I. The Argument's Genesis
Sam Harris's February TED lecture begins with a provocative premise:
...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, and 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 can not 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 is no description of the way the world is that can tell us the way 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.
Andrew Sullivan recently linked to the lecture with this response from Freddie deBoer:
[I]f we are indeed a cosmic accident, the result of the directionless and random process of evolution, then it makes little sense to imagine that we are capable of ordering the world around us, beyond the limited perspective of our individual, subjective selves. This has always been to me the simplest step in the world, from the first two beliefs to the third, from the collapse of geocentrism and creationism to the collapse of objective knowing. Yet I find that it is one many people not only refuse to make, but one that they react against violently. This is the skepticism that is refused, and this refusal is the last dogma.
There's also this clarification, this clarification, and this clarification from deBoer. Several other bloggers have weighed in on the debate. The highlights: from Julian Sanchez:
God or whatever other transcendent sources of certainty we might posit just serve as baffles to conceal the ineradicable circularity that’s going to sit at the bottom of any system of knowledge. You’re always ultimately going to have a process of belief formation whose reliability can only be vouchsafed in terms of the internal criteria of that very process. Calling it a divinely endowed rational faculty rather than an adaptive complex of truth-tracking modules doesn’t actually change the structure of it any...I do think we can make “objective” judgments. They’re only “objective” relative to our contingently evolved nervous systems, but since that’s all objective can ever have meant, that's objective. This is totally distinct from the question of how confident we ought to feel about most of our conclusions. I can be mistaken about an objective fact, but that doesn’t entail that it’s a mistake to think of it as objective one way or the other. Because objectivity is a system-relative property, it’s not undermined by the fact of our cognitive limitations.
And from Will Wilson:
Contingent minds merely undermine the necessity of our being able to comprehend the world (a necessity that the faithful take quite seriously, as an old Dominican friar once explained to me), they leave open, however, the possibility of contingent minds that “just happen” to be of the sort that can make sense of the universe in which they happen to be located. Nevertheless, Freddie is right about one thing: once we eliminate necessity, we need reasons to think that our minds are of the right sort; after all, the humble Giraffe is well adapted to its environment, but will never come to understand particle physics or the workings of its own neurophysiology. How are we to know that we are not like Giraffes, only with considerably wider possible-knowledge horizons?
This discussion has occupied nearly all my time and brainpower for the last week, and it has stretched my patience and eyesight more than a few times. Ultimately, many people have forgotten where the debate started: subsequent commentary has wandered uncontrollably from the cosmic questions first proffered by Harris to the merits of various political ideologies to the nature of science, morality, and knowledge. Straw men pepper the electronic landscape, and there are more than a few reductio ad Hitlerum sprinkled throughout multiple sites. So, I am going to attempt to grossly (over)simplify the terms of the debate for clarification.
Click to read more ...
I was late tuning into the debate tonight because (a) I was busy reading Clifford and the Grouchy Neighbors to my kid for his pretend-to-go-to-bedtime story, and (b) I forgot all about it. I’ve got a lot on my plate these days, and unless one of these presidential hopefuls stands up and says he’s ready to sign seal and deliver my wife’s green card before the weekend they have nothing I care to hear.
Friday, February 24, 2012 at 3:42PM | tagged 
