Sam Harris' Moral Landscape 15 years on

Bad ideas from a simpler time

Sam Harris, credit: YouTube

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2010 seems like an awfully long time ago. No one had heard of a Trump presidency or Brexit, the idea of lockdowns would have been considered science fiction, no one knew what Twitter was, and Facebook was still largely for the roughly university age to compare their lives to people they hardly knew at school. The age of Obama seemed to symbolise to many the apotheosis of an idea of progress, that the world could and would continue to get better. It was in 2010, this far simpler time, somewhat after the peak of the era of the publishing phenomenon known as new atheism, that Sam Harris published the Moral Landscape.

Harris book, the thesis of which is essentially that we can derive morals almost entirely from science and philosophy under the premise that human wellbeing is the central aim of morality, was met with a fairly mixed reception. 13 years on it is safe to say that besides fairly devout followers of Harris it hasn’t exactly had a significant impact, but why it hasn’t is worth consideration. We live in an age of apathy when it comes to religious ideas (in the West, in which I am writing), and yet one of intense moral anger and outrage, and as much as I am going to argue that Harris thesis is to say the least all over the place, at least he was morally honest enough to make the attempt. It should have had a bigger impact, wrong or not, because we aren’t asking these questions at a time when we need to, and the subject remains a conversation that we are simply not having enough.

The irony is however that in some ways we are attempting to enact Harris thesis but simply unacknowledged and badly. Throughout the lockdown period we heard the phrase “follow the science” thrown around by just about everybody in the public sphere, under the assumption that once the science was clear the moral path was apparently just obvious, as if it was almost inherent in it somehow. The fact that everyone using the phrase came to different conclusions about a) what the “science” actually even meant given how it was used, and b) what we should do about it anyway, was never quite recognised, that is unless you wanted to criticise those who disagreed with you. If we really do want to follow science as a moral lamp-light, we have to decide what values frame it, and how those values themselves are derived. Leaving these things up to the squabbles of politics won’t do it anymore.

It is also perhaps reflective of the immediate blindness of the book itself that it was published in a far less divided time. Assuming morals are derivable from rational knowledge when we all largely agree on them, and when things mostly seem to be going well in a public sense isn’t exactly a hard sell. But in a time like ours when political debates have become battles between competing moral and existential worldviews, the argument actually has to hold water. So does it?

Harris’ initial premise, that "(1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences are related, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world”, is already a complicated one. There are obvious ways in which this might seem directly true, that it is better to not be experiencing suffering than to be experiencing it. But the apparent flaw here exists in the word “states”. “State” as a description of the brain and the world is characteristic of much of Harris’ reductive worldview, which we will get to, but the problem is that nothing really is a “state”. Everything is in flow, everything that we experience is related to everything else we experience, related to our sense of individual and corporate self, related to everything and everyone around us. Hence, say, suffering can’t really be described simply as good or bad unless it is related to something. You might experience a kind of suffering that itself gives meaning to another experience, or experience something that gives meaning to suffering.

We have known this for a long time, the ancient historian Herodotus recounts a story of the Persian King Cyrus saying that “from soft lands tend to come soft men, and the same land cannot produce a wondrous harvest and men who are good at warfare”. Herodotus also refers to the Scythians as “unfightable and unapproachable” because their lands are cold and tough for farming. To put it more simply, hardship hardens, or spoiled children value nothing. Experience itself might in moments be described as pleasurable or unenjoyable or painful or happy or sad, but these moments have no meaning unless they are related to the course of life. Suffering is not just good or bad or meaningful or meaningless, because everything is related. Reducing wellbeing to “states” is an immediate problem, and is just an argument for a tranquilized and feeble world.

Harris does of course acknowledge this to some degree, he says “It seems clear that ascending the slopes of the moral landscape may sometimes require suffering. It may also require negative social emotions, like guilt and indignation.” Yet this is passing, insufficiently explored and bookended with Harris’ usual diatribes about religion.

And the great problem that lies behind all of Harris arguments is simply how much is assumed as given. He says “I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible”.

This is, to put it lightly, totally ridiculous. “Should” is only possible if we assume that the moral conclusions we have already made, are themselves implicitly true. Which is to say it is circular arguing. You decide what you already want to conclude and then suggest something else has compelled you to conclude it. The Romans or the Greeks or the Assyrians, for example, were perfectly content with their moral view of the world, and the assumption that we can now say that they were wrong and we are right, as Harris put it, because “there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics”, is to totally ignore the complete convenience that the moral answers you have already concluded just happen to essentially be the rough moral consensus of the Western world in 2010. Why on earth should this be so?

The idea that, say, slavery is wrong could be argued scientifically if you assume Harris’ premise about wellbeing, and all its unspoken foundations. It is, you could argue, better for the slaves to not endure the horrors of the slave trade, so those participating should act to alleviate that suffering instead of benefiting from it. The problem is that the idea that we should value everyone’s wellbeing equally is not in any way given, in fact it is an expression of other deeper values such as equality and intrinsic value. Even so, how far do we go? The problem is that Harris is assuming a worldview before he is contriving his sequence of scientific morals, a worldview that presupposes a set of values derived or at least contingently emergent from religions Harris also despises.

The point is, we believe many of the things we do in the West because of the thousands of years in which ideas such as “love your neighbour as yourself”, the Imago Dei, or stories about the intrinsic value of the suffering, of Jesus identification with “the least of these”, have filtered into the worldview and structures of our society. You don’t have to fully adopt the Tom Holland argument in its more extreme or appropriated political form to acknowledge a significance in the particular shape and difference of historically Christian moral ideas or the hypocritical nature of people like Harris who claim to hate Christianity.

The problem here is that we come to the very issue Harris is trying to avoid. To assume we can invent a scientifically derived worldview is to have a set of assumptions about what morals already are, about what is most important and about what we should value. The fact that Harris premise about wellbeing is a basic cliche of Western individualism is an illustration of this.

In a way this is mirrored by Harris’ view on free will. In order to hold Harris’ view of free will you have to exclusively excuse yourself from its implications. In other words, there is no free will except for me concluding that there is free will, a process that assumes individual rational thought and the capacity for internal conscious validation of said thought as ‘true’. The idea that all thought is determined by sequences of cause that said thought is reducible to makes all thought biologically or physically contingent, and so meaningless. The difference between an atheist and a Hindu is a difference of physics. Yet you can’t believe that if you are telling everyone you have concluded that it is an absolutely convincing argument that there is no free will.

In the same way to take Harris argument on morality you have to excuse yourself from your own contingency. You must assume that the ideas you are allowing science to ‘prove’ are already good, and that we already know, obviously, that it is best for everybody. Yet for someone who derides religion so much, these ideas are irritatingly contingent on an inherited religious worldview.

But, to give his argument its due, you cannot argue that the entire of moral intuition is contingent on religion, or even on ideas. And even so, ideas can never entirely be a source of morals, something about them must align with our emotional relation to the world.

And no doubt, we have a capacity for rich and intense moral experience. Harris himself said after an experience taking psilocybin “We have a word for love, for instance, but what’s the word for all the love you can possibly feel, and all the love you recognise you have failed to feel at every moment in your life up until this moment. What do we call the experience of having that ocean of feeling invade you, and fill every empty space in your mind?”.

In a less psychedelic example, historian Tom Holland described visiting the Holocaust museum in Washington, and after witnessing much of the horror and suffering, walking into a room where there is one of the ships used to rescue Jews from Denmark, and after seeing the first image of compassion and courage in the midst of the awfulness of everything else, he said “I remember breaking into tears shamelessly, and I was not the only person”.

Clearly this reaction is not the result of mere historical religious contingency, and although it is subjective it is not sufficiently subjective that it can be disqualified as entirely or arbitrarily subjective, it is ‘true’ in the highest of senses, that is truth that contains both subjective and objective reality and is properly moral, based on a shared and widely accessible category of human experience.

From the perspective of language, this means it must incorporate language that goes beyond the thing-for-thing representation of scientific language into the moral and the metaphorical. It is important to note many of the religious moral ideas we posses do not derive from a list of statements as much as a set of stories, modes of transmission that take the mind beyond the reductive into a uniting of our experience with the truth of our reality.

This mystery of how subject and object properly interact, how the objectively describable elements of our evolution have come to produce inwardness and subjectivity remains utterly mysterious to us. With this we must at some point acknowledge lies the moral. We have clear intuition, there are clearly things we can say about wellbeing, but the idea that all morality is or could ever be the product of science is a reflection of so many of the mires we are in in the modern world. It is a product of what Dr Iain McGilChrist would describe as the work of the left hemisphere, that which divides the world into mechanical pieces, (“states” as we started this essay with discussing), rather than recognising that reality is far more intuitive and subjective than what can be reduced to a kind of utility. Harris may be wrong, but the reasons he is wrong should cause us to reconsider the “state” we are currently in, and that while reason may be a useful way out, there is far more than reason to reality.