The following is a transcript of this
TED Talk, and my comments on it. The black is the transcript itself, and the blue text are the words or phrases upon which I comment in the green bullet points.
I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality — questions of good and evil and right and wrong — are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people — I think most people probably here — think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, "What is worth living for?" "What is worth dying for?" "What constitutes a good life?"
So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion — and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue.Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
- Why should we care about the well-being of conscious creatures? Why is a conscious creature more valuable than a rock? Says who or what? In fact, from a physical standpoint, they are both simply examples of a collection of atoms held together by various physical forces.
- Another question is, does Sam believe that consciousness is real or just an illusion?
Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks?It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about. And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects.
- "Ethical obiligations" Isn't this what Sam is trying to prove? He seems to be assuming those, but upon what is the assumption based?
- "Feel compassion" and "more concerned" describe human experiences (feelings) that in fact, the majority of humanity may experience, but while they may point to something this true, they do not in themselves make the thing an obligation or "ought" that I could pass on to another. From an evolutionary standpoint, they could describe a trait that had value to pass on that trait to the next generation, but this does not prove that the well-being or felt happiness or lack of suffering of conscious creatures is better than the opposite. From Sam's perspective aren't the feelings simply a combination of electrical impulses and hormone changes?
And there's no notion, no version of human morality and human values that I've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes. Even if you get your values from religion, even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death — either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell — you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes. And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim, which, of course, may or may not be true.
- He is once again assuming what he is supposed to be proving. Just because people believe in morality or values does not make them an obligation that others should follow. If we use this standard to "prove" something, then I don't have to prove the existence of the supernatural, I can just assume it because most people believe in some sort of supernatural. But isn't challenging the old assumptions supposed to be what a scientific viewpoint is supposed to do.
- For the purpose of definition, objective morality if it exists at all is an obligation or ought to someone or something that is true regardless of whether the individual personally believes or feels it. It has to exist outside the individual and have some force if not followed.
Now, to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life, for human beings, we know that there is a continuum of such facts. We know that it's possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong — where mothers cannot feed their children, where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately. And we know that it's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic, to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable.
And we know — we know — that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space. Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not. Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye, so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors? Probably not. There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths.
- "Good idea" depends on what the goal is. Morality is tied to teleology or purpose. If your purpose was to make a bunch of rich westerners sick then adding cholera to the water would be a good idea. If your goal is "human communities flourishing" then perhaps you like the TED community of humans and you don't want to add disease to the water. The question remains why is any "human community flourishing" a good idea? So far the whole talk is based on assuming that at least one thing is good, namely human flourishing, but he did not provide evidence why this is better than dead space or nothing at all. I mean he might feel it is better, and lots of people might feel it is better, but why do their feelings get to impose upon someone else who does not like other humans or who is more concerned about their own flourishing?
So, in talking about values we are talking about facts. Now, of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels — from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements. But if we're going to talk about human well-being we are, of necessity, talking about the human brain. Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain —
whatever happens after death. Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife, in this life, his personality — his rather unfortunate personality — is the product of his brain. So the contributions of culture — if culture changes us, as indeed it does, it changes us by changing our brains. And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can, at least in principle, be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind — neuroscience, psychology, etc.
So, what I'm arguing is that value's reduced to facts — to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings. And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings. And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape, with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures, both personal and collective. And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access, that few people access. And these await our discovery. Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual. Perhaps there are other states that we can't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them.
Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. I don't think, for instance, that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child, or whether we should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense. (Laughter) But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.
For instance, there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal, where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board, hard, and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin. And hundreds of thousands of children, incidentally, are subjected to this every year. The locations of these enlightened districts, I think, will fail to surprise you. We're not talking about Connecticut.
And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious. The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod, lest we spoil the child — this is in Proverbs 13 and 20, and I believe, 23. But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior?(Laughter) Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters?
- On the whole, I actually agree with many of the points made by Harris once we get past that he has assumed morality and not proven it. I think the general standard of human flourishing sounds suspiciously like "Love your neighbor as yourself." In fact a good portion of the justification for laws, whether religious or civil is that they lead to the well-being of the people. I have read lots of religious texts, wisdom literature and historic philosophy about how to live well. Harris seems to think that the science of values based on human well-being is something that has just been discovered, but in fact it has been happening for thousands of years.
- For instance, I have no problem asking the question about spanking. Notice that when Harris speaks about spanking in a pejorative way, he is already making a value claim about its "goodness," without providing evidence. I have seen and talked with lots of people who have been abused and recognize the harm physical and emotional abuse has. On the other hand, I have also seen many instances of kids that are raised with virtually no negative consequences and they are in fact spoiled and it ends up causing them and those around them great harm because they have not learned proper boundaries. Therefore, I would suspect that a study that honestly tested the hypothesis that child rearing with lots of positive reinforcement and some negative reinforcement, including moderate physical disciple actually provides the most human flourishing. I and millions of people have had overall positive outcomes with this kind of child raising practice. Ancient wisdom should not be rejected just because it is ancient. Let's authentically test it and see if perhaps the observations and wisdom of people down through history actually match what really works.
Now, many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined, and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed. And so, how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being? Well, consider by analogy, the concept of physical health. The concept of physical health is undefined. As we just heard from Michael Specter, it has changed over the years. When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30. It's now around 80 in the developed world. There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability. People will send you donations when you're in that condition.(Laughter)
Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open, genuinely open for revision, does not make it vacuous. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science. Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing.
Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality? Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions.
- This whole talk seems like Harris is Columbus just discovering the New World and acting like no one has ever been here before when in fact he is simply talking about moral and ethical discussions that have been happening for thousands of years. Absolute moral standards applied in specific situations is called situational ethics.
- For instance, as a Christian Pastor, I have read through the Hebrew law code in Exodus - Deuteronomy and the Ten Commandments are listed both in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. The commandment not to murder is clear, but then there are various laws dealing with situations where perhaps and accidental death occurred or where the governing authority has the right to take someone's life. There was an absolute standard based on the value of human life, but the law was written with the understanding that various situations impact how that absolute should be applied.
- All ethical systems have done the same thing. Rather than reinvent the wheel, why not study some history and philosophy and discover if the wisdom of the ages can help you in this search for practical morality.
So, for instance, if it's really wrong to lie, it must always be wrong to lie, and if you can find an exception, well then there's no such thing as moral truth. Why would we think this? Consider, by analogy, the game of chess. Now, if you're going to play good chess, a principle like, "Don't lose your Queen," is very good to follow. But it clearly admits some exceptions. There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do. There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do. And yet, chess is a domain of perfect objectivity. The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all.
Now, this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere. Consider the great problem of women's bodies: What to do about them? Well this is one thing you can do about them: You can cover them up. Now, it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as "wrong" in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?
Well, who are we not to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil — women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. But what does voluntary mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father's first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame?
Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her. What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing?
Now, to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. (Laughter) But if we are in a reflective mood, we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. OK, so perhaps there's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. (Applause) Perhaps there are many such places--again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.
And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being. In fact, the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue. But the demagogues are right about one thing: We need a universal conception of human values.
- Once again a very uncharitable reading of history. Frankly even from a materialist sociological standpoint I would at least give credit to those religions that survived and under which people flourished. Perhaps by accident or because of the wisdom of some sage, these people discovered some principles which helped the most people flourish. Those religions and societies that did not promote human well-being were perhaps got killed off by those more productive societies that found out these principles.
- In fact, using Harris' logic about human flourishing and evolutionary principles then perhaps we should examine history to see which societies have produced the most human flourishing and then test their values to see if those values continue to work. 0000
Now, what stands in the way of this? Well, one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality — especially secular, academic, scientist types. When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don't in any other area of our lives. So, for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion, and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness. On the other hand, we have someone like Ted Bundy; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women.
So, we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one's time. (Laughter)Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say, "Well, there's nothing for the Dalai Lama to be really right about — really right about — or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science. He likes chocolate, he likes vanilla. There's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other." Notice that we don't do this in science.
On the left you have Edward Witten. He's a string theorist. If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around, in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten. The other half will tell you they don't like the question. (Laughter) So, what would happen if I showed up at a physics conference and said,"String theory is bogus. It doesn't resonate with me. It's not how I chose to view the universe at a small scale. I'm not a fan." (Laughter) Well, nothing would happen because I'm not a physicist; I don't understand string theory. I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. (Laughter) I wouldn't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member.
But this is just the point. Whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it is to have a domain of expertise. That is what it is for knowledge to count. How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise, or moral talent, or moral genius even? How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count? How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering? Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering? No. (Laughter) How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being? (Applause)
- Notice how the assumption made at the beginning comes into play here. The assumption that human flourishing in general is the standard is used to judge both Bundy and the Taliban, neither of which had (have) that as their goal. Bundy's goal was to satisfy a sexual power urge, and the Taliban's goal is to be obey their god. The question still comes back to Harris and anyone else, why should these other people accept your understand of good? This really makes a difference when trying to convince 1.5 billion Muslims who will not simply accept your definition as a starting point. Especially if many of them hold a moral system that allows them to use force to coerce others if necessary.
- As an interesting aside, notice that Harris hardly would have to convince Christians because his standard is suspiciously close to the Christian standard of loving God and loving others.
So, this, I think, is what the world needs now. It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts. It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering. Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality. We live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less, and they will one day mean nothing.
We live in a world filled with destructive technology, and this technology cannot be uninvented; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. It seems to me, therefore, patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life. And to do that, we have to admit that these questions have answers. Thank you very much.(Applause)
Chris Anderson: So, some combustible material there. Whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world, hearing some of this, may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing, after as well, some of them.
Language seems to be really important here. When you're talking about the veil, you're talking about women dressed in cloth bags. I've lived in the Muslim world, spoken with a lot of Muslim women. And some of them would say something else. They would say, "No, you know, this is a celebration of female specialness, it helps build that and it's a result of the fact that" — and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view — "that male lust is not to be trusted." I mean, can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist?
Sam Harris: Yeah, well I think I tried to broach this in a sentence, watching the clock ticking, but the question is: What is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations, and you're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you don't veil yourself? And so, if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil, or a very funny hat, or tattoo their face — I think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want, but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under. And so I think we shouldn't be so eager to always take their word for it, especially when it's 120 degrees out and you're wearing a full burqa.
CA: A lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress. But can you reconcile that? I think I understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that doesn't become one dimensional, where we all have to think the same. Paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward, 100 years forward, how you would like to think of the world, balancing moral progress with richness.
SH: Well, I think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail, then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail. So, we're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion, and we're going to understand the factors that encourage it — whether they're genetic, whether they're how people talk to one another, whether they're economic systems, and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space.
So, everything is not going to be up for grabs. It's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women. I mean I don't think we need an NSF grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea — but at a certain point we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them. Do people love their daughters just as much in these systems? And I think there are clearly right answers to that.
CA: And if the results come out that actually they do, are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues?
SH: Well yeah, modulo one obvious fact, that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system. So, you can say like, "Because I knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend, I chopped his head off. And that was the most compassionate thing I could do." If you get all those parts aligned, yes I think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love. But again, then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context. It's all of us in this together, not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus.
- It is really interesting how people who talk derisively about God are so willing to play his role. What is the larger context Sam, and who gets to decide? You see the guy blowing himself up thinks he is doing it for the larger context. Planned parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Hitler thought eugenics was a good thing and that forced sterilization of the unfit (Sanger) or outright killing them (Hitler) was helping the larger context of human well-being. In fact, there is nothing I fear more than a person who trying to force others to do the right thing for their own good. Sam would quickly turn "moral scientists" into the new high priests who help direct society "for their own good." In fact, isn't that exactly what the larger bureaucratic states all become?
CA: Sam, this is a conversation I would actually love to continue for hours. We don't have that, but maybe another time. Thank you for coming to TED.
SH: Really an honor. Thank you. (Applause)
Final Thoughts:
- Sam did not prove objective morality, and in fact did even try. He simply assumed a standard and ran with it.
- While Sam's standard ends up looking very like my own Christian standard, I am afraid that he will not have any luck promoting it because he does not give any convincing evidence for it. Basically, his standard is generalizing human empathy, but that relies on people's feelings. We don't actually feel empathy for everyone. In fact, we feel apathy toward most people and we downright dislike others. How does he plan to promote the idea that we should generalize our feeling toward people that we actively dislike? As a Christian, I have an answer to that question, namely that those people are loved by God and therefore I should love them too? Why should someone who only empathizes with those in their group or who only live to satisfy their own desires change to love others?
- Finally, many atheists have recognized that atheism does not provide a ground for objective morality and therefore disagree with Sam. Nietzsche and Bertand Russell are examples and here is a more modern example.
