Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 28 May 2015 6:12:24pm
I haven't read The Moral Landscape, so I can't be sure Harris doesn't cover some of these issues, but from what is presented above, he seems to be missing a lot.

My most fundamental objection is this: "landscapes" are often used in science for searching for minima, maxima or other optimum points. As far as I can see, Harris is advocating the application of such a device to morality. I have no particular objection to that as a concept. But the fundamental difference between science and morality is choice.

We can map scientific landscapes of physical systems, because the behaviour of its components is fundamentally predictable and repeatable. The behaviour of people is not so. I realise that in part Harris is trying to argue that it is, through his argument that science might, at some point, give us perfect understanding of the workings of the brain, preferences, etc. But to argue that human choice can be understood and incorporated into the construction of a "well-being/moral landscape" suggests that choice is an illusion - that our choices are governed only by the physical world and state of things within it.

This brings us to a lose-lose proposition for Harris's moral landscape. On the one hand, we can concede that we cannot map our actions accurately onto the landscape because ultimately we will rely on others' choices, or on the other, we can concede that choice is indeed an illusion, in which case any discussion of morality is moot since the idea of making a "moral choice" is also an illusion, and has been already been decided by the state in which we find ourselves. I personally reject such pseudo-predeterminism out of hand. But I think its part in Harris's argument must be acknowledged.

I also find his rejection of "the gray areas of life where we spend much of our time" quite disturbing. How useful, really, is a conception of morality that cannot provide insight into our daily choices? Especially when Harris also suggests that a moral system to "ameliorate suffering, regulate conflict, and provide personal security and social cooperation, yet allow individuals a substantial degree of discretion to live their lives as they wish" is insufficient.

And another: Harris wants us to maximise the well-being of conscious minds. With mounting evidence that many other species have conscious minds, are we to include them in our analysis? If global well-being will be maximised by the annihilation of the human race, is that necessarily the morally correct choice? For me, the express purpose of developing, encouraging and exploring any conception of morality is to aid society. So the annihilation of that society cannot be the moral choice. At the same time, though, we cannot be completely ignorant of the well-being of other conscious minds, but perhaps their well-being should be discounted versus that of people. At which point, we have introduced a s