails and titles more clickable.
(But I think it is in a way, a necessary evil. But of course everything needs to be balanced correctly. I'm sorry if you feel it is too accusatory, I did try to make the video more "pop" while still reflecting the content in the video correctly.)
--Fai
@@carefreewandering Thanks for the candid and thoughtful response. Perhaps a more academically-toned title like "Problems with Harris' book..." would be a better title?
I think it is a pretty good balance between click bait and a title so accurate no one clicks on it. His newer videos have a warning that he is trying to promote his videos (Which in general is necessary if one wants people to see them)
Between 17:10 and 17:13 he claims, teachers in the U.S. would beat their students because a student who is not studying well is morally bad. Well, if you asked such a teacher: 'Was Mary a bad person?', 'Is someone, growing up in countryside e.g. and forced to work there instead of indulging in studying morally bad?', 'Are indigenous people in the rain forest morally bad?', he/her would answer: 'No' or 'Not necessarily.' But what, I presume, they think, if students are not willing to study, not willing to obey to the teacher's demands it is safe to assume he/her is not willing to obey to other institutions, authorities as well, what it makes him dangerous hence a bad person. The tendency to anomic behaviour should therefore be treated respectively. School is an institution within a capitalistic heteronomy in disguise of commodified freedom to buy commodities. And aberration in every way is therefore evil.
Maybe the teacher simply thinks to be given the opportunity to learn, and yet waste that opportunity, is what makes the student a bad person; essentially, the ingratitude. But I admit it could also be as you suggest the defiance of the student that is the primary problem; I would contend that it depends on the teacher. The connecting line here is still that it's about punishment for punishment's sake.
@@luke-alex when you say "punishment for punishments' sake" at the end, it seems to imply damage for the sake of personal intent to harm vs the sake of instruction? It doesn't seem to fit how I was considering the intent of the thread whereby the teachers intent of use of punishment was between conformity to a larger social-order goal (creation of a consumer class actor: the student) or creation of a conforming vessel of information (yet can be argued for the sake of the student, like why a parent might hand-slap a child in relation to not touching a hot stove, importance/intensity application).
Punishment in school has a long history that VASTLY predates capitalism, let's please leave capitalism out of it, there's no need to put it in everything, it's not salt. Obedience to authority, playing one's expected role, respecting one's elders or those more knowledgeable, are all ideas that, right or wrong, are as old as dirt. In fact they're the opposite of individualistic ideas, they're sociocentric ideas, that stress your role as a cog in a bigger machine who owes others for your very continued existence and thus you have to pay them back by making your part. Confucianism for example is very big on this, and it's hardly a capitalistic mindset.
That is why teachers used to punish pupils (and still do; the only reason to abandon beating was our shift to the thought that it was disproportionate and ineffective punishment. But pupils can still be punished by bad grades or having to repeat years). The general sense is that it is the students' *duty* towards society that they study, so that they can one day do their part as productive members of it - which, again, has always been a thing, regardless of the specific economic system. In fact all the more important when resources were scarce.
@@JH-ji6cj I said punishment for _punishment's_ sake, not for the sake of inflicting harm-these aren't quite the same; though if you strip away the moral 'dogma' they are admittedly not very different.
Punishment here is about correcting a moral deficiency; the teacher believes it is their moral duty to punish 'bad' students. Yes, they ultimately believe punishing bad students will act as a form of correction to make the student 'better'. But the reason they believe this isn't because they read a scientific study that tells them beating students is an effective way to deal with the student's 'trivial' failing in the classroom; it's because of their belief that the student is bad and therefore the punishment is morally justified and necessary.
I don't think it really compares to the situation you describe of a parent slapping a child to stop them burning themselves. Here, the harm to the child is much less than the one the parent has preventing, so this is very concretely about protecting the child. And I don't think a parent would describe this 'slap' as a punishment; it is a form of communication. It's called for because of the urgency of the situation; but punishment is very deliberate.
I would also take this opportunity to draw a distinction here between talking about the structural role of school in a capitalist system (which Schurik72 was perhaps really getting at), and talking about the motivations of individual teachers. I'm talking about the individual teachers. One could say that school is about enforcing conformity in a very amoral, practical sense; but this is a completely different discussion in my view.
@@luke-alex fair enough, thanks for the clarification.
As a member of a 12th step group, I am attracted by William James and his philosophy of pragmatism. By leaving the question of religion aside, Williams recommends that we do what works at the moment. James's Varieties of Religious Experience is referenced in the Alcoholics Anonymous book.
I appreciate a lot of what Dr. Moeller has shared here and agree that: without an absolute moral reference, there is no basis for objective morality.
When we shift from the moral lens to a lens of relative wellbeings, however, it feels as though we have kicked the can down the road from our initial dilemma. Instead of determining between two moral choices, we choose between two different types of wellbeing. Has this not just taken the question of morality and given it facepaint?
07:00 "We can't extrapolate the conditions of maximum well being for one person, then apply it to everyone, call it "absolute good", and expect everyone to be happy".
Having read "The Moral Landscape", I dont believe Harris is saying this. I think he would agree that people have individual needs and preferences, and that we should try to meet these. The rest of your critique seems to rely on this misunderstanding.
I think that's kind of the point - Harris does this, but the consequence of his overall argument leads to the contra position by implication. This is what 7:00 is highlighting.
@@matthewshorney268 Sam Harris' argument isn't to say that science can tell us everything about morality (if nothing else, because we are not that far advanced technologically and scientifically), simply that many people argue in such a way as to perceive science as telling us *nothing about morality* . He's saying if you get a fleet of doctors, scientists, biologists, sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, nutritionists and pediatricians - SURELY they can offer some truths which we would consider "moral", which we would consider to be in the best interests of an individual or a society. And if they can help the individual or a society, then surely they have met some sort of "moral criteria" - surely we ought to place *greater weight on scientific truths* which can "maximize" well-being.
@@thelibertarianperspective7519 Ok that does seem like a reasonable question on the face of it. But Harris emploring that 'Surely, they can offer truths..' doesn't give his argument foundational credibility. Stating that something seems obvious doesn't make it true. And to me, the video shows how Harris hasn't understood the consequences of previous philosophical argument around the topic. Scientists can always do good science to find facts, but applying that science to solve problems requires a value judgement based on individual ( or collective) values. Value judgements are essential to answer any of the following questions: what problems should be solved? Does everyone agree on those problems? What trade offs are we okay with? If Harris provided a reasonable definition of wellbeing then perhaps the majority can get on board with setting up a society revolving around maintaining it. But if we say that wellbeing is a moral truth, then any trade offs for any other value would be absolutely immoral. The consequences of that do not seem reasonable and obvious, but it follows from Harris' premise '
CCK Philosophy also did a video on why Sam Harris is wrong, I suggest you watch that.
@@thelibertarianperspective7519 The impression I have of Harris's argument is that he's saying exactly that science can tell us everything about human well-being and hence about morality. The science just hasn't advanced far enough yet.
I feel like this channel has a bright future. I get a numberphile vibe from the format. It works really well.
Yep. Excellent communication of philosophy and Sam Harris bashing? I'm all in lol
@@carsonwall2400 LOL same. It's really outlandish to me that he essentially claims to have bridged the is-ought problem.
‘After him finished the book’? True to name.
Not sure if you respond to comments but I'll give it a go... what do you think of the idea that most moral judgements/arguments are actually aesthetic ones masquerading as something "more important"? For example, we see causing suffering as an "evil" (there was even a Greek philosopher who referred to things like storms and plagues as "natural evils" if I recall correctly) but I think there's an argument to be made that we just don't like the appearance of suffering and we ascribe morality to it to give our aesthetic aversion more weight.
So I doubt you want the opinion of a random youtube commenter but you've struck a chord because that's exactly how I feel. I've been really convinced by moral fictionalist and meta ethical moral nihilism and honestly I think a more moral society is achieved this way. Stripped of the language of morality beyond speaking of harm, power and social contracts what grounds exist to say being gay is a sin? What grounds exist to declare anything wrong by hiding your aesthetic judgements behind weasil words like "moral fabrics" or "inherent good".
Just my two cents.
I know ethical egoism based on capacity for empathy is like a philosophy 101 meme position but honestly - I've never heard a convincing counter claim.
This man is my spirit animal.
I've been thinking of this and saying this for years, though I describe myself, bluntly, as a moral nihilist.
My view on morality is purely expressivist I.E a description of what moral language is as a cultural phenomenon, and I hold that moralism actually enables more antisocial behavior than it establishes prosocial benefits.
It's a broken part of our evolutionary heritage that we've stuck with because it functions "well enough", but which prevents us from considering modes of thinking and behavior that functions better for our personal pursuits than what we get under any particular type of moralism.
I'd love to hear more from this author and I think I am going to have to purchase his book.
"Prevents us from considering modes of thinking and behavior that functions better than what we get under any particular type of moralism"
I agree in a lot of instances, but I'm curious, how does a moral nihilist define better? That is how do you measure moral progress?
@@runemborg
Well, I don't measure moral progress because as a moral nihilist, moral language is viewed as incoherent or just deceptive language games trying to hide the actual value that any particular system reduces to.
So for instance, when a religious person says an action is "bad", ot actually means "against the will of god/against god's nature". When a utilitarian says it, it means that it causes unnecessary harm etc.
Now, how do we define a system as better or how do we recognize progress within a system?
Ultimately, I am just concerned about my own flourishing, so I'd personally consider any system that makes me more happy or content worth pursuing.
It also seems to be that other conscious actors do the same, and so I'd supppse that they would pursue their own ends and then we would simply have to barter or make concessions were our ends come into conflict.
I simply don't bother obfuscating this with a moral system or language, because ultimately I think that any system you propose will ultimately run foul of your ends at some point, or lead people to essentialize and "other" people who don't adopt or live up to the standards of your system, which I think is the primary process with which moralism hurts people and the pursuit of their ends.
Take walking on red lights for instance.
I doubt most people would moralize the existence or use of red lights.
Clearly, they're useful and help us manage traffic in a way that reduces risks and harms, but we don't consider traffic violations a moral issue (though I grant some might, or that it could be argued).
It seems to me society, and by extension me, is better of for us having traffic lights and enforcing/thinking of their use in amoral terms.
I sinply extend this logic to all of moral discourse.
I am not concerned with what is good or bad in a moral sense : only in the trivial sense of is it good for me and the people I care about, and then I try to act in a way that doesn't run me into problems with other people.
When this is applied to a society, it merely becomes a matter of "what is best for us and our loved ones" because you cannot live and function in a society without being a part of an "us".
@@hian I can't see clearly the sequitur of ideas in your writing, but I think there's enough to controvert your main points.
When you bring up the case of what to do when there's conflict between people you conclude that the way to go about it is making concessions and bartering, but there's an immediate moral premise that underlies choosing this way of action, and that is that you must respect the other person's right to life and autonomy, because it very well might be that what it's more convenient for someone's flourishing is going over them. In essence, for everybody to have that chance some things are necessarily bad if they happened, and people shouldn't engage in them. Similar thing with the stoplight example, because diminishing risks for people is implying that it would be bad if they died in a traffic accident. Furthermore, someone not obeying this rule and a crash occurring because of it would have deliberately acted in a situation where it was mandatory to behave according to common sense-just to be technical about what a traffic rule ought to be- would be, not unclearly, an action which would have gone against other people's right to life, and thus a bad action.
Perhaps moral language and systems can be seen as a rational way to structure what we find is at least the basis of what we find convenient to maximize, which could be personal flourishing.
In synthesis, just to add some color to my already obvious conclusion, I cannot imagine any persuasive case that can start to undermine moral language and systems to ultimately make them fall for being inconvenient for humanity.
@@nicolasescobaravila7910
No, I fundamentally reject that there is an inherent moral premise to bartering for one's well-being.
This is an essentialist encroachment on language by moral supposition which renders all actions and behavior "moral" in such a way that moral behavior and mere behavior becomes indistinguishable.
That's silly.
For instance, no-one would consider simply waking up in the morning a moral/immoral behavior, and thus the onus is on moralists to make a positive case for how a behavior has a moral component, not on me to prove how it doesn't.
In the case of essentially stealing self-priority as a moral axis and concluding am I still making moral assessment, or claim : this is the act of superimposing a model of morality on my model of operation in direct contradiction to the language used that should suffice to demonstrate how that makes the idea of morality functionally useless.
Specifically, I don't act out of self-preservation or towards my own flourishment because I consider it "good". I simply do because that is what makes me happy.
If you ascribe this moral value you might as well ascribe the act of listening to music or eating delicious foods moral value as well I.E that it is morally good to eat good food.
Finally, I don't barter with people because I attribute their autonomy or flourishment moral value.
I merely barter with them in so far as they are necessary for me to meet my own ends.
If maximizing my own flourishment was best achieved by wiping out all other life in the universe, and it was within my power to do so, then I would do so.
It just so happens to be the case that I don't have that power, nor am I convinced that doing so would help me flourish.
In the case of traffic lights, I am not assuming it is morally bad for people to die in traffic accidents. I am simply observing the fact that if traffic was a chaotic hellscape, it would probably both endanger and bother me specifically.
Other people are mere accidental beneficiaries of my support of this system in so far as it is to my liking and preference.
In so far as people have a similar self-interest, it is safe to assume we'll end up with traffic lights wholly regardless of whether every single person within said society deep down has no preference for the well-being of other drivers or pedestrians than themselves.
Your point was that moralist language is restraining, and deceptive because it looks to hide what the moral system reduces to.
Well, that sounds paranoid to me, because it doesn't take too much to unpack the essence of what these systems (religious people, utilitarians) look for, and it's not reprehensible that they're looking for something.
I'll step around the complex philosophical analysis you made because I think I have enough to grasp in order to make a simple rebuttal.
There are things that are undesirable in the universe: there's destruction of life, beauty; there's physical and emotional pain; suffering and frustration. There are also things that are desirable; flourishing sums them up quite well.
These are phenomena which essentially take place in sentient beings, which are a very small part of the universe, but more than plenty to necessitate morality. And given our experience this is something completely opposite to triviality.
This is as important a thing as it gets.
Because laying down in language the previous concepts and that good lies in diminishing the undesirable and maximizing the desirable just cannot be unnecessary. If it was it takes us to places such as "If it was convenient to my flourishing to wipe out all life in the universe, and I hat that capacity, I would do it".
I'm sorry, but that kind of thinking would hardly give a possibility to you being alive and pursue something.
I'm not convinced on the example of beating students. I can see that the teachers really think they are beating the students in order to educate them, which means help their long-term well-being.
Its an excuse for abuse of power my dude.
problem is it doesn't based on research and my personal experience. It just made me anxious over how to improve my mark or not understand why it isn't happening. And I don't feel like asking teachers because they beat me so I want to avoid seeing them to avoid pain, so my grades either stagnate or worsen. It just put students in a negative loop. If the end result is to improve, it certainly fails at that.
I have some questions,
Should we stop torture -if all- because it's bad or because it doesn't work?
The other question is about freedom of speech, we should allow people to express themselves freely because it's an essential freedom, or because if we allow the authorities to suppress some ideas we don't like, it Will be a slippery slope and can do that to us in the future?
@Tight n Nerdy 😂😂
Marvellous, thanks, i have learnt so much from this 1 hr video about amoralilty/morality/religion/science/the law/politics/human behaviour/truth
Harris says the concept of 'well-being' should be a simple test
of an action being 'good ' or not. Have I over-simplified?
That definition is circular. If the whole point of his defining 'well being' as the standard is that it is supposed to inform our morality, to say that we know an action is good because it improves well-being and our test to know if an action improves well-being or not is whether or not that action is 'good' is circular reasoning of the most straightforward kind.
@@faqgougle7641 Your formulation is indeed circular, but I don't believe Harris would say the way you determine if an action improves well-being is if it is good, he would say you can objectively measure whether an action improves well-being and you would say that the Acton was good of it increased that objective measure.
He makes it 100% clear at the beginning of the book that he makes the single assumption that improving overall well-being is something we ought to do and/or be interested in. Most critics of the book either don't know he does this or ignore it. He derives an ought from an is and an if. He explains his reasons for doing so. The easiest way to disagree is to simply say that you don't accept this one assumption. And in that case Harris doesn't claim to have any way of persuading you. The whole book rests on the the reader accepting the initial assumption. I think it's a reasonable assumption as far as thinking practically about morality goes. But if someone doesn't think that then that's fine.
@@kasroa the problem is that basically the only way you have to deny that is specify which people, precisely, and under which conditions, do you think is morally important that are made to _suffer_ . Because otherwise you pretty much agree, and the rest derives from that.
IMO the bigger issue is that even if you accept that premise, comparing well-beings of different people and deciding how much good for X is worth as much suffering for Y is a fundamentally unsolvable problem itself, because we don't have access to qualia and even if we did there'd be problems with it anyway. But that's less about what the goal of morality overall is, and more about a proper definition of fairness.
@@HaganeNoGijutsushi
You assume the suffering of one is on the other side of another’s well being
When you say things like '... is bad' that in itself is a value judgment which implies morality, so his drinking argument kind of falls apart because it suggests that human lives are worth preserving over say the freedom to drink and drive etc.
Him arguing for this position as something people "should" hold is kind of self-defeating in a sense, because if he were complelty amoralistic he shouldn't even be able to argue for that.
@@timothyschwarz4028 Thats conflating a hypothetical prescription with a categorical one.
As he said in the video itself “You shouldn’t X” or “you should X” can either be absolute (categorical) or relative (hypothetical).
If I say “You should preserve moral language” (Such as “you’re a bad person”), I am not committed to that being a categorical prescription.
There can, and there isnt one case in which this doesn’t work to my knowledge, be specificity to that prescription.
Namely (for example): “You should preserve moral language as to not talk past each other”.
There’s specificity there, which makes it relative/hypothetical, and that goes for the most general statements too.
“You’re a bad person”, unless it’s said by a person that isn’t thinking, will always break down in some deeper relative meaning, where “bad” there means XYZ things (normally the breaking of some social code etc).
This is just imposing moral realist notions by force.
“Should”, “Shouldn’t”, “good”, “bad”, don’t at all by default denote some absolute notion.
“You should study, in order to pass your exam”, “It’s bad to oversleep”, are all instance of those words denoting the conductivity of a thing RELATIVE to a goal.
So, “Human lives are worth preserving” can be some condition/criterion by which you judge other actions, but it will never be a moral truth that is absolute.
It’s totally obvious that while it’s an intuition most people hold, and that we may be even biologically/socially disposed to hold, it’s not gonna apply to all cases, even by human judgement.
There’s a million cases in which human lives are superseded by some goal, and therefore discarded as a criterion for “good/bad”, in exchange of other criteria.
@@surplusrevenge2013 But for “You should preserve moral language as to not talk past each other”. to be in any way meaningful we have to accept "to not talk past each other" as "good" and with every other example this would also be the case.
We could say "If we do not perserve moral language we will talk past each other." without seeing "to not talk past each other" as good, but if we want to make this normative we have to accept that second part as good.
@@timothyschwarz4028 Yeah I agree but the point is that “Not talking past each other” being “good” can merely mean that’s a desire/preference/disposition/commitment of yours.
The moral realist wants to say that “good” there means something deeper than just wanting to realize/actualize the proposition.
And it just isn’t.
It’s not even close to contradictory to hold to a relativism and say that all that “good” and “bad” means is the levels to which some action/event are conducive to the realization of some desire etc
Moral principles are constantly used and useful. Even a statement like "analytic moral philosophy is useless" belies reference to moral principles: from, foundationally, that epistemology is a possible project in even a minimal sense, to evaluating a certain baseline of philosophy and logic generally, to the construction of sophisticated concepts like "analytic moral philosophy" which correspond with something in the world, to the judgement that concepts ought to be "useful", to judgements about what constitutes usefulness, etc..
Although I think this channel is really great, I find it unfortunate in general when educators present themselves as doing some educational/corrective with respect to their discipline but then find the need to insert their own views/dogmas without even reference to common objections or alternative views. I don't think that serves students or the public well.
interesting video. how do you classify something as "fair", "more just", etc without a moral judgement?
"we should stabalize expectstions" is obviously are moral claim.
not really. stabilizing expectations just happened to be one thing that people liked, with broad enough support that those laws came into being
No, not necessarily. The expectations could be altered for reasons to improve criterion, not ethical propositions
I feel like the professor is trying to have his cake and eat it:
Near the start of the presentation, he states that having an absolute morality is "not desirable" because it would necessarily relegate all other forms of discourse to a lower level. But this pre-supposes some kind of moral framework with which to judge absolute morality as desirable or not. It feels like the professor is saying that absolute morality would be bad because it would get rid of relative morality (i.e. the variety of human discourse around ethics etc.).
Secondly, a bit later on the professor states that (absolute) moral thinking is "dangerous" and "problematic" because it tends people towards conflict and violence. But here the professor is making a value statement! He's engaging in exactly the activity he's trying to refute.
Preach!!!
Hard to say as maybe i dont have a perfect grasp of whats being discussed here, but i think it presupposes that relative morality is more advantagious as it allows ones position to be changed based on argument or critical thought? I mean, he is a philosophy professor after all.
I agree the Trolley Problem (and its like) is useless as he describes regarding any real-life moral dilemma. However, it has helped us to see more clearing how changing variables reveals certain general "gut feelings." For instance, while most people tend to justify pulling the lever to save five and let one die, when the variable includes a more active roll (such as pushing a heavy person onto the track) many less say they would do that. This reveals that the perceived weight of responsibility differs and this knowledge can be generalized to more real-life situations. Again, this is its only 'use' and otherwise I totally agree with the argument made in this video.
52:05 - During the Covid pandemic we actually have been in a situation like a trolley problem: at the peak if contagions, doctors had to make choices as to which human beings to save and which to let die. Same with some political choices during Covid, as you observed: are we going to let old people die in order to protect the economy? Real life sometimes encounters very real "trolley problems".
Edit: ah, I watched until the end; I understand your point about every moral dilemma being very concrete and often impossible to adjudicate based only on abstract general principles.
51:00 It's pretty disingenuous to call moral thought experiments "abstract and entirely useless" and act as if people posing these dilemmas weren't perfectly aware that every situation is unique and complex or that their goal was to rely entirely on an oversimplistic strategy like counting victims and taking nothing else into account. In my view the idea of the trolley problem is very useful in getting people to think about the fact that there exist moral dilemmas everywhere in the first place. Furthermore there is a very obvious and very real problem that plays out in real life pretty much exactly as a trolley problem: autonomous vehicles in particular (where none of the counterpoints brought up hold true) and AI ethics in general.
The point is that it's so complex that the oversimplification, rather than bringing out the truth, obscures the truth. Moral philosophy (or amoral philosophy) is the practical philosophy, so to create a situation that is impractical is useless.
The problem with abstractions is that they often put you in a different human condition. In this case it's being able to have foreknowledge. In real life, I won't choose one over the other, I will try to save both.
This was a really interesting video. I definitely agree with your points on this topic. Your book is now on my reading list.
You explain Peterson's point far better than he could or would even be willing to do, due to his charlatan-like way of existing in the public sphere.
Why are you calling him a charlatan while also agreeing with his point? I like Peterson myself so I'd like to know.
@@enigmaticone6559 Didnt he write "charlatan-like"? This by the way is the typical Peterson charlatan-like style. Willingly put up a strawman and then destroy it or making claims that are so obviously wrong. Its not his whole person - not "he is a charlatan" but several of his arguments would also use charlatans cause he willingly spins them in the direction so his target audience feels pleased.
Even in this little example of Peterson at Minute 25 claiming that Harris "acts christian" is so obviously absurd in the way he is justifying it here ( in contradictin of Moeller who argues really well why the basics of Harris is religious... but not christian, which is precisly what Peterson claimed). It is even embarissing for me to react on such a weird claim that not robbering a bank or not killing people is acting is based on "fundamental christian" metaphysics. (Easiest way to show how ridiculous it is to pur "christian" in this context is asking about all the chinese non-christian people who dont know anything about christianity and where the whole society is not based on christianity at all).
And by the way... bank robbery is not mentioned in the bible. Of course not. There were no banks 2.000 years ago.
The modern justice code was WAY more influenced by philosophers of 17./18./19. century then by the bible - where btw most of "gods commandments" to NOT apply at all in modern civilization Uh - did he forget about it? Of course not.
And THIS is charlatan-style. In my opinion Peterson is ABSOLUTELY aware of his words and does it very willingly for his (christian american!) target audience.
If he would argue about a broader religious behaviour which of course is problematic... he would argue like Moeller. But he wants to argue FOR his christianity. And this gets very weird and absurd if you check out whole humanity and the whole global wide history where the majority of people didnt knew much about christianity (and a lot didnt know anything at all) and werent christians at all.
@@BoothTheGrey Okay, Charlatan-like doesn't mean Charlatan exactly, although I wasn't quite sure of the distinction that is made between those, which is why I asked his meaning. I don't agree with you saying that I put up a strawman either as I didn't make a claim or destroy it, but whatever. You explained that line of thought quite well though so let's go from there. I agree that his statement that Harris is Christian was too far but I understand his point. He's saying that Christian ideals or meta-physics underlie the thinking of the western world, not in terms of the christian god but more in terms of the ethics embedded in the bible. Which I think makes sense because I do see a lot of parallels. Christianity is the biggest and most wide-spread religion in the world now, obviously not everyone is christian that's not the point. The point is that Harris cannot be completely separate from fundamental religious ethics as it's the basis of many of the ways we modern people believe humans should conduct themselves whether you're religious or not, Jordan uses Christianity because again it is the most widespread, especially in the western world. I do think Moeller is more accurate in referring to religion as whole, plus in any case many religions make a lot of the same points about how how humans should conduct themselves. Jordan is not talking about the law, he's talking the personal code of ethics ( or moral behavior? beliefs?) that we should not rob banks or kill people. The law comes after that, people can argue that the only thing holding us back is the law but I don't quite believe that, although without any law whatsoever I imagine it would be pretty terrible. It could also be argued that religious ethics were used in the forming the system as law as we draw from whatever ideas that have been created before us but I wouldn't really know about that so I won't. Peterson has said that he prefers constructing an ironman in order to refine an argument as much as possible as he believes in the ideal of truth, in my understanding, to be highest ideal to go for which is one of the many things he's put out that really resonate with me and is why I like him so much. If you look at his biblical series you'll see how he analyzes fundamental lessons that can be gained from it such as making the proper sacrifices. To god, I suppose but again in my understanding Peterson isn't so much religious as psychological in that he believes in God only, or starting from that basis, God as an ideal of the good that we all create within ourselves. Again, this is my understanding I don't claim to fully understand where he's coming from there.
@@BoothTheGrey By the way do you have a good video or something on Harris that I could look at, because I've heard a lot about him but I'm not quite sure where to start on learning about his points of view. I watched the debate between him and Jordan but that's about it. I don't really feel like reading his books yet which is just laziness on my part.
@@enigmaticone6559 Uh - why is this marked? Because you strawman again. If someone uses a word, which is very context-focused used (in this case even with a word-addition by hyphen) and you ask only for this word and exactly write "why are you calling him a charlatan" - this is exactly a strawman. You ask for something no one said in that way that you asked.
That you NOW say you werent quite sure what he meant with "charlatan-like"... is NOT what you said and you did NOT ask for explanation what a difference between charlatan and charlatan-like could be and how his statement could be meant. If I did not reply or no one else... your question with the strawman would just stand there alone.
The so called "christian ideals" are not existing in most countries of the "western world" if you would take christian ideals from the bible for real cause worhipping the god is by far the most important ideal. BY FAR. The "parallels" are pure cherry-picking which of course is something religious people do all the time. And Peterson does very precisly talk about ACTING - not thinking. So the ACTING would be determined by christian ideals when someone is not robbering a bank, not raping women (what is about women acting anyway? - His answer is man-focused cause this is his target audience) or not murdering anybody.
To not do these actings has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with "christian ideals" - cause you find this in most religions and also in ancient philosophies of asia, too. Cause the fundament of this bevahiour is a social necessity for a community that works - especially large communities where most people dont know each other. And the most important "feeling" is not being religious but being at least a bit empathic.
If he would refer to some traditions like "sunday in germany" (which is a special day where most shops still arent allowed to open) or celebrating christmas although it was hijacked by capitalism decades ago... but no... his examples are "killing, raping, bank-robbery". He is supposed to be such a smart guy that these examples were not an accident. (And by the way raping is in some circumstances not punished in the old testament - if it is a jew who owns slaves e.g.)
I would suggest Peterson is reading more ancient greek, chinese or indien philosophers... not this bible crap where you have to seperate the few interesting parts from to horrendous brutal parts - especially in the old testament (which Jesus stated himself as still accurate - he exactly was a critique of jewish behaviour 2000 years ago to be not following the old testament anymore which was in his time of course the only holy scripture).
The idea that THE BIBLE is the foundation of our ethics is just wrong. A few little party can refer to that. But the bible ITSELF took over from other ideas of that time from ancient agypt or babylon. The Greek Philosphers have much more influence on modern civilization than the bible.
Moeller by the way is saying that Sam Harris basic attitude to make (secular) moral an absolutism - THIS is religious behaviour. And this in my opinion is way to generous from him towards Peterson cause Peterson does NOT say that Harris religious attitude is his absolutistic moral approach. Peterson says Harris acts because of OTHER behaviours in that way you could call him a christian (!) believer. And this is absolutely ridiculous.
And yes - Peterson says sometimes religious and sometimes christian. In my opintion (again) purpose for his taget audience. Which is the reason he acts partly charlatan-like. He is so deep in his giving his audience what they want... it is almost not noticable what is his fan-service and what is his own opinion.
And most psychological interested people OF COURSE are aware of the fact that people dont act "right" cause they know all the laws. They just have basic empathic understanding of social structures. Which is of course the basic law that Kant claimed. Its the social law that anybody should act so his acting could be generalized. Nobody does this thought everytime directly. But... we have the possibility to feel others harm - especially when we see them directly. To not feel the harm of others you have to be drilled to destroy this. To say it differently: Most people are able to put themselves in thoughts/feelings in the situation of another person. How would I feel if I was raped or was a bank-worker and someone is robbering the bank I am working in? Those are empathic intuitions many dont are fully aware of but they are there in our brain.
Of course you can claim this is "gods law" in our brains. Every biologist would say... OK... then many animals have this law, too, for their own species. Why do we kill them again? Ah... I see... they taste so good.
I watched some Sam Harris lectures many years ago. UA-cam is full of them. He talks so much... its very easy to find stuff from him and he has to say to ANYTHING a lot. Often rather smart. Sometimes really strange. Many strange stuff is based on his absolutistic approach.
Interesting
About something being 'absolutely good,' I think Kant's conception of 'the good will' was essentially that to him, thus his idea of the categorical imperative, which stems from his idea of the good will.
I'm trying to challenge my own beliefs here but I'm 30 minutes in he hasn't once challenged Harris' ideas in a coherent way. He's just punching at a straw man with vague words. As far as I understand it Harris' main argument is him proposing that wellbeing should define absolute good and by that definition good can be measured scientifically, but he keeps saying that Harris says there is some sort of transcendent good as there is in religion, which is a much easier target to fire at. Am I missing something here?
He says multiple times that the idea of an absolute good is incoherent and resembles the religious propositions Harris generally spends so much time critiquing. There is no scientific way to even begin to define "absolute good" or a generalized sense of absolute "flourishing" among sentient living things, which is the crux of The Moral Landscape.
@@taylorpearson506 the crux of the moral landscape is in the way he defines good, he ties it too wellbeing and that makes the idea of good no longer "generalized" or "incoherent". We can't messure a transcendent good but when we define it by a measurable quality (like human happiness), it becomes tangible. Whether or not we can determine it right now there is an answer to the question "what would cause the most happiness/wellbeing for the most people" therefore if you define "good" as a measure of human wellbeing, you can scientifically messure good.
isn't morality simple the answer to "what should we do?" in various situatiins nd contexts. if theanswer to that question is "you should do X if you want to Y to happen" that's still an answer. Moral debates can still be had if all goodness is relative to deciered goals, and morality is still meningfull. I don't get why he wants to stop talking avbout "morality", just because it is relative. What don't i get?
No, it its not, but you acutally get the point. It's about a misunderstanding of the meaning of the modal verb.
Let me explain myself.
If you ask me "What should I do in order to make X happen", you are asking me "how" to do something, that is: given a goal X, what is that I have to do to make that happen. Tha means that you must arbitrarly chose a goal, and everything else is a consequence of that decision.
The questions of morality are always about "what is (absolute) good?", or "what is goodness per se?".
As Nieztsche says, "There are no moral facts, bu only moral intepretations of facts".
The goal of Sam Harris and a lot of other thinkers (and religions too) is to define what is absolute, objective good.
But if we have to negotiate a goal in orther to make sense of what is good, then it means that goodness can't be objective, and that it's always abritrary.
Morality is, in my opinion, a means to an end. TO suggest that the goal must be arbitrary is true in some instances and not true in other instances. My desire to be happy is a valid goal in my life and may be meaningless to you; however, what if my desire to be happy and your desire to be the same are best accomplished collaboratively? Then, we have a basis for agreement that is not arbitrary.
@@andersonwallace4365 "what if my desire to be happy and your desire to be the same are best accomplished collaboratively? Then, we have a basis for agreement that is not arbitrary." That's all well and good until we find out there's another two guys guys that agreed on something completely opposite to what we agreed on... and now we are back on square one. Turns out it was arbitrary all along. But I agree with its use as a tool for cooperation, I'm just not comfortable with people claiming universal moral rules... that seems to be too close to religion for my liking. It will just bring more problems down the line. Who knows what will be considered moral 1,000 years in the future? (if we make it that far).
@@posteador What two other guys think isn’t relevant to whether or not jumping off a cliff, without a parachute, is a good method of achieving a long and happy life. Morality, in Harris’ view, is just the word we use to describe the optimal strategy for long term human happiness/well-being. I don’t believe that Harris would argue for coercion to make people more moral, except in instance where certain actions would harm the fabric of society (e.g. tolerance of murder).
@@posteador Harris accounts for the fact that morality may change with circumstances, as long as the end goal is the same. 1000 years from now, we could be living like cavemen, scavenging for food and drinking parasite infested water, the goal of morality wouldn’t change; however, the means likely would.
The idea that one shouldn't pursue "the correct moral realization" because it would render all current, past and future efforts futile, is like saying we should not try to cross the ocean in wooden ships, because one day we will have airplanes.
The struggle, mistakes and so on are part of the learning journey. Learning is very seldom pleasurable and often requires cognitive effort which can be quite stressful. Grappling with complex ideas that you're just not equipped for, in an effort to master them, is something every single student knows.
Children learn to spell a certain way, write a certain way and read a certain way, do math a certain way, all of which are unlearned later in life, and yet we don't think that what we should do is start grade 1's with calculus.
So there are two elements to this:
First, the ongoing effort on the individual in their contemporary zeitgeist to learn "truth" (which will always be an approximation as future information will make these truths more correct);
Second, the ongoing effort at a societal level.
Example (perhaps poor) of the first: Learning to graph mathematical functions on X and Y axials which flow infinitely into all directions, only to realize later in life that there are smaller and larger infinities. One would assume that the knowledge of the second would in some sense lower the value of having learned the first.
Example of the second: Take any field of science. 40 years ago we were morons compared to what we know today. Lobotomy won the Nobel prize! Children were operated for "being hyperactive"! And yet lobotomy was a second-order result of our understanding of the brain, and specifically, that we could "fix" things neurosurgically. Today, hundreds of thousands are saved every month from issues that would've been death sentences. The effort spent on lobotomy seems today to have been absolutely irrelevant, useless and morally repugnant. And yet it is a fruit of a tree. A tree who's growth we cannot predict with any accuracy, and so we must all gather fruit and hope our fruit is the one that "wins out".
Just some thoughts that arose.
So there is no ethical connection to drink driving? - Major Premise: I cannot both want to murder and want to be murdered, regardless of time or location, therefore murder is a categorical imperitive and a universal moral violation. Minor Premise: I am conscious of the empirical scientific evidence that posits: Drink driving increases the probability of killing another human. Conclusion: It (is) a moral violation to drink and drive. If this is syllogistically floored please advise? I understand the legal difference between murder and a road traffic incident, but my minor premise points out that I am aware of the possible consequences of my actions. Ps: Amazing channel, thank you for the content
This isn’t an accurate representation of what Harris is saying, as far as I understand it. Harris specifically is not trying to get an ought from an is. He’s only saying that if we can agree on criteria, as in rules for a game, for what is conducive to wellbeing we can begin to make objective decisions towards that end. This is different than conflating the two.
yeag but the critic here is that "florishing" or utility or "hapiness" are psychological unsound concepts that don't get you very far as a basis. if he says we can all agree that we prefer a world with hapiness over a world of endless suffering, he os probably right, but he is playing a trick on us, what we imagen when we hear happiness or suffering is very different from person to person, and they are meaningless concepts in the apstract. So this is no real agreement at all and no sound basis for moral discussions.
This still doesn't address the second argument made that even if we agree on what the criteria for morality is that is not desirable, even detrimental to well being. When we all agree on the 'criteria' for morality we essentially create a religion, whether it includes the traditional deity or not.
That's such a none statement though.
"If we could agree about what morality is and how its measured then we could measure it and optimize it"
I guess sam?
Sam Harris uses economics specifically in regards to well-being and that part is often ignored. He does not think just as a philosopher. The multidisciplinary approach to Ethics is cool.
the term 'amoral' was , at least in my experience, frequently used to deflect criticism of unethical business practices. something like: 'company is an amoral construct therefore the company or its personnel didn't do anything wrong. the legislature made it possible.'... so its become somewhat of a red-flag term for me. i agree with your critique of morality/moral-language though
But the trolley problem is still an important primer to think about negative utilitarianism which occurs everyday at the highest levels: should the hospital buy more dialysis machines or more NICUs, should the state build more schools or more hospitals, should i do homework or masturbate. The trolley problem doesn't take into account resource scarcity or allow a framework for assessing competing interests, but it is an important educational tool to introduce the horror of utilitarianism as well as it's positivist/empirical view of problems.
Fantastic!
My man is a fan of Blame XD
Thought I would see more comments about this :/
nicely spotted! would love to see a video on that
His example of school beatings, I would argue, supports Sam, if one stipulates it's immoral to beat students (and includes other evidence, such as blow back, it doesn't work etc).
But without morality, how do you condemn the beating of the students you mentioned as well as condemned(I believe)?
I'm really confused about your point of morality causing unwanted things to happen. Why do you view these things as bad without an intrinsic moral sense?
@@waynelou2042 Harris claims there is objective morality. You can still see things as bad subjectively when denying that claim.
I disagree on the assertion made about exploding books. I think there is value in having a Telos to morality, and I’m not convinced that objective moral truths are impossibilities. I would argue that they are still contingent, but no means trivial. Saying that murder is wrong is true in the absolute, but there is context to a merger that can justify it, like self-defense. I think that this supposed arbitrariness throws the baby out with the bath water.
I don't think you can really say that murder is wrong in the absolute as a sort of law of the universe; however you can make a decent mathematical case that in the interaction of a group of agents each of which values their own life and who keep a reputation tally on all other members that dictates how much they should trust them or cooperate with them, adopting a "no murder" rule tremendously increases the efficiency of cooperation. It's never a "you must", but a "if you do X, you get Y". If you create a society in which murder is allowed and even encouraged, you get no society very very quickly. We don't like that at all (in fact, so much that this part of our programming has probably been hardcoded into us by evolution itself), so we tend to stick to "no murder" as a general rule.
I thought that Harris' whole project WAS to downgrade morality (good/bad) from the general sense, to the trivial, relative sense.
Like you, I think Harris sees the absolute sense of good/bad as an unhelpful and impossible goal - he is dismissing those ideas, and instead presenting a sensible, trivial, relative version of morality: one that he claims human ideas of absolute morality already approximate and tend towards, due to scientific truths about humans.
You say he's wrong for 'conflating' those two ideas, but then go on to say that one of those ideas is garbage anyway! So I think you're really in agreement: it's not that Harris conflates the two, he is deliberately replacing the absolute with the trivial. (His use of language sometimes does imply a moral absolutism - I think this is sloppy language that is really trying to reference the 'objectivity' provided by the normative nature of the scientific method.)
In other words: Isn't Harris simply saying: 'Moral truth doesn't exist, but here is this other concrete thing that works better as our referent for moral language, let's use it instead.' ?
Harris states that all humans, bar a few mentally deranged outliers, accept utlitarian premises. Moral relativism obfuscates these premises and rolls the discussion further backn than it needs to be.
That has always been my understanding of Sam's views on morality. I think the comparison he makes between health and morality makes this clear. It's one of his go-to analogies for how he thinks we should be thinking about and talking about morality. Namely, there doesn't need to be an absolute standard of what is healthy/good for us to make objective investigations into what makes us healthier/better people.
The conflation happens in the second step of Harris' argument.
In the first step he argues that human flourishing is 'universally preferred' over human misery. This is the point of his 'world of misery'-thought experiment.
In the second step he argues that, because this is so, human flourishing is morally good. Not good 'relative to certain criteria', but good in an absolute, moral sense. He's pretty explicit about that.
So the problem is that Harris argues from a relative 'good' to an absolutist 'good'. He needs the second step in order to make statements about morality at all. Otherwise he would only be talking about flourishing. Because he wants to argue not -only- that most people prefer to flourish (that would be rather uncontroversial), but rather that making most people flourish is morally desirable.
His go-to analogy betwee health and morality is to make a different point: namely that there are no clear demarcations between what is healthy and what is unhealthy, but that we at the same time all have a rather clear sense of health anyway. The same, according to him, with morality: we all have a rather clear sense between what is right and what is wrong, because we can see that when people suffer it is worse than when they flourish. So the health-analogy is used in order to not get entwined in problematic discussions about what, exactly, he means by human flourishing. What demarcates flourishing from suffering? These are very difficult discussions that he obviously doesn't want to wade into, so the health-analogy is a good way to hand-wave that.
@@Matthijsendt I think the health analogy successfully makes both points, but you may be right that he uses the analogy more often to avoid the demarcation problem.
As for the relative to absolutist move that he makes, I don't think he successfully solves the is-ought gap. My most charitable interpretation of his view is that the universally preferred behavior is itself the claim that "we ought to maximize flourishing". If it is an objective fact that everyone believes that to be the case, then you can get off the ground with making other prescriptive claims about how we ought to behave. So, while he can't truly make prescriptive claims solely based on descriptive facts, he can theoretically be making objective claims and investigations about morality.
Why should anyone value their own relative standards instead of the opposite standards? How can one convince another that their standard is preferable if neither has objective supremacy?
Usually by threat of violence. That's the premise behind all laws - obey or we will make you. This is usually balanced by the fact that the laws are created with the collective approval or implied collective approval (e.g. via elected representatives) of society at large. When this second part breaks down you tend to get revolution - a counter backed with violence.
I evaluate their impact on reality and as a living thing with a sense of self preservation I can say I don’t want to live in a world where murder is moral (in fact we empathize with others in such a way that we feel the victims pain and want it to stop).
So as a living thing with empathy and self preservation I can make certain evaluations about rules or ethics in an objective manner.
Wearing a mask is uncomfortable in the moment and I don’t like it but it protects me and others. The thought of people struggling to breathe in the hospital makes my skin crawl. I don’t want to suffer like that and I don’t want others too.
We can make further arguments about the knock on effects of masks and other undesirable restrictions on public health and the economy. We have examples of successful lockdown policies across the world and make an objective argument that it was the ethical thing to do.
Especially since it meant Australians were having Christmas as a family not locked down thanks to their policies.
Honestly I don’t care if it’s called ethics or not but as physical beings in a material world we can come to some almost but not quite objective standards
@@jeffwells641 I think that’s why this idea of consent through democracy is so important. Democracy gives a non-violent Avenue to mediate competition between philosophies.
It’s why we have courts for example instead of blood feuds. We synthesize those violent or hostile interactions into a game of sorts.
@@jeffwells641 Amorality offers no defense against the oppression of minorities, which is easily sanctioned by common/collective whim. White supremacy is good in an amoral sense.
@@OpiatesAndTits Sometimes when I feel slighted by others I become angry; other times I don't. Sometimes I want to hurt people in accordance to how I've felt hurt. Other times I don't. Emotion is whim. I see no reason to define what is ethical by how common its sentiment. Inflicting pain is only unethical if you've defined it as such. If morality doesn't exist, there is no logic which compels or supports that view above the view that pain is good. In an amoral world, the only law is that whatever is common persists. Whatever whim has the greatest support becomes law. The only law of nature is that might always wins. Slavery in America was good, in an amoral sense, until more white people than not decided it wasn't. There is no absolute argument, no pure logic, in an amoral world, to prevent the oppression of minorities; in this world there is only rhetoric and shared whim.
Thank you very much for that. However, I would disagree on the divorce example at 41:55. Giving up on determining the "guilty" party in the course of divorce proceedings is in my opinion how morality prevailed over the social contract of marriage. The process of putting the blame on one party in courts has (in my country it is regrettably still the case) to be based on finding out who and to what degree breaks the promisses implied or stated in the contract. (I mean infidelity, violence, shady money deals, psychological manipulation etc.). It might involve some "moral" judgement but in general is more of a legal investigation. into who did not deliver on some contractual obligations. Hence, the financial "punishement" in the form of alimonies or the right to retain the house or raise children, sort of mirroring taking over business assets. And... giving up on that mechanism comes from a moral reflection that we should limit unnecessary suffering for the former "guilty" party as they are not in fact "evil" (falling in/out of love is not a sin) and as such do not deserve punishment.
Who is the interviewer ? Any why does he keep bringing up JP and William Craig?
The Moral Landscape is at the level of a pissed off teenager
regarding the child punishment thing: i think sam is very clear that what he means by "human flourishing" and it is precisely not just hedonistic pleasure. a childs future accademic and personal devellopment is therefore included. Research shows us that violence is bad for accademic achievment, mental health and in regards to personality it either makes you meek and terrified of everything or a violent person yourself. so in sams morality we can conclude that spanking has no moral value. But lets assume for the sake of argument that spanking a child harms and terriefies them but also increases accademic aptitude. This is what sam means with "multiple peaks on the moral landscape". now i agree that sam offers no solution to finding the highest peak and has therefore not singlehandedly solved moral philosophy, but i dont feel like he claims that either. what i think the main takeaway from his work is, that we can make our moral decissions better by applying scientific rigor and actually thinking about the consequences of our actions instead of trying to find some justification why what we are already doing is morally good. he challanges us to formulate moral goals and research the solution instead of falling back on rigid moral systems. In the most basic sense, morally good action for harris is just "acting to improve the world". i dont believe he ever claims that you can derive a should from his work, only that there is no "should" that is not innately tied to states of the human brain. for that core tenant i have so far never seen a rebuttal. again, spanking the child can be moral for harris, but only if it truly improves the childs experience in the long run. i think you misunderstood his point there. he took spanking a child as a thing that has no effect other than causing pain. it is understandable that you are not up to date on child psychology, but "spanking children is bad" is not sams argument, it is "spanking children has been proven (so far as we can know) to be harmful and useless, therefore it is bad"
what harris wants (imo) is for moral philosophers to start applying scientific testing to their hypothesis. you can write a thousand pages about the moral way to raise a child, but if there is no devellopmental psychology research in there it is useless.
You don't even understand what this professor said. But hey keep simping for Harris, well known Islamophobe, and American imperialist
@@arhael1 your mind is ruined, sad
@@arhael1 not an argument. Leabe your emotions and petty comments out of it and do better.
@@jiimmyyy Good boy was able to get that my comment wasn't an argument. It was just statement. You don't need to agree with it. Yet you did, so this emotion and pettiness pointing is just lame. I deliberately chose to write that as an answer to this essay of a comment that shows from the beginning that that person didn't listen carefully to the video, and just regurgitate the same points from Harris fandom like many others.
@@ant7891 you showed me, happy!
This is a timeless topic, 'how should i lead a good life?'
And the answer is quite personal for each.
It may exist at any one time, but changes for every moment.
A fundamental problem I see in defining "good" in "maximizing wellbeing" for example is that it no longer is absolute, it is a relative use just like the tennis example. As a result, the majority of people would reject that use. Both conservatives and liberals would say "I do not want to be good in that sense. I think people should only be well off if they work hard and contribute to society. I want them to suffer if they are lazy or don't contribute to society." The move from the vague, undefined "trivial" morality to the well-defined "relative" morality adds with in that element of disagreement. At that point, you are just begging the question surrounding your underlying political priorities, ones that a vaguely centrist liberal like Sam Harris would greatly disagree with a vaguely libertarian leftist like myself. If you have the same underlying axioms all of the logic sounds convincing, but when they differ you reach different conclusions, which is not the "objective" morality advertised.
I don't think liberals would say that lol
No, you simply haven't examined your preferences thoroughly enough. Why tf do you think people are ever persuaded? How do explain that? People often do share the wish for the well being of conscious entities and they mere focus on HEURISTICS for that, but when you point out to them how their heuristics fail, they change their minds.
Actually, Harris limits his discussion about objective morality to human wellbeing, so critiques of his argument should be limited to such. The wellbeing of an alien species may very well not be compatible with human wellbeing.
There exists no nonreligious reason why human wellbeing is involved in what is morally good or bad (what people should or should not do regardless of what they want to do).
He doesn't limit it to humans, he limits it to sentient beings; or by the definition he likes to use: any creature for which it can be said "it is like something to be that creature". Or even more simply, he might say creatures that have the capacity to experience suffering, and perhaps be aware that they are suffering. To be honest it really doesn't matter all that much, you can expand the definition all you like because the arguments of the book don't really depend on how narrow or how broad the definition is. It could include every living creature or it could just include humans, but sooner or later you'll run into a problem if your definition is too narrow. For that reason he is quite broad in the book and includes most animals, known or otherwise.
I wonder if Wittgenstein addresses the communicability of the text. Obviously, the Bible is often considered "good" and "right" in the absolute (but performative) sense, of providing lessons for the present moment, the present culture. The iteration of the text: using present example to make sense of its parables, for example, is held to be it's "good." It remains (indeed, reinforces) its truth, its "good," by accepting the eschatology of human-kind, its fallability and fallenness from language (Benjamin), rather than adhering to the words themselves. It is by addressing, therefore, the "good" in the smaller, empirical sense, that seemingly the higher good is reached.
"You can never jump from well-being for this particular person in this particular circumstance to well-being as such"
But that's not what Harris is saying. The Moral Landscape is compatible with Wittgenstein. Harris is just saying that this isn't purely relative.