Sam Harris’s attempt at objective morality

I just took a look at Sam Harris’s now-slightly-infamous TED talk (above), and had a little flick through a subsequent piece in the Huffington Post, and was rather interested in what he had to say. Interested, because I had thought it was the cast-iron consensus among educated peoples to speak of morality in relative terms, or at the very most to concede that it is such a difficult subject that we can’t reasonably hope to get to the bottom of it. Even if this were the correct view, I have always thought it a somewhat frustrating one—if you cannot prove you are right, on what basis can you assert that you are right? Clearly, relativists must think this too, but opt for a different route at the fork.

Harris’s thesis is similar to one I very vaguely formulated myself a little while back, and centres around the idea of mental states. He asserts that there are—to put it crudely—good mental states and bad mental states. A good moral action, then, is one that results in a good moral state. Clearly, this is not an assertion that can be made without much qualification, and he goes to great pains to do so. Mapping out all possible states would be a gargantuan, and probably impossible, task. If it is impossible, it will be because there are literally an infinite number of possible distinguishable states. Eating ice cream while at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street on a sunny day produces a different state than doing the same thing at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 33rd on the same day, even if both are pleasurable.

If we imagine a “family tree” of possible mental states, such that each state requires for its achievement some combination of having experienced certain other states and a certain “brain structure”, we might get some idea of the possibilities of experience. Such a family tree can be asserted without any recourse to morality at all: it’s just a scientifically described set of possible experiences. No single one of these mental states could be equated with happiness, but rather there will be a certain set (perhaps infinitely large) of states that all belong to the group “happiness”, and there will be certain common features of this group such that if a new member were to be discovered, it could be easily identified as such. Most importantly, we may also be able to assert (and this can in principle be empirically tested) that a certain mental state, or more precisely a certain set of mental states (e.g. happiness or regret) may be out of reach for a certain person with a certain brain structure. Such an assertion would provide an obvious way to deal with an obvious objection—the objection being, “what if a madman finds contentment in evil deeds?”; the retort being, “madmen are incapable in principle of being content”.

Clearly, the origins of our potential for behaving morally—our empathy, our sense that all humanity is fundamentally the same, and our reason—arise from the complex tale of our evolutionary past. With this in mind, it seems to me that if we intend to draw the family tree of sets of possible mental states, we can only then assert with some measure of impartiality the superiority of one state over another if we understand their origins. So we can say that mental state Z439126H, which is a member of the “happiness” set (which in turn we can give a completely nondescript name so that its appellation provokes no controversy), arises because the circumstances that attend it are good for the survival of the genes that make up Homo sapiens. Similarly, we can say that mental state Y129087A, which corresponds to the feeling that a madman gets on committing a particular evil deed, is not connected with a state of affairs that promotes the survival of the genes of Homo sapiens. So we can claim that Z439126H is superior to Y129087A from the evolutionary perspective.

This leads us into an apparent conundrum, because there is no obvious reason to say that the evolutionary foundation is a good one for morality. But there are many assumptions which we make in ordinary life, which we all agree on, and which none of us feels the need to justify. We all agree that the proverbial table and chair exist, and it would be silly to have to prove this in order to prove some larger point. However, the evolutionary foundation is not so experientially self-evident as the existence of solid objects. Even if most reasonable people believe that we are the product of evolution, nevertheless it has not yet been proven beyond doubt that evolution has conspired to make us moral.

Perhaps the most we can ever say, then, is that the general survival of the species is the fountain from which all our behaviours spring. When our instincts do not work to this end (even in some indirect way), then there is something functionally wrong with them. Now it might be objected that from this point of view there is nothing really wrong with killing one person, since this is pretty negligible compared to the six billion people on earth. However, if we were not repulsed by murder, this would mean that our own gene-preserving instincts would be diminished, and humanity would be slightly the worse for it.

Sam Harris has made a bold first step in producing the case for a science of morality. But people have not yet converted en masse, and that is largely because such a science is in its very inchoate stages. In the near future, the instruments currently at our disposal will seem positively blunt, and we may well be able to talk in vastly more precise terms than we can now. At the moment, an objective morality only feels like a safe bet, but it cannot yet be asserted without very reasonable arguments to the contrary.