Sam Harris on the moral formula: How facts inform our ethics
Q: Why do we need science to tell us what is right and wrong?
SH: “I’m using the term “science” very broadly, in terms of our best efforts to make valid truth claims based on evidence and clear reasoning. So history, for my purposes, is a science in the sense that we can make true or false claims about historical fact.
What I’m arguing is that morality, questions of good and evil, right and wrong, because they relate to questions of human and animal well-being, also entail truth claims about our world, human nature or the prospects of human happiness that fall within the purview of science. Otherwise, we’re just left to argue over preferences: things are wrong because we don’t like it or a majority of people don’t like it. (…)
Q: How do you get from that to the claim that science can actually determine human values?
All of this is a domain of discovery. If we understand the dynamics of mental life in real detail – to speak particularly of our case, if we understand the human brain in real detail – then we will know how various experiences and ways of living with one another – thoughts, intentions and behaviours – affect human life.
How much should we value freedom of speech? How much should we value compassion? How should we raise children to think about the suffering of other human beings? All of this can only be understood in the context of science in the end.
Then science will be answering questions about, for example, whether we should we be privileging obedience to parental authority over free expression and if so, exactly how much and when and what are the consequences of getting the balance wrong. All of these are neurological questions in the end. (…)
I think we can have a rational discussion about how much we want our states of consciousness, our emotional lives, to track the reality of our lives. We definitely want it to track it for the most part because otherwise, if we’re just taking this perfect narcotic each day, it’s not a sustainable situation. You’re just lying on the couch in bliss, but your relationships have dissolved, you’ve lost your job, and your children have starved to death. It’s materially unsustainable if nothing else. But your love for the people in your life, which you value and which is major component of well-being – your connections to others, your ability to function in the world – all of this is predicated on your states of consciousness tracking the actual reality of your life in the world. (…)
When I talk about morality I’m really talking about psychological health, and the health of societies. Can science tell us about psychological health? If the sciences of mind are, in fact, sciences, and they are, in fact, of mind, then one would hope so, at some point.
Take a truly fraught, value-laden question such as “How should parents raise children?” Clearly, if we understand anything about child development, healthy emotional lives, healthy cognition and what it means to equip children to become high-functioning adults, enjoying all the fruits of civil society peacefully and collaboratively, we are talking about how you should raise children, and there are scientific truths there waiting to be discovered. (…)
I view philosophy as essentially the womb of the sciences. Whenever a question is not experimentally tractable, not quantifiable, then it’s squarely in the domain of philosophy. The frontier between philosophy and science is never clear. But the moment you start actually talking about data and neurophysiology it would seem you’re playing more the language game of neuroscience than philosophy.”
