Why Sam Harris Is an Atheist

    As we saw in our last blog post, Sam Harris set out to demonstrate "How Science Can Determine Human Values," to quote the subtitle of his book. It was a bold attempt to find an objective moral standard based on science. And, in our opinion, he largely failed in the attempt. While he offered many opinions of his own on a wide variety of subjects, he gave few specifically scientific reasons for them. Instead he mainly went over the same ground that numerous theologians and philosophers have traversed for many centuries before, all the while not professing to see any valid objections to his own highly colored opinions. In the end Dr. Harris comes across as an atheist trying hard not to sound like Nietzsche.
    In his wandering peregrinations of the mind, however, Dr. Harris stumbled into an age-old trap, the hoary controversy over determinism v. free will. Dr. Harris says that there is no such thing as a free will, but unlike religious determinists of the past such as Augustine, Calvin and Edwards, Dr. Harris is an atheist and a thoroughgoing materialist (and a neuroscientist at that). But this creates a dilemma for him. On the one hand he wants to say that everything that occurs in the human mind has a natural cause, and therefore can be studied scientifically by neuroscientists such as himself. But if this is the case, Dr. Harris' own thought processes have been biologically determined, which raises an intriguing question: how can scientific reasoning be valid? There would be no necessary correlation between what goes on in the scientist's mind and external reality.
    Dr. Harris himself is aware of the problem and states it this way: "The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will. Thoughts, moods and desires of every sort simply spring into view – and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable" (p. 104).
    This, in turn, affects our view of moral responsibility. Dr. Harris challenges traditional notions of sin and culpability. If we only understood the underling causes of bad behavior we would be more compassionate with the erring. At the same time it would open the door to a scientific solution to the problem of human evil.
    But then Dr. Harris seems to step back and modify his position somewhat. He argues that a person could be held responsible for his behavior if he had the intention to do harm. However, if our "thoughts, moods and desires" are rooted in our biology and "simply spring into view," then does not the intention also have an underlying social or biological cause? How then, can we hold a criminal responsible for his actions?
    Moreover, if our thoughts simply spring into view for reasons that are inscrutable, then what about Dr. Harris' own research? It is remarkable that he managed to earn a doctorate from UCLA with thoughts that "simply sprang into view." And how about his book? How did it come about? (It became a New York Times bestseller.) Dr. Harris is caught on the horns of a familiar dilemma: science depends on the assumption of causality in nature; but causality in the mind means that the scientist himself is non-rational. Dr. Harris, it seems, has led us to a dead end.
    Again Dr. Harris appears to back off from his earlier assertions. He tries to argue that while biology and physical circumstances provide the motives for thought and action, that does not mean that we cannot still think rationally. "The fact that reason must be rooted in biology does not negate the principles of reason" (p. 131), he says. We are motivated to think, but we still think. "There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated: one is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt . . .As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion" (p. 126). But then he goes on to say ". . . the inseparability of reason and emotion confirms that the validity of belief cannot merely depend on the conviction felt by its adherents; it rests on the claims of evidence and argument that link it to reality" (pp. 126-127). It is a little hard to see how the one "confirms" its seeming opposite, but apparently what Dr. Harris has in mind is that our thought processes, while being driven and directed by our emotions, are nevertheless still capable of being rational. A passion for truth should lead us to pursue the truth with all the mental acumen and intellectual rigor at our command. But the problem remains: if everything we think is the result of chemical changes in our brains, how much mental acumen do we really have? Is it not all an illusion?
    Dr. Harris is quick to point out how emotion and bias influence the thinking of religious believers and social conservatives. But the argument is a two-edged sword – it cuts both ways. Is it not possible that Dr. Harris' own thinking has been shaped and molded by his personal biases? He notes at one point that dopamine receptor genes seem to play a role in religious belief: people with the most active form of the gene seem to be more religious. Might not a prescription for the drug L-dopa take care of Dr. Harris' atheism problem? Is it not possible that he is an atheist because he wants to be an atheist? The devout Christian sees evidence of Intelligent Design everywhere; Dr. Harris sees it nowhere. Has our perception, or lack thereof, been affected by our natural inclinations?

A Scientific Basis for Morality?

Review:
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Sam Harris
Free Press, 2010
307 pp; pb.

 
    The Moral Landscape, by the outspoken New Atheist Sam Harris, is an attempt to find a scientific basis for an objective system of morality. The attempt is a bold one, for conventional wisdom says that it cannot be done. Science cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is."
    Dr. Harris is well aware of the difficulty. He is a neuroscientist with a degree in philosophy. Those on the secular left say that no such objective morality exists, while those on the religious right say that no such morality is possible without reference to a Supreme Being. Dr. Harris, however, thinks that he has found a way out of the difficulty.
    We should note that when Dr. Harris speaks of "morality" he is not talking about a set of unvarying moral precepts or an abstract principle that exists outside of the human mind. He even goes so far as to say that, strictly speaking, morality is not even about an "ought" at all, but rather about how we as humans would like to structure society.
    He argues that most human beings would prefer to live in a well-ordered society that has achieved a high level of peace and prosperity. By the same token almost no sane person would want to live in a poverty stricken country terrorized by corrupt warlords. The answer, then, is to learn how to cooperate with each other in a spirit of reciprocal altruism. And science, he says, can show us how to achieve that. In a word what Dr. Harris offers us is an updated version of Utilitarianism, the idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
    Dr. Harris' grand vision sounds very appealing, but the devil, as they say, is in the details. Dr. Harris' book has received a great deal of attention, much of it critical, and in an afterword to the 2011 paperback edition Dr. Harris responds to some of his more thoughtful critics. In particular he addresses three major criticisms; 1) the Value Problem; 2) the Persuasion Problem; and 3) the Measurement Problem. Due to limitations of space we will confine our attention to the first two.
    Dr. Harris contends that the goal of morality should be the general well-being of conscious beings. But how do we define "well-being"? Good health? Satisfying relationships? Material success? The good feeling that comes from acts of kindness? Religion? Wine, women and song? Dr. Harris offers us plenty of opinions of his own, on everything from burqas to embryonic stem-cell research. But significantly, he rarely provides us with a specifically scientific basis for his opinions, which raises the intriguing question, what is the real source of his values? Since he does not tell us, we can only guess. But the answer, apparently, is either from his own intuitive sense of right and wrong, or else he has borrowed them from his Western (i.e. Judaeo-Christian) culture. We seem to recall Someone else a long time ago telling us about the Golden Rule! That being the case, Dr. Harris has left himself wide open to the criticism from the left: his supposed universal standard of morality rests on nothing more than his own cultural or emotional biases.
    The other problem that Dr. Harris has is what he calls "the Persuasion Problem." The problem here is that Dr. Harris is trying to find a basis for altruism in self-interest. Here is how he himself states the problem: " . . . there is often a tension between the autonomy of the individual and the common good, and many moral problems turn on just how to prioritize competing values" (p. 42). "Prioritize" indeed. Why should anyone think about the common good at all? Dr. Harris says that it is in our own self-interest to do so, and so it is. But in real life self-interest and the common good often collide with each other, and when one's own individual self-interest lies close at hand, the "common good" can seem like a hopelessly vague abstraction. Adam Smith had a surer insight into human nature: capitalism works precisely because it appeals to our selfishness and greed.
    In the final analysis we think that Dr. Harris failed because the tried to combine two opposites: human autonomy and the common good. In so doing he eliminated the element of duty or obligation from morality. In the end his "moral landscape" is neither universal, nor truly moral, nor even scientific. Dr. Harris, it seems, is a law unto himself.