Moral Blindness in the Name of “Tolerance”

There are very practical concerns that follow from the glib idea that anyone is free to value anything—the most consequential being that it is precisely what allows highly educated, secular, and otherwise well-intentioned people to pause thoughtfully, and often interminably, before condemning practices like compulsory veiling, genital excision, bride burning, forced marriage, and the other cheerful products of alternative “morality” found elsewhere in the world. Fanciers of Hume’s is/ought distinction never seem to realize what the stakes are, and they do not see how abject failures of compassion are enabled by this intellectual “tolerance” of moral difference. While much of the debate on these issues must be had in academic terms, this is not merely an academic debate. There are girls getting their faces burned off with acid at this moment for daring to learn to read, or for not consenting to marry men they have never met, or even for the “crime” of getting raped. The amazing thing is that some Western intellectuals won’t even blink when asked to defend these practices on philosophical grounds. I once spoke at an academic conference on themes similar to those discussed here. Near the end of my lecture, I made what I thought would be a quite incontestable assertion: We already have good reason to believe that certain cultures are less suited to maximizing well-being than others. I cited the ruthless misogyny and religious bamboozlement of the Taliban as an example of a worldview that seems less than perfectly conducive to human flourishing. As it turns out, to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court controversy. At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. In fact, this person has since been appointed to the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and is now one of only thirteen people who will advise President Obama on “issues that may emerge from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology” in order to ensure that “scientific research, health care delivery, and technological innovation are conducted in an ethically responsible manner.”25 Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim:

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?
Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing well-being—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.
She: But that’s only your opinion.
Me: Okay … Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human well-being?
She: It would depend on why they were doing it.
Me [slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head]: Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”
She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.

Such opinions are not uncommon in the Ivory Tower. I was talking to a woman (it’s hard not to feel that her gender makes her views all the more disconcerting) who had just delivered an entirely lucid lecture on some of the moral implications of recent advances in neuroscience. She was concerned that our intelligence services might one day use neuroimaging technology for the purposes of lie detection, which she considered a likely violation of cognitive liberty. She was especially exercised over rumors that our government might have exposed captured terrorists to aerosols containing the hormone oxytocin in an effort to make them more cooperative.26 Though she did not say it, I suspect that she would even have opposed subjecting these prisoners to the smell of freshly baked bread, which has been shown to have a similar effect. 27 While listening to her talk, as yet unaware of her liberal views on compulsory veiling and ritual enucleation, I thought her slightly overcautious, but a basically sane and eloquent authority on scientific ethics. I confess that once we did speak, and I peered into the terrible gulf that separated us on these issues, I found that I could not utter another word to her. In fact, our conversation ended with my blindly enacting two neurological clichés: my jaw quite literally dropped open, and I spun on my heels before walking away.

While human beings have different moral codes, each competing view presumesits own universality. This seems to be true even of moral relativism. While few philosophers have ever answered to the name of “moral relativist,” it is by no means uncommon to find local eruptions of this view whenever scientists and other academics encounter moral diversity. Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for Muslims in Kabul. To demand that the proud denizens of an ancient culture conform to our view of gender equality would be culturally imperialistic and philosophically naïve. This is a surprisingly common view, especially among anthropologists. 28 Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework—but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. In practice, relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to
tolerance is not put forward as simply one relative preference among others deemed equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about morality than intolerance is. The contradiction here is unsurprising. Given how deeply disposed we are to make universal moral claims, I think one can reasonably doubt whether any consistent moral relativist has ever existed. Moral relativism is clearly an attempt to pay intellectual reparations for the crimes of Western colonialism, ethnocentrism, and racism. This is, I think, the only charitable thing to be said about it. I hope it is clear that I am not defending the idiosyncrasies of the West as any more enlightened, in principle, than those of any other culture. Rather, I am arguing that the most basic facts about human flourishing must transcend culture, just as most other facts do. And if there are facts that are truly a matter of cultural
construction—if, for instance, learning a specific language or tattooing your face fundamentally alters the possibilities of human experience—well, then these facts also arise from (neurophysiological) processes that transcend culture.
In his wonderful book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker includes a quotation from the anthropologist Donald Symons that captures the problem of multiculturalism especially well:

"If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists.29"

It is precisely such instances of learned confusion (one is tempted to say “learned psychopathy”) that lend credence to the claim that a universal morality requires the support of faith-based religion. The categorical distinction between facts and values has opened a sinkhole beneath secular liberalism—leading to moral relativism and masochistic depths of political correctness. Think of the champions of “tolerance” who reflexively blamed Salman Rushdie for his fatwa, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali for her ongoing security concerns, or the Danish cartoonists for their “controversy,” and you will understand what happens when educated liberals think there is no universal foundation for human values. Among conservatives in the West, the same skepticism about the power of reason leads, more often than not, directly to the feet of Jesus Christ, Savior of the Universe. The purpose of this book is to help cut a third path through this wilderness.

Mr.Samsa wrote:Sam Harris is an idiot...

Particularly this section:

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?
Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing well-being—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

"She" asks for an explanation or example of how science could answer how forcing women to wear burqas is wrong, and he reverts back to his opinion without answering the question at all. To rephrase his answer so that it actually addresses the question posed to him, he would have to say this:

Because science has demonstrated that right and wrong is a matter of increasing or decreasing well-being—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

Then he would point to the scientific experiments or studies that demonstrate why right and wrong is determined by increasing or decreasing well-being. Then he'd point to the experiments which justify whatever particular brand of utilitarianism he subscribes to; is it a compromised well-being for everyone? an overall well-being at the cost of the minority? etc etc. In other words, if the overall well-being of the entire population was increased by hating homosexuals and setting them on fire, even though it resulted in the pain of the minority, then Harris' "objective" morality suggests that science supports our destruction of homosexuals. Obviously, Harris would argue against this and say that we need to take into account the well-being of all individuals, so even though homophobes' well-being would be increased by actively hating homosexuals, their wants should be ignored in favour of the minority... But then we are impacting on the well-being of some individuals (no matter how hate-fuelled and disgusting their opinion is)...

Basically, Harris runs into the same problems that utilitarianism ran into centuries ago. He tries to avoid it by labelling his particular brand of opinion/philosophy as "science", even though it has absolutely nothing to do with science. Why do people let him get away with this?

This doesn't mean I support people who want to burn the faces off women for being raped, I obviously find such actions abhorrent. The point is that there is no scientific reason to label such behavior as "wrong", and only people like Harris who have no clue what Hume's is/ought problem is would think that science can determine human values. Obviously once we figure out what values we want to hold, or what oughts we should have, then science can help inform our positions. For example, we can decide that we think that we should value human well-being. Clearly there is no scientific way of determining this, but we can decide it ourselves or reach this position through logic and reason. From there, we can use science to make moral decisions; if well-being is defined as maintaining the good health of as many people as possible, then we can decide that it is "morally" wrong to throw acid in the face of a rape victim. The problem Harris then faces is that it's also morally wrong to sell cigarettes and to use them.

Summary: Harris should not be discussing an issue he is so clearly ignorant of, and it would be in his best interests to stick to what he's good at. I'm not sure what that is, his politics seem shaky, his neuroscience is like a creationist investigating evolution, and his ideas of morality are more ridiculous than a first year philosophy student...

Mr.Samsa wrote:

MattHunX wrote:Woah, there!

First, read the rest of the book, if you can get it, then say Harris is ignorant, that is of you still think that.

I know I should, but I've watched all of his talks on this issue, all of his shorter commentaries on his book, read reviews of his book, and discussed it with other people who have read his book, and all lead me to the same conclusion: When he says "Science can determine human values", he means "People can decide through logic, reason or opinion what values they wish to hold, and once decided and defined, science can inform their moral choices".

As such, his position is redundant since that's how morality has been discussed since, practically, the dawn of time..

But I can accept that I might be wrong, I assume that you've read the book? If so, can you point me to the scientific literature that he cites to support his claim that right and wrong is a matter of increasing or decreasing human well-being? (I assume that this means that as long as it doesn't affect the well-being of a human, we can do whatever we like to animals. Unless he then slips into Peter Singer Woo-Ville where he starts discussing "conscious beings"...).

NineBerry wrote:Science and morality don't mix.

Most of the most barbaric acts in human history were committed by people who believed they absolutely _know_ what is right and what is wrong. I rather like people who know that they could be wrong or that there could be several different possibilities of looking at an issue.

NineBerry wrote:What is the "best" way to organize morality depends:

a) On the goal you have. And different people have different goals. And there is no objective way to decide which is the right goal or the wrong goal. It's just a matter of opinion.

b) On the circumstances. Whether organizing a society in a certain way will work, depends mostly on the technologies and resources that are available to it.

NineBerry wrote:What is the "best" way to organize morality depends:

a) On the goal you have. And different people have different goals. And there is no objective way to decide which is the right goal or the wrong goal. It's just a matter of opinion.

b) On the circumstances. Whether organizing a society in a certain way will work, depends mostly on the technologies and resources that are available to it.