This is a reasonable question, but there is no way Carroll could answer it "precisely" and "in terms of measurable quantities" for his own field, much less for a nascent science of morality.

I think he knows that he's pushing at the edges with this whole subject. I don't want him to shut up at all, not this early. His next book is on this science of morality, so maybe his critics will get something more substantial to consider. Maybe not, but the investigation is well worth trying.

As I suspected:

And science's failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion -- that great engine of ignorance and bigotry -- a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary -- because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

This is an attempt to undermine religion's claim to being the only source for morality. And yeah, it's time we tried to wrest that away.

To Spinozasgalt.... Yup, I am in fact a nominalist, with respect to all abstract entities, even numbers.

I thought so. Thanks for the discussion.

Luis Dias wrote:He's a fucking troll, that's what he is.

Yes. This latest screed puts him past the reasonable assumption of being young and stupid or overreaching and into the realm of serious madness. To have this happen so soon upon the heels of Dawkins planting the flag in Personality Disorder Land has been an experience.

Still, you reminded me earlier and are reminding me more of something. I think I said this before, but it bears repeating. Harris doesn't believe what he says, though he may not be smart enough to realize it. That's because none of the examples he uses require much science. Truly, you don't need an MRI to figure out that pouring strong unbuffered acid on someone's face is not good for their well-being, and if you can't figure it out, I doubt that a pile of papers and a Star Trek laboratory will help any.

The Moral Life of Babies

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

[snip]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magaz ... wanted=all

epepke wrote:

Luis Dias wrote:He's a fucking troll, that's what he is.

Yes. This latest screed puts him past the reasonable assumption of being young and stupid or overreaching and into the realm of serious madness. To have this happen so soon upon the heels of Dawkins planting the flag in Personality Disorder Land has been an experience.

Well, having an impulse to fix the world, followed closely by becoming a media darling (on whatever scale, and for however long) does not seem to be good for anyone who starts out with a bit of rationality. Funny, it never seems to bother folks like Deepak Chopra, who are unconflicted about their reasons for seeking the status of a messiah.

One can easily find justifiably uncomplimentary things to say about organised religion without believing it's going to save the world.

Somebody once said, "Beware of enterprises which require you to buy new clothes." Who was that?

You have to be something of a showman these days to get enough notice so that your ideas reach a large enough audience to have any effect, or gather financial support. Politicians, actors, and authors have to be self promoters. I can understand the resistance to Harris' ideas, but why the attacks on his person?

He made the TED talk in February. It's now May. Seems a short time to already write off his proposal.

Sam Harris: Toward a Science of Morality

Over the past couple of months, I seem to have conducted a public experiment in the manufacture of philosophical and scientific ideas. In February, I spoke at the 2010 TED conference, where I briefly argued that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science. Normally, when one speaks at a conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a coffee break. I had these conversations at TED, of course, and they were useful. As luck would have it, however, my talk was broadcast on the internet just as I was finishing a book on the relationship between science and human values, and this produced a blizzard of criticism at a moment when criticism could actually do me some good. I made a few efforts to direct and focus this feedback, and the result has been that for the last few weeks I have had literally thousands of people commenting upon my work, more or less in real time. I can't say that the experience has been entirely pleasant, but there is no question that it has been useful.

Continues: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harri ... 67185.html

Tom Wood wrote:You have to be something of a showman these days to get enough notice so that your ideas reach a large enough audience to have any effect, or gather financial support. Politicians, actors, and authors have to be self promoters. I can understand the resistance to Harris' ideas, but why the attacks on his person?

Because the person produces the ideas, and he's the one putting up the nonsense anti-rational emotive rhetoric.

He made the TED talk in February. It's now May. Seems a short time to already write off his proposal.

He doesn't have a proposal. He has kid stuff, a bunch of naive statements that don't hold together.

Here's what Harris is acting like. He's acting like the latest dweeb who has decided that Relativity is Wrong. It's fine to challenge something, but you at least have to demonstrate that you have bothered to learn the arguments you are opposing, but Harris has entirely failed to do that. Instead, in his blog and the Huffington Post article, he's simply gone into more extreme histrionics.

epepke wrote:He doesn't have a proposal. He has kid stuff, a bunch of naive statements that don't hold together.

Here's what Harris is acting like. He's acting like the latest dweeb who has decided that Relativity is Wrong. It's fine to challenge something, but you at least have to demonstrate that you have bothered to learn the arguments you are opposing, but Harris has entirely failed to do that. Instead, in his blog and the Huffington Post article, he's simply gone into more extreme histrionics.

I actually am starting to think it is worse than that. Harris has a buzzword ("well-being") which is poorly-defined, and is trying to combine it with another word ("science"), also poorly-defined, even by scientists themselves.

I think Harris more or less understands that science is "evidence-based" (and probably a few other buzzword attributes), but the train that he has boarded with the Huffington Post article is off the rails into territory that is non-science, which is the trick used by pseudoscientists. I don't think his motivations are evil, but his orientation toward some poorly-specified "Eastern" woo still intrudes itself here. It's all well and good to pay lip service to "well-being". Who can argue with that? It's just not a ticket admitting him automatically to the discourse of morality with some special sauce on him conferred by his incantation of the word "neuroscience"!

Roughly speaking, besides really wanting a trump card against religion, he seems to be on about the "perfectability" of humans. I'd really like to know the roots of the concept of "well-being" he is deploying, and to what extent he's like any other woo-head who wants the franchise for a particular species of religion, in this case some sort of pseudo-Buddhism, or something. So out with it: What's the basis for saying that "the well-being of sentient organisms" is always my highest priority? Does it cut us loose from natural selection? If anything trumps woo, natural selection is it.

Sam Harris, @Huffington Post wrote:I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

Nietzsche comes to our rescue and points out that reason sometimes bites itself in the ass, when ill-formed syllogisms are deployed. I have no problem with people joining a tribe based on irreligion, but let's say it plainly.

Cito di Pense wrote:I think Harris more or less understands that science is "evidence-based" (and probably a few other buzzword attributes), but the train that he has boarded with the Huffington Post article is off the rails into territory that is non-science, which is the trick used by pseudoscientists. I don't think his motivations are evil, but his orientation toward some poorly-specified "Eastern" woo still intrudes itself here. It's all well and good to pay lip service to "well-being". Who can argue with that? It's just not a ticket admitting him automatically to the discourse of morality with some special sauce on him conferred by his incantation of the word "neuroscience"!

I have an armchair psychoanalysis.

Harris has been in academia too long. Every university worthy of the name has two sides to the campus. Humanities is always on one side, and physics is always on the other. Which side departments like anthropology and psychology are on says a lot about the character of the university.

I think that he feels comfortable on the humanities side, and also feels envy toward the physics side and ventures there as well. However, he's seeing people on the humanities side who are going "yay Islamists!" and coming up with a lot of PoMo nonsense, which they have been doing since the 1970s, when Edward Said published Orientalism. He doesn't see that on the physics side. So he thinks as follows:

1) Object to naive statements by liberal, naive humanities types about the Magic Goodness of All Things Islamic.
2) Roll the philosophy department out of the cesspit to the other side of campus.
3) ?????????
4) Profit!

epepke wrote:
I have an armchair psychoanalysis.

Harris has been in academia too long. Every university worthy of the name has two sides to the campus. Humanities is always on one side, and physics is always on the other. Which side departments like anthropology and psychology are on says a lot about the character of the university.

I think that he feels comfortable on the humanities side, and also feels envy toward the physics side and ventures there as well. However, he's seeing people on the humanities side who are going "yay Islamists!" and coming up with a lot of PoMo nonsense, which they have been doing since the 1970s, when Edward Said published Orientalism. He doesn't see that on the physics side. So he thinks as follows:

1) Object to naive statements by liberal, naive humanities types about the Magic Goodness of All Things Islamic.
2) Roll the philosophy department out of the cesspit to the other side of campus.
3) ?????????
4) Profit!

Pretty good. Big money is not presently flowing toward philosophy departments, and only superstars like Dennett get much love. Actually, I like Dennett's approach. He seems to realise that philosophy is edutainment.

I thought that Sokal put the wooden stake in the heart of PoMo, but it will take a generation for the beast to die.

http://www.iqdupont.com/blog/2009/3/21/ ... -on-s.html

Sam Harris might have converted Richard Dawkins. From Dawkins' blurb for Harris' new book.

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text ... landscape/

"Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris’s previous books that couldn’t have been written by any of his fellow ‘horsemen’ of the ‘new atheism’. This book is different, though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can’t duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris."

— Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show On Earth

The moral relativists / nihilists here need to understand that religions last stand and last line of defense is morality and this has to broken through, broken down.

Moridin wrote:The moral relativists / nihilists here need to understand that religions last stand and last line of defense is morality and this has to broken through, broken down.

1. Religion's last stand does not need to be broken down.
2. Even it such action was necessary, that doesn't give intellectual legitimacy to Harris' ideas about a scientific morality.

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:

Moridin wrote:The moral relativists / nihilists here need to understand that religions last stand and last line of defense is morality and this has to broken through, broken down.

1. Religion's last stand does not need to be broken down.
2. Even it such action was necessary, that doesn't give intellectual legitimacy to Harris' ideas about a scientific morality.

1. There will be different opinions on this. I think it would be a good thing to do.
2. True, but if you want to start the process then somebody (or more) has to make a proposal. Harris' is one such proposal. He's about to publish it in his next book, so we'll have much more to look at then.

Tom Wood wrote:1. There will be different opinions on this. I think it would be a good thing to do.
2. True, but if you want to start the process then somebody (or more) has to make a proposal. Harris' is one such proposal. He's about to publish it in his next book, so we'll have much more to look at then.

You're right, there will be disagreements about whether religion is a good or bad force in the modern world. However, my point was that simply because one thinks that religion is a bad force, and that religion's last leg is morality, and that science must be used to sever that final limb of religion, is not a good reason believe what Harris says.

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:

Tom Wood wrote:1. There will be different opinions on this. I think it would be a good thing to do.
2. True, but if you want to start the process then somebody (or more) has to make a proposal. Harris' is one such proposal. He's about to publish it in his next book, so we'll have much more to look at then.

You're right, there will be disagreements about whether religion is a good or bad force in the modern world. However, my point was that simply because one thinks that religion is a bad force, and that religion's last leg is morality, and that science must be used to sever that final limb of religion, is not a good reason believe what Harris says.

Agreed.

Harris is having an effect already though. His proposal is already included in the Wikipedia page on determinism, for example. PZ Myers has a post up now about a stoning that mentions an "objective criterion for judging an act as not moral".

So Sam Harris now thinks that Science can replace Philosophy when it comes to asking the tough questions about morality?

Sounds silly.

I respect the "New Atheists" for promoting rationality and skepticism, but they really need to keep their noses out of politics and philosophy, especially Sam Harris.

Sam Harris is simply a pragmatic moral consequentialist as far as I can tell. As a Buddhist, I should know because we follow more or less the same philosophy. We avoid killing (and other actions) when it is almost certain to cause unnecessary suffering/dissatisfaction-phenomena in direct or indirect ways, keeping in mind that some level of suffering is inevitable in unenlightened mental states. Therefore, minimizing suffering becomes equivalent to epicurean stance of maximizing pleasure, minus the connotation of pleasure as "instant gratification, hangover be damned".

Technically speaking, this has little relation to the philosophy of science, but I suppose the rational analysis of moral consequences could be described using the English word science in a vague, non-technical sense.

nac wrote:We avoid killing (and other actions) when it is almost certain to cause unnecessary suffering/dissatisfaction-phenomena in direct or indirect ways, keeping in mind that some level of suffering is inevitable in unenlightened mental states.

You do realize that organised crime syndicates exist in a state of war with rival clans, and engage in vendettas with little risk of retribution from a larger population situated at some position of moral superiority. These rogue clans endure particularly high levels of suffering in order to pursue other goals. Who's to say what they consider "necessary"?

In other words, take this "enlightenment" thing and bend a spoon with it, or something, or explain how it is that people join crime syndicates. Otherwise, it's nonsense. In their own sweet way, crime lords are epicureans, too.