Harris on Objective Morality

What does he miss on this? I feel like his science of morality holds up pretty convincingly. His opponents are just religious ideologues desperate to hold legitimacy

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>what is the good is what is good
you don't see the issue here?

The student accused him of using common sense as an argument, and I feel like in his response, he did the same thing. "We know that burning down all our wealth is clearly not the right answer, so we know there are objectively wrong answers"

But by saying "clearly burning down wealth isnt the right answer" hes just using the common sense argument again.

>Oxford Grad Student: "You've came here claiming that you can show us how to determine morals with scientific objectivity, but in your whole talk you didn't show how that is possible, you just made common sense claims like 'it is bad to throw acid in someone's face'. Can you actually go beyond that low-hanging fruit of common sense morality and explain how morals can be determined scientifically?'
>Harris: *pauses* "That's a great question. Well imagine if someone throws acid in someone's face. I think we know that's bad by common sense, and that well, actually that is my entire argument."
>Dawkins: *stares at Harris admiringly*

I haven't read Harris but I've listened to all of his JRE episodes and a few episodes of his podcast. Can you post a quick link to his ideas on morality?

I think I fall somewhere in the middle between moral objectivists and relativists. What is good for you is good and what is bad for you is bad. I don't think there is a lot of interpretation to be had beyond that (pretty cut and dry. the same for everyone) and I don't think this is a treatise that can be applied to the masses. It essentially benefits a person to preach selflessness while practicing selfishness. Incidentally, Jews have been known to do this well.

You are you. What feels good is good, what feels bad is bad - the morality of us all when we come into the world. Building on that foundation obviously wouldn't look like doing heroin all day every day. My best friend recently became addicted to heroin - and I can tell you he isn't happy. If something ultimately leads to unhappiness, then that obviously isn't the way to go.
Incidentally this coincides with "There is nothing in goodness above pleasure and there is nothing in evil below pain" - Sefer Yetzirah (Hebrew book of creation apparently. I'm not religious or Jewish)

Now in order to ensure maximal pleasure, it should go to stand that one would need maximal power. If you think about it, willpower is kind of a defining characteristic of life. Can can even kind of be measured by willpower.
A dog can affect more change in the world than a tree, and a human can affect more change than both.
Also if you think about it - and this doesn't matter much - if you are your will, then to make the world conform with your will is to literally expand yourself.

In any case, You attaining power definitely perpetuates You. This is objectively good for You. Definitely a logical point of life.

Also - and again this isn't something I necessarily buy into, but it's an interesting coincidence: "Love is the law, Love under Will." - Thelema (Crowley)
That Thelema quote pretty much sums it up.

Just to make it clear, I don't put much credence into scripture or occult. It's just interesting when it coincides with logical truth as I can see it.

How is using a common sense argument a bad thing? He's pointing out a fact that, one thing is clearly bad then it should go to stand that another is clearly good.

Though I disagree on burning down all wealth to be a bad thing. I'm sure there are ways it would benefit certain people.

I think the only objective morality is a personal morality that's encircled by happiness - where ultimate happiness is on one end of the pole and ultimate sadness is on the other.

I kind of outline it here:

I'm sure the basic idea of gravity was always common sense...

The common sense argument isn't necessarily BAD, but the student was accusing him of relying on it.

>one thing is clearly bad then it should go to stand that another is clearly good.

But this is what the student is asking about. How can one thing be "clearly bad"? The student is wondering what the scientific justification for "clearly bad" is, and Harris just responds "well its obvious some things are clearly bad, so it stands to reason that everything else can be objectively bad or good"

Sure, ultimately he was definitely relying on 'common sense' - and to a fault imo, as I wouldn't consider a woman getting acid thrown on her face objectively bad.

If someone where to throw acid on my ex's face, I would honestly feel that that act was objectively good. Or if you want to get PC, what about someone throwing acid on the face of Hitler's mother before she met his father?

I see where you're coming from. I was thinking about gravity being common sense, where the original arguments were: 'hey man, shit falls down'. But that argument isn't only common sense. It can clearly be tested.

The waters are just extremely muddy with something like morality I think.

>We know that burning down all our wealth is clearly not the right answer,
only according to hedonists

He fails to point out that the basis of our morality is from religion. If not for religion's influence on our morality in the Middle Ages, we'd be savages to this day.

Objective morality is a morality based in a single rule. Harris uses objective losely, just like other philosophers he's making an assertion and using a very stretched version of a word to define it. (Ideology, property, spook, ubermensch, existence)
To argue that he is defining his terms correctly is missijg the point, discuss if his idea of codifying morality is possible.

Personally according to my moral compass everything can be boiled down to aesthetics. Happiness is good, but so is tragedy, and freedom, and social dynamism, and cultural contrast, cause they facilitate aesthetic arts and stories, and I've just decided that that is the greatest good, so I think I can look at my internal morality objectively

Would you say that there was less murder, rape and thievery in the middle ages?
Morality is from ~common sense, first and foremost. If there wasn't the false awakening of religion then a Sam Harris would've appeared sooner.

>We can use empiricism to determine the utility of every action

I wonder what Socrates would have to say on the matter.

>I can feel my subjective delusions objectively

Never said anything about feeling.

This

We have Christian values in the West whether we like it or not.

I like how Harris is trying to argue that there are objective moral truths and yet you see him try his hardest to dismantle Jordan Peterson's worldview, which argues the same thing with a much more convincing argument.

pls respond to this

What's wrong with throwing acid in a girl's face?

If my daughter dishonours my family, surely it is right and morally just for me to punish her by burning her face. The family honour is more important than her wellbeing or her face.

The real failing in his argument is when he says the following: "The moment you admit that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures science has something to say about it."

The problem is that, the statement "The moment you admit..." is a rhetorical way of saying "ACCEPT MY MORAL AXIOM".

This is why so many people criticize him for essentially ignoring the is-ought gap.

sam harris will always remain an elite Hollywood family funded goyim whose words met ears but shouldn't have.

deriving ought from is. first grade.

> the basis of our morality is from religion
*the basis of religion is from morality

Science doesn't work without axioms.

Just rephrase it:
>If morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, then science has something to say about it.
That means you need to either explain what morality is such that it's unrelated to the well being of conscious creatures, or make the case that science cannot say anything about the well being of conscious creatures.

If anyone is curious: the objectively good thing for anything is to survive but there are levels. At one end of the scale you have your own survival. Are you having acid thrown in your face? Once that is safe the next level up is the city. Does allowing acid thrown in ppls face help protect city? It promotes destroying the society as well as your own.

Things can be destroyed for the better but until I hear a good argument for cities being better destroyed I think we can take that as a constant.

Jews have a long history of taking advantage of White people's unique sense of morality and moral goodness. You're a fool if you're taking what this jew says at face value.

>Just rephrase it:

Why would I rephrase it when Harris is deliberately using the words "The moment you admit..." ?

He's doing an intellectual sleight of hand.

Scientific/Mathematical axioms aren't interchangeable with moral axioms you moron.

I'd like to see you give an argument for that.

As far as morality goes, you either subscribe to virtue ethics or you subscribe to nihilism. There is nothing in between. Most people are just confused as fuck about morality, that's all.

Virtue = a trait in an individual that is conducive to the enduring prosperity of his community. Formalise it as 'fitness' abstracted to a social setting, where the survival of your offspring isn't the measure to look for but the survival of your social space/culture/polis.

But we have to agree on a definition of morality to work with. The well being of conscious creatures is only one set to try and argue over. Personally, i think its a stupid definition because it doesn't directly account for social and tribal interactions. A better definition would be that morality is what helps a collective survive long term.
Yes, but the tribe survives only because individuals survive. The problem is that you can't have it all one way. It's a balancing act between what is good for an individual to survive and what is good for the tribe. If you consider yourself a member of a particular tribe, and you received help from your tribe, you must also be willing to make sacrifice for it. You can see this in multicellar organisms and the rise of cancer cells and the fact that only a few cells in your body, the sperms and eggs, actually make it pass your death. And system that have individuals working together to survive long term will have a set of morality developed simply through the process of evolution. Ants, bees, naked mole rats, chimps, baboons, all these orgasm have "morality" embedded within their behavior.

If 2+2 isn't 4, mathematics as a whole stops functioning as a discipline.

If Abid in Dar-Es-Salaam believes Allah is the source of all morality and structures his life according to the Koran, and Kelly, an atheist who a moral consequentialist and historian at UCLA, literally nothing happens.

They both live their lives without contradiction.

>But we have to agree on a definition of morality to work with.
There is only one sensible definition of morality: virtuous behaviour.

>Personally, i think its a stupid definition because it doesn't directly account for social and tribal interactions. A better definition would be that morality is what helps a collective survive long term.
It does account for it. For example, try to explain how helping a collective survive long term is important morally in a way that is unrelated to the well being of conscious creatures. That phrase really is all-encompassing here, everything we care about ultimately boils down to it.

Alisdair MacIntyre should be required reading.

It's perfectly possible to construct a mathematics based on the flawed assumption that 2 + 2 = 5. It will of course fail to optimally describe the physical world.

It is also possible, obviously, to believe that it is a good thing to throw gays off of rooftops, and to base a morality on such ideas, but it will produce a society where people suffer needlessly.

Scientific axioms are testable against the real world. So are moral axioms. If an axiom is found to lead to unphysical predictions, the axiom must be discarded.

What do you mean by virtuous? What do you consider as virtuous behavior? How do you account for subjectivity in that people will disagree on different situations, what the right thing to do is?
There's no such thing as a vacuum. Abid will go out of his way to kill Kelly. A thousand years later different sects of Islam will go out of their way to kill each other because Islam is highly moral system in that anyone it considers an outsider, a member of another tribe, must be conquered, converted, or killed. Nothing wrong with that but the means to which separates the Muslim tribe from every other tribe is how willing you are to fuck goats.

>but it will produce a society where people suffer needlessly.

And? You are the one who has the burden to prove that suffering needlessly is "wrong". Not just "bad". But actually morally wrong.

Good luck.

But the problem comes in the fact that he uses the word "conscious" which will draw various criticisms since people will disagree about what is conscious or not.

You got your terms mixed there, brother. If I take reduction of suffering to be a good thing, and base a morality upon that idea, then it is morally wrong, by definition, to cause suffering on anyone.

Pain and suffering by definition contain the desire to have less of it. And I will take it as a common sense axiom of my morality, that reduction of suffering is a good thing -- just as in geometry we take the notion of a "line" as a basic, common sense, unprovable object.

Now we may discuss methods of reducing suffering.

(Now you may be a filthy nihilist and disagree with my axiom, but my theory of morality predicts that if you live opposite to my fundamental moral axiom, you will not be a happy bunny. You may perform this experiment on your own life, although I don't recommend it.)

>reduction of suffering is a good thing

Pleb-tier moral universe m8

I know that this is what you believe, but you aren't supplying any arguments for why I should believe it too.

The muslims who throw gays off buildings literally believe they are doing the gay people a favor because they are saving them from eternal hellfire after death.

And I promise, there's no argument that you can use that makes morality less relativistic in this instance.

This is what they believe, you have your own beliefs. You might believe your own morality is superior, but that's only another example of the intrinsic relativity.

I think he's saying that generally society operates under that premise.

My argument against your axiom is that we may surmise that suffering is a great teacher since one could not arrive at the conclusion that suffering is suffering unless they have suffered. If your axiom is true then what else might suffering teach us. I would say your axiom is only part true. Suffering is the prime mover of this universe, it is what made the fish crawl out of the sea, the ape to rise to his feet and man to cast himself into uncharted seas, searching for a brighter day. Brother a world without suffering is a dead world, if all life is suffering, and all life is sacred then suffering is the most primal sacrament.

Being challenged in my views causes me 'pain' and 'suffering' with my emotional state. Therefore, in order to continue the reduction of suffering, we are required to blanket all public and private institutions with a 'no speaking' clause.

Morality is just a set of attitudes that are conducive to our evolution. it's good for you that the community is moral so you have enough morality in you to support a collective morality in your community and shame people who don't follow it, but sometimes you need to break the rules to get ahead as an individual so we're not perfectly moral. Morality is a tiered system, generally speaking, your children>yourself>your extended family>your friends>your community>humanity in general.

By forcing you to encounter opinions that differ from your previously held beliefs, I am making you stronger, which will be beneficial to you in the long term. This will reduce your suffering.

See what I said above. But I totally get what you're driving at and I couldn't agree with you more. The preferred method to reduce suffering is not to hide from it, but to encounter it and become tougher.

You do believe it too. I guarantee to you, that in your daily life you do all that you can to reduce your suffering. You may do that in a stupid way that brings no results, or you may be successful at it.

In the example of tossing gays off of rooftops, we are already talking about methods by which to reduce suffering. Muslims ostensibly try to reduce the fags' suffering by killing them, even though I don't believe that's what they are doing at all. I say there are better ways to treat them. ( There are obvious arguments as to why it is stupid to believe that god would create homosexuals and then torture them forever for being the way he made them, but it's not really an interesting conversation to have. )

The real question we should be talking about, is whether or not we are suffering stupidly, or tragically. We all already agree that suffering is a bad thing, it's in our nature through bloody evolution. It's probably the very driving force of evolution.
You are smart enough to know all the obvious arguments against that particular example, so I will not insult you by listing them here. I will also not go further into religious debate. I am even going to concede, that I will stick to my axiom with a religious zeal. I will only say, that

*that I am standing on a sturdier footing than, for example, Muslims are, and I will defend this position without apology.

>It's probably the very driving force of evolution.
only insight in the retardation that was your post.

In the pursuit of suffering I suppose one must make a distinction between the forms of suffering, not getting brought down into the relativist position of supposing that all suffering is of a type but by delineating, specifying even, ways to suffer we would arrive at eventually a distinction between Human suffering and bestial suffering. Here I am tempted to quote Kierkegaard but I'll paraphrase: that to not know one is in despair is to be completely lost to despair; and therefore to suffer like a beast is without merit.
Damn, I feel like reading some stoics, only drinking water and getting into lifting/meditation again. Ha

If you accept that, then the previous arguments should also make sense to you, in that encountering difficulties, and thus subjecting yourself to suffering willingly, will evolve your character to be better suited to the environment you inhabit.

But maybe you'll oblige this retard and point out my mistakes.

yea i agree with the part about how suffering can be good. the autistic scientific morality i can do without.

>In the example of tossing gays off of rooftops, we are already talking about methods by which to reduce suffering.
Not necessarily. God's will doesn't always lead to reduced suffering.

>it is stupid to believe that god would create homosexuals

I agree with this. Nobody thinks God created homosexuals.

You do not know the mind of God, so your arguments are childish