Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

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You miss the point entirely, and your "counterexample" is a non-sequitur.

The purpose of Harris's speech is to argue, against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain, that there are ethical and moral truths to be found even if we cannot yet discern them. In response you mount a straw-man argument against a coarse implementation of utilitarian ethics, but this doesn't even relate to Harris's point.

To answer: yes, it would be a bad idea to kill all children found torturing small animals. Why? Because, as human beings, we would suffer greatly in such a society (to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling, and children don't flourish into healthy adults in a society where their murder is considered acceptable), even if a naive implementation of utilitarian ethics incorrectly indicates that such an approach leads to the greatest overall happiness. That this is a fact subject to evidence, rather than a simple matter of opinion, is Harris's point here.

>against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain

It's very odd to think of this as a "postmodern" point of view. Aristotle would be a postmodernist under this conception.

>to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling

It's not wrong because we find it unsettling -- we find it unsettling because it's wrong. This is the problem with Harris's program of research: it gets the cart before the horse. Facts about morality don't reduce to facts about how we feel or what we believe. (In the philosophical literature, this position goes by the name of "emotivism", and it's been pretty conclusively refuted over the centuries.)

Studying the psychology of moral judgments can't tell us what's really right and wrong, any more than studying the workings of the visual cortex can tell us what kind of objects really exist in the world. Human perceptual faculties are imperfect, and our moral perceptions and judgments are no exception.

>It's not wrong because we find it unsettling -- we find it unsettling because it's wrong

You're wrong. In that case you'd have to say that "it's wrong because it's wrong". We perceive murdering a child as horrifying/immoral/wrong because caring for the young is something that was useful for human evolution. For other species of animals this is not a useful strategy an they wil eat/abandon their offspring for the benefit of the rest, in that case would you find it to be immoral behaviour?

>In that case you'd have to say that "it's wrong because it's wrong".

No, that doesn't follow. I could say, for example, "it's wrong because the categorical imperative prohibits it."

It's true that you must eventually come down to some moral assumption or principle which isn't independently justified, but that is the same for everyone in any field of inquiry.

>We perceive murdering a child as horrifying/immoral/wrong because caring for the young is something that was useful for human evolution.

Similarly, you can say that I perceive a desk in front of me because perceiving mid-sized objects in the immediate vicinity confered an evolutionary advantage on my ancestors. But you can also say that I perceive a desk in front of me because there is a desk in front of me. That is the causal account that's relevant to epistemological concerns, and the same goes in the case of moral judgments.

>For other species of animals this is not a useful strategy an they wil eat/abandon their offspring for the benefit of the rest, in that case would you find it to be immoral behaviour?

Most animals don't have a sufficient capacity for reflective thought for questions of morality to arise at all. But for very intelligent animals (e.g. dolphins, elephants, chimps), I think questions about whether their behavior is moral or not genuinely do arise. Certainly, these questions would arise in quite a pointed fashion if e.g. a hyper-intelligent alien species enslaved us. It's clearly not enough to say "they evolved to behave like that so it must be moral." I don't know what to say about these cases, really, but the issue doesn't seem as straightforward as you make out.

I think you're missing the point. As you say, there are better statements of utilitarianism, that more closely approximate how you feel. Other people feel otherwise. A fascist would reject your argument, and might well kill the children, because fascists think that the welfare of society trumps the suffering of individual humans.

The basic question of ethics is this: can we persuade reasonable fascists that they're wrong, or must we keep nuking them from orbit?

What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

I should have been more clear about this. In my previous post, I'm supposing that killing the children would be the wrong thing to do, as I strongly believe our current understanding of human psychology and sociology indicates. But I could be wrong, and whether I'm right or wrong about this moral decision is not a matter of opinion, but is fundamentally a scientific question. This, as I understand it, is Harris's point.

>What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

Ok, so now all he owes us is an explanation of how to do that.

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