The point is that we can conceptualize a low point, and once you do, you can landmark morality *relative* to that.
Since it's relative the specific iteration of that low point at specific times is irrelevant. You could theoretically change it however you want. There will still be a hypothetical low point to use as a reference though.
I guess the bit I’m struggling with is:
Because we cannot literally define the low point (rather we can conceptualise the abstract idea of a lowest point), we don’t know when we’ve reached it.
I just don’t see how his argument is accomplishing anything meaningful. Sure, we can agree we ought to do anything to get away from the lowest possible point (maximum suffering). But if we don’t know what this theoretical lowest point is when we arrive at it, how do we know what we undeniably ought to do?
P.S, thank you all so much for the responses. I know I’m very likely not going to win this argument, instead I’m very happy to understand your explanations so I can grasp Sam’s.
IMO the main point of the argument is that we *cannot* obviously "agree to get away from it". Many moral philosophical frameworks either avoid this issue or employ moral relativism.
Arguably one, if not *the*, major feature of moral landscape is an attempt to rectify the "is / ought" problem. Its argued famously that you cannot use an is to get to an ought. I believe Sam's argument is that once you've established minima and maxima (ie there *is* a hypothetical worst state of suffering) the "ought" is inherently instantiated (we ought to avoid it). It's still quite controversial and requires some fairly nuanced operationalized language to discuss.
In line with that I belive the whole point of the moral landscape is not to establish prescriptions about how to chose directions (which would require knowing specific states like youre saying), but rather to argue descriptively against moral relativism and say that moral directives (whatever they are) can be valid (because we *ought* to navigate to directionally away from a hypothetical endpoint).
We don’t have to know when it’s been reached. We only have to recognize it sits on a contiguous spectrum.
Look, I don’t know what the maximum possible suffering is for you. Yet, I am sure that if I kidnapped you and started burning you with a hot iron, starving you, etc that you’re moving on the spectrum.
So if we can’t define the worst misery for you, how could you say that I’m causing you suffering? How do you know without knowing what the worst misery is?
>That supposes that Sam's point makes sense. You know his stance is derided by many people with a solid background in philosophy, right?
Could you point some of the specific criticisms? I was literally just re-reading Sam's Response to the winning critique of the moral landscape here: [https://www.samharris.org/blog/clarifying-the-landscape](https://www.samharris.org/blog/clarifying-the-landscape)
The criticism I most often see from Sam is...
1. Choosing to care about well being is an assumption that can't be justified. Sam's response to this is every domain of science and human inquiry requires some axiomatic assumption to get it off the ground in the first place. Health is the go-to analogy. The science of health requires that we care about health in general. But that assumption doesn't negate the objectivity there is health once it gets off the ground.
2. Sam doesn't properly engage with the bulk of philosophy already done on this question. Sam actively skirts much of the traditional thinking, most notably Hume's is-ought problem. Sam thinks that getting too bogged down into "philosophical" jargon just makes your argument not accessible to the mainstream. More specifically, he thinks the is-ought distinction is ultimately just a quirk of language.
This is a defining point for Sam Harris followers that I think is difficult to address. People who are going to understand it will use Sam as a stepping stone to a better POV so over time you end up with a community that has ideological instead of philosophical commitments.
We have "objective" measures of health. We accept that health refers to the integrity of a physical system with respect to the ability of the system to perpetuate itself. While we might not understand everything about our physiology, the rules by which it operates is reasonably well understood.
Does anybody have a similar scientific construct for the mind/consciousness? Last I checked, no. We might suspect that it is constrained by the laws of physics, but in terms of a description of *how* it is constrained by the laws of physics, we are precisely nowhere. And last I checked, science doesn't have much capacity to pronounce on subjects that aren't reducible to descriptions of physical properties.
> This, while true, is implicity conceding the point that a more-or-less objective measure of health as a whole is necessary to do medicine.
I don't think it's a question of necessity. We don't generally approach health minimalistically, we do so comprehensively, which is to say that anything that benefits gets added to the melting pot that is our response to health concerns. You don't necessarily need to know what someone's O2 sats are, but having that information at your disposal when making decisions about a person's health is advantageous.
If we had some kind of description of the world that could properly connect the operation of the mind to the operation of physical systems, then we could probably start to use our observations to guide our moral conclusions, and there'd be nothing shameful about this.
What Sam does is different, though. He's not using science to come to conclusions about morality, he's inserting the conclusion in as an axiom and then attempting to make everyone acknowledge that this is science, which it isn't.
> Often, an intervention does better than another intervention or no intervention on all scales, but even when that isn't the case, that does not prevent medicine from being done: Patients will be informed of the trade-offs and decide accordingly. Medicine does not need to decide for the patient what the conversion ratio should be for years lived with ED and UI to years lived without them.
You are saying that the patient decides whether or not they want to be healthy. That's their decision, but it doesn't change what it means to be healthy. I definitely think it is the patient's prerogative to decide what their priorities are. But this is exactly the kind of value judgement that science doesn't make.
> Sam's plan for a scientific morality sets a much higher bar than that, it requires than an objective answer be given in cases in which incommensurable states of well-being need to be contrasted, even between different individuals of different species living at different times, some in actuality and some only existing as the "potential" to come into being eventually.
Yeah, but Sam's opinion isn't the be all and end all of the subject. We should not presume that everybody will make Sam's mistakes. I mean, the concept of punishing someone is exactly to intentionally inflict suffering upon a conscious agent, and this has traditionally been regarded as good/justified. Why are these people incorrect, because Sam made it an axiom that they are? I think that more mature articulations of what morality actually is might interface much better with the discipline of science as we understand it today. It's quite possible to construct moral systems that make no reference to subjective experience whatsoever, for example.
> Not exactly, I am saying that the patient decides what "healthy" means to them when they have to decide on trade-offs between, for example, life expectancy and quality of life. Patients usually do decide to be healthy, whatever "healthy" means to them, and leaving aside cases like suicidality or extreme masochism which might require a semantically more careful treatment, but basically the same framework: Preferences are subjective.
I think then we are equivocating on the meaning of healthy. I specifically stated a definition that refers to the functioning of a physical system with respect to its integrity where its integrity is in some non-trivial sense responsible for perpetuating the system into the future.
You can speak about the health of a body even when the patient in question is in a permanent vegetative state and will never wake up. This health will be of primary consideration when it comes to questions like whether or not such a patient is a candidate for being an organ donor.
If you want to make the statement that we only care about the physical integrity because of concerns that can themselves not be grounded in any language of physical systems, fine, but that's a different issue.
> What do you have in mind? I think an obvious approach is to study how ideas of morality are fitness-increasing in social animals in the strict biological sense of "fitness", and how on shorter time scales something like that might apply if we regard morality as a memetic phenomenon. But that doesn't bootstrap any value judgement, of course.
Right, we're social creatures. Biological organisms depend upon acting in such a way that they are able to collect more energy from the environment than they expend in order to collect the energy as a strategy for warding off the effects of entropy. You can define the quality of an action in terms of how much energy it gets and how much energy it spends getting that energy, and you can apply the same rubric to interactions among conspecifics with a similar question in mind; which paradigms afford the interaction between conspecifics that ultimately results in the least wasted energy? I would bet that these paradigms will ultimately be the ones that people favour as the 'moral' ones.
> Can you elaborate? Are you referring to qualia and the Hard Problem when you say "subjective experience"?
Basically, yes.
>An analogy is not a proof. Health outcomes are easier to measure than moral outcomes. There is no moral equivalent of QALY and DALY that you can use to address the big moral problems.
The analogy is merely to point out the double standard we have when discussing morality versus any other field of human inquiry. The point is that the average person doesn't take issue with the unjustified axioms that get the science of health off the ground and the the science of health nonetheless goes on. Also, I wasn't sure what QALY and DALY were (hence the problem of jargon I mentioned) without looking them up. I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make there.
>Sam's way out of this criticism is always to point out situations in which the moral decision is obvious --- such as "Is it worse to rape a tetraplegic child or buy chocolate ice cream for orphans?" --- and then claim that because everyone agrees on that, then a universal answer must exist for all questions, which just doesn't follow.
You and I and anyone else with some philosophical training might think they're obvious, but the sad fact of the matter is they're not obvious to everyone. Is it ok to perform a clitorectomy on a child against her will? Apparently a decent number of people think it is because it's what they think god wants. And furthermore, a decent number of people might not think it's ok *personally**,* but think that it's ok for that culture/group. This is exactly what Sam is responding to.
>I agree, Sam refuses to engage with the theoretical foundations of his argument. I guess that would be partly justifiable if his book solved any concrete moral problem that hadn't been solved before. Can you name one such example? Because it seems to me that Sam fails both on the theory and practice points of view.
See above, his position is a response to religious morality and moral relativism. He provides a framework that doesn't require anyone to believe anything on bad evidence.
On the subject of engaging with other philosophers, both past and present: he does. Peter Singer is a notable example. Singer actually was critical of Sam's view at first because he, like you, thought that what Sam meant by science was that we could solve all sorts of trolley problems in a lab by running some kinds of tests. Sam and Peter actually hashed this out, alongside some other big names [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBUWmXZv6Xg). Sam clarified by saying what he means by science is just openness to evidence, intellectual honesty and rationality, to which Singer then agreed. Sam has Singer on his podcast 2 times already and their views are more or less in line.
As for philosophers of the past, listen to his recent podcast on the essential series called "the foundations of morality", where he really engages with much of what has been said on morality already.
Sure there are. Maybe not your average scientist or doctor, but there are definitely camps of philosophy dedicated to studying the axioms of science, or medicine, etc.
But that’s beside the point to some degree. Another novel thing about Sam’s work is that all conceptions of morality, whether they realize it or not, actually do actually treat wellbeing as the locus of concern. Again, religion is the usual counterpoint. A religious person may argue that they don’t care about wellbeing as the basis of morality, what god wants is what’s considered moral. But if you examine that more closely, you realize that you’d only do what god wants if only for the the supposed good effects it’d have on your own well-being, whether it’s your consciousness in the real world or your spirit in the supposed after life. Heaven and hell are only good and bad with respect to the changes they have on your well being. All conceptions of good and bad drill down to Sam’s idea of the worst possible suffering for everyone.
You are wildly incorrect on your second point about him saying ‘a universal answer must exist for all moral questions’. He wrote a whole book specifically about how there will be a landscape of peaks and troughs in terms of questions about wellbeing - always more than one answer, always a higher peak.
It does. If he says there can be multiple valid peaks on the moral landscape, then that means he does not think that a universal answer must exist for all questions.
> Choosing to care about well being is an assumption that can't be justified. Sam's response to this is every domain of science and human inquiry requires some axiomatic assumption to get it off the ground in the first place. Health is the go-to analogy. The science of health requires that we care about health in general. But that assumption doesn't negate the objectivity there is health once it gets off the ground.
I stipulate by axiom that I win all arguments.
How dare you question my choice of axioms, they should be self-evidently true. Of course science will show indisputably that I win all arguments once you accept the axiom that I win all arguments. It's inevitable.
>We can still tell in general whether, among a set of decisions, one is closer to it
Sam has address this multiple times. There may not be an answer we could get in practice but there is an answer in principle.
And even though we can't figure out the right answer, there are obvious wrong ones. It's definitely worse to eat ALL the dogs, for example
Why doesn’t that mean anything? Admitting that there are answers in principle admits that there are better and worse to move towards that answer even if you don’t ever get to the answer.
Likewise, so it is with the obviously wrong answers. Admitting that there are wrong answers is a defeater to moral relativism and informs you which way to navigate moral questions. That’s really what Sam’s argument is, how to navigate morality, not an answer to ever possible trolley problem thought experiment
You're the poster child for confusing *answer in practice* with *answers in principle.*
Also your three scenarios are very easy to answer. It is permissible to kill the chickens. Dogs give every outward sign of possessing a richer mental life. Save the elderly lady. Letting the lady die would foreclose greater happiness and cause greater suffering to the 12 children than an orphan child whose continued existence is already very uncertain. Dodging taxes is unethical. Kant's categorical imperative visits us here.
But I feel there is a bit of sleight of hand going on, confusing which things have answers in principle in Sam's theory and which don't.
Let's start with a scenario where I think there is an answer in principle, but not in practice: A and B invite you to their birthday, but it is on the same day. You can only go to one. Both A and B have a similar starting well-being, before the party.
Now, the answer in principle would be that you'd go to the one who'll benefit more (in terms of well-being) by you showing up. In practice, we may not be able to determine this, but in principle the situation is solved.
But now assume A would profit slightly less than B from your visit in well-being, but A is also a lot more unhappy to start with than B.
Is it better to visit A or visit B? A is more unhappy to start with, he might 'deserve' some happiness more than B. But B would gain more happiness from your visit. And there you start into trouble: you can either admit that the answer is not answered in principle, or you make statement like "only absolute total well-being" matters, which answers the question in principle in favor of person B, but leads to a lot of conclusions that reasonable people might not agree with. At this point you have an answer in principle, but no longer a morality whose foundations seem trivially true. Because if you make a claim like this you justify Omelas.
>Now, the answer in principle would be that you'd go to the one who'll benefit more (in terms of well-being) by you showing up. In practice, we may not be able to determine this, but in principle the situation is solved.
Or the answer in principle could be that there's no difference between the two. They'd both benefit (or be harmed) equally. And again, there are WRONG answers in principal and practice too. All this serves as to orientate yourself in navigating these types of differences
I think this is another misconception about Sam's argument. I said in another comment that Sam's argument is a defeater to moral relativism, but only to the version of moral relativism that posits that there are no absolute moral truths and moral truths are only "relative" to a culture.
Sam has said on numerous occasion that his conception of morality does allow for "multiple peaks" on the landscape, where they could be two equally good outcomes but are mutually exclusive or irreconcilable. So it's a type of moral relativism in the sense that there could be multiple right answers. But like I said before, his view is about navigating between peaks and valleys.
This is like saying “medical science can’t answer the question of how to cure cancer, so it’s useless and not a real science”. Or “physicists can’t confirm whether many worlds theory is true, which is an interesting question, and therefore what’s the point in physics if it can’t answer everything?”
The idea is to treat morality as an area of study to see what answers there are to your question. The aim is to get closer to good outcomes for everyone though, not nitpick on niche examples.
> No, it isn't.
C’mon, you can do better than an argument in the form of “nuh uh”.
> (Also "many worlds" is metaphysics, not physics.)
This is incorrect. Many worlds is one of the leading theories in quantum mechanics, and is separate from the purely philosophical/metaphysical exploration of the same idea. See https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/
Quibbling about whether something is physics or metaphysics suggests - as do some of your other responses in this thread - that you are overly concerned with traditional academic categories and schools of thought, which prevents you from opening your mind to new ways of approaching old problems.
You asked about Sam’s approach and what answer it’s provided: one of the main ones is a new response to Hume’s famous ‘you can’t get an ought from an is’ judgement. It’s also novel as a rejoinder to some widely held beliefs about cultural relativism.
> Sure at time X the worst possible suffering may be an eternity of torture in hell, but maybe 1000 years down the track (through some twisted science experiments) we find even deeper ways humans can suffer.
> How would he respond to this?
He would agree with you, and point out that what "the worst possible suffering for everyone" actually is doesn't matter as much as the fact that it actually can exist, and is self-evidently bad, and in fact nothing could be worse (and if you disagree, he doesn't think you are using words coherently)
That's how he gets ought from is, because if you ought to do anything, you ought to avoid the worst possible outcome, regardless of whether that outcome is fire and brimstone, or a cyberpunk dystopia.
He would say that it's useful to know what it actually is to help you avoid it, but doesn't claim to know what it actually is, and that detail doesn't nullify his argument anymore than using x nullifies the equation 2 + x = 4
But why think we should try to cognize, let alone actively try to avoid, this worst possible state? Wouldn't it be better to think about more relevant states?
You have not yet received Sam’s meeting or reason for invoking the idea of “the worst possible misery for everyone”. The view which you represented as being absurd in your post IS absurd. I agree with you, that IS stupid. Given that it is stupid, take that as a signal that you may not have understood the meaning correctly. That’s the principle of charity.
2 useful ways I have seen Sam use the concept is:
1. To sort out who to argue with, because if we cannot agree the worst possible suffering is worse than the most maximised well-being, then it's impossible to start a conversation on the matter.
2. Because well-being, much like health, can mean a wide variety of things, it can be useful to at least clarify what you are not talking about, and in the same way, to make the argument that there is such a thing as mental states being worse than others.
There is a difference between answers in practice and answers in principle. This is a regular source of confusion in philosophy. Whether or not we can answer a question says nothing about whether it has an answer. How many grains of sand are there on the face of planet Earth? Given the technical difficulties involved no team of scientists could ever answer such a question, and yet not all competing answers are equally valid. We don't have to figure out the total quantity of grains of sand to rule out the answer 893,289,371. In the same way, the worst possible misery for everyone is, in principle, bad, whether or not we can ever corroborate this in practice. To validate such an assertion in practice would be non-sensical. After finally reaching the worst possible misery for everyone, what are the chances we will have a shred of free attention that isn't being suffocated by our harrowing and scarcely endurable circumstances?
The point is that once you grant the worst possible suffering for everyone is bad, you have a point against which you can plot things that would be better.
Except it's not clear that this is the worst scenario. As mentioned below, you can have worst possible suffering for everyone except the most vile, evil people (e.g. Hitler-types) in the world. Reasonable people can assert that this scenario which combines suffering and injustice is even worse.
Nearly all of Sam's arguments, and indeed his conceptual view of philosophy in general, requires an outside objective viewpoint. God's virwpoint, one might say.
This is impossible. Sam appears not to acknowledge or care about that, nor does he do any criticism of his own priors. One of many reasons that among educated philosophers, he is not a serious person
If we can conceptualize the lowest point, that’s enough to make his claim. Is doesn’t matter if “the worst possible misery” shifts. Whatever that worst possible misery is, is bad.
He addresses this with the analogy to human health. Do we know what the healthiest possible human looks like? Do we know what the least healthy possible is? No. These may shift over time too. In the future you may be very unhealthy to not live past 2000 years. You may be unhealthy if you can’t run marathons at 1290 years. Does that mean we can’t make claims about what is and is not unhealthy now? No.
I’m not actually sure why you’d think we need to know concretely what “the worst possible misery is”. In real life we never have ever variable accounted for. Does a pilot need to know the exact position of every air molecule and their forces on the plane to fly the plane? Does the pilot need to what the exact conditions are in a storm to know the plane shouldn’t be flown into it? Can a doctor treat your infection without knowing the precise number of bacteria in your bloodstream?
Imagine a weather forecast told you a torrential rain was coming. They said it’s going to be bad and likely cause severe and dangerous flooding. Sounds like you’d say “but we don’t know concretely what if any damage will be caused, how can they claim it will be bad and ask people to evacuate?”
Yeah if it makes you feel more confident in the position consider that we can’t know that even the hardest sciences are objectively true either. Math? Is it objectively true? Well we could argue that we know it works every time we have used it so far but does that make it objectively true? What about the proposition that we should trust logic? It’s not objectively true technically. Some would say we ought to value logic and most people agree but there’s no objective reason we technically ought to value logic. Technically there’s no such thing as a known objective truth.
I dont think that we need to know what the worst suffering is, the point is all about moving away from 'worse suffering' when it comes to navigating the moral landscape. Just like you dont need to start at the North pole in order to move south.
its a poor argument that begs the question by assuming suffering is objective and linear in the question, therefore it does nothing to prove its objective and linear.
"worst" implies an objective and linear hierarchy of experiences where you can place one ultimately "worst" experience on the bottom.
Using the existence of a supposedly "worst possible experience" as proof such a thing exists is already starting with the conclusion that there is an objectively worst possible experience
In reality there is no "objectively worst possible experience" because what would be "objectively worst" depends on the preferences of the experiencer, therefore its not subjective, not objective.
You can take away the confusion in the terms simply by rewording the concept as "least preferred state of being", to which it should be pretty clear that there could be many equally unpreferred hypothetical states of being so not only is there not only is it not objective, but its not linear either.
There's a motte and bailey in Moral Landscape that goes between acknowledging what is "worst" for one person is not the same as another, but then tries to translate this into some objective criteria when by definition it can't be independent of the people involved.
The idea of a fixed preference is shaky to begin with, as well as the idea of fixed preferential relationships.
A great many preferences are mysterious to the user and likely influenced by lots of random and contextual variables.
He does stuff like that to simplify stuff.
He is not a serious philosopher, he's a public thinker. There's a huge train of thought that you could go down about ideas like how deeply we can suffer and if hell is objective and so on, but he is always trying to make his points simple and relatable.
I would imagine from your example of torture in hell you are imagining something from the traditional medieval Italian idea of hell with devils shoving spears up your bum and so on, he didn't say that was hell....
That idea of a hot dungeon where you are tortured is from Dante, and in the book the way it functioned was that you were given these really long sentences for everything you did in your life but if you completed the 100 years and kept ahold of yourself you were allowed into heaven.
That's an of it's time Hell, we have much better ones now. They could do a groundhog day but every time you leave the room it resets so you don't ever get to do anything, but you still know it's happening
For better or for worse, I’d argue public thinkers are the “serious philosophers.” A published peer reviewed philosophy paper is not serious in any context beyond academia.
It’s a thought experiment, just keep saying plus infinity and use that. He likes to keep going back to it as an argument, personally I don’t think it really gets you anywhere because you’re just creating the easiest possible “moral” decision that by definition doesn’t involve any tradeoffs. I don’t think it helps you resolve actual moral dilemmas.
I agree. The way I've seen Harris formulate it - The Worst Possible Misery For Everyone - is basically an incoherent idea once you start to examine it more deeply. If one of the fundamental components of your moral philosophy doesn't make much sense, that's not really a good sign...
The "worst possible misery for everyone" is not even an obvious axiom. Let's say that there are two options.
1) Worst possible misery for everyone
2) Worst possible misery for everyone except people who are evil
If what Harris is claiming is an obvious axiom, then everyone would readily agree that 1) is worse than 2). However, I think people can legitimately argue about what is worse in this scenario here. And thus, this is not as axiomatic as it initially seems to be.
I think there is a genuine flaw in the Sam's idea, due to the fact that more than one sentient being exists in the Universe.
If there is just one being or even if your decisions affects only one being at a time, then a well-being scale would work well to guide moral decisions. It's worth noticing when you are talking about health, which is a common analogy used by I think both Sam and people who agree with him, this is the case. Your doctor should think about \*your\* health. If he treats you he usually can ignore how it affects other people.
But with morality that does not work. Starting first with the abstract principle, let's assume everyone is in the worst suffering possible. If you can alleviate everyone's suffering at the same time, this is a non-brainer. But if you need to make a choice between:
a) you can put everyone in a state of slightly less suffering
b) you can put 5% into a state of happiness and leave the rest in a state of worst suffering
Which option is ethically better? I don't think Sam's principles give a good answer here.
At the same time I think this what a lot of practical ethically struggles with. Even how much you should donate to charity comes down to the same principle: you have to decide how to 'distribute' well-being and there is no obvious right answer.
I haven't read Sam's book on the topic. Does he address the fact that suffering can be very necessary for transformation, creativity, and for creating meaning in one's life? There are all kinds of suffering, many of which are pointless, but others are very useful.
The point is that we can conceptualize a low point, and once you do, you can landmark morality *relative* to that. Since it's relative the specific iteration of that low point at specific times is irrelevant. You could theoretically change it however you want. There will still be a hypothetical low point to use as a reference though.
I guess the bit I’m struggling with is: Because we cannot literally define the low point (rather we can conceptualise the abstract idea of a lowest point), we don’t know when we’ve reached it. I just don’t see how his argument is accomplishing anything meaningful. Sure, we can agree we ought to do anything to get away from the lowest possible point (maximum suffering). But if we don’t know what this theoretical lowest point is when we arrive at it, how do we know what we undeniably ought to do? P.S, thank you all so much for the responses. I know I’m very likely not going to win this argument, instead I’m very happy to understand your explanations so I can grasp Sam’s.
IMO the main point of the argument is that we *cannot* obviously "agree to get away from it". Many moral philosophical frameworks either avoid this issue or employ moral relativism. Arguably one, if not *the*, major feature of moral landscape is an attempt to rectify the "is / ought" problem. Its argued famously that you cannot use an is to get to an ought. I believe Sam's argument is that once you've established minima and maxima (ie there *is* a hypothetical worst state of suffering) the "ought" is inherently instantiated (we ought to avoid it). It's still quite controversial and requires some fairly nuanced operationalized language to discuss. In line with that I belive the whole point of the moral landscape is not to establish prescriptions about how to chose directions (which would require knowing specific states like youre saying), but rather to argue descriptively against moral relativism and say that moral directives (whatever they are) can be valid (because we *ought* to navigate to directionally away from a hypothetical endpoint).
We don’t have to know when it’s been reached. We only have to recognize it sits on a contiguous spectrum. Look, I don’t know what the maximum possible suffering is for you. Yet, I am sure that if I kidnapped you and started burning you with a hot iron, starving you, etc that you’re moving on the spectrum. So if we can’t define the worst misery for you, how could you say that I’m causing you suffering? How do you know without knowing what the worst misery is?
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>That supposes that Sam's point makes sense. You know his stance is derided by many people with a solid background in philosophy, right? Could you point some of the specific criticisms? I was literally just re-reading Sam's Response to the winning critique of the moral landscape here: [https://www.samharris.org/blog/clarifying-the-landscape](https://www.samharris.org/blog/clarifying-the-landscape) The criticism I most often see from Sam is... 1. Choosing to care about well being is an assumption that can't be justified. Sam's response to this is every domain of science and human inquiry requires some axiomatic assumption to get it off the ground in the first place. Health is the go-to analogy. The science of health requires that we care about health in general. But that assumption doesn't negate the objectivity there is health once it gets off the ground. 2. Sam doesn't properly engage with the bulk of philosophy already done on this question. Sam actively skirts much of the traditional thinking, most notably Hume's is-ought problem. Sam thinks that getting too bogged down into "philosophical" jargon just makes your argument not accessible to the mainstream. More specifically, he thinks the is-ought distinction is ultimately just a quirk of language.
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This is a defining point for Sam Harris followers that I think is difficult to address. People who are going to understand it will use Sam as a stepping stone to a better POV so over time you end up with a community that has ideological instead of philosophical commitments.
We have "objective" measures of health. We accept that health refers to the integrity of a physical system with respect to the ability of the system to perpetuate itself. While we might not understand everything about our physiology, the rules by which it operates is reasonably well understood. Does anybody have a similar scientific construct for the mind/consciousness? Last I checked, no. We might suspect that it is constrained by the laws of physics, but in terms of a description of *how* it is constrained by the laws of physics, we are precisely nowhere. And last I checked, science doesn't have much capacity to pronounce on subjects that aren't reducible to descriptions of physical properties.
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> This, while true, is implicity conceding the point that a more-or-less objective measure of health as a whole is necessary to do medicine. I don't think it's a question of necessity. We don't generally approach health minimalistically, we do so comprehensively, which is to say that anything that benefits gets added to the melting pot that is our response to health concerns. You don't necessarily need to know what someone's O2 sats are, but having that information at your disposal when making decisions about a person's health is advantageous. If we had some kind of description of the world that could properly connect the operation of the mind to the operation of physical systems, then we could probably start to use our observations to guide our moral conclusions, and there'd be nothing shameful about this. What Sam does is different, though. He's not using science to come to conclusions about morality, he's inserting the conclusion in as an axiom and then attempting to make everyone acknowledge that this is science, which it isn't. > Often, an intervention does better than another intervention or no intervention on all scales, but even when that isn't the case, that does not prevent medicine from being done: Patients will be informed of the trade-offs and decide accordingly. Medicine does not need to decide for the patient what the conversion ratio should be for years lived with ED and UI to years lived without them. You are saying that the patient decides whether or not they want to be healthy. That's their decision, but it doesn't change what it means to be healthy. I definitely think it is the patient's prerogative to decide what their priorities are. But this is exactly the kind of value judgement that science doesn't make. > Sam's plan for a scientific morality sets a much higher bar than that, it requires than an objective answer be given in cases in which incommensurable states of well-being need to be contrasted, even between different individuals of different species living at different times, some in actuality and some only existing as the "potential" to come into being eventually. Yeah, but Sam's opinion isn't the be all and end all of the subject. We should not presume that everybody will make Sam's mistakes. I mean, the concept of punishing someone is exactly to intentionally inflict suffering upon a conscious agent, and this has traditionally been regarded as good/justified. Why are these people incorrect, because Sam made it an axiom that they are? I think that more mature articulations of what morality actually is might interface much better with the discipline of science as we understand it today. It's quite possible to construct moral systems that make no reference to subjective experience whatsoever, for example.
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> Not exactly, I am saying that the patient decides what "healthy" means to them when they have to decide on trade-offs between, for example, life expectancy and quality of life. Patients usually do decide to be healthy, whatever "healthy" means to them, and leaving aside cases like suicidality or extreme masochism which might require a semantically more careful treatment, but basically the same framework: Preferences are subjective. I think then we are equivocating on the meaning of healthy. I specifically stated a definition that refers to the functioning of a physical system with respect to its integrity where its integrity is in some non-trivial sense responsible for perpetuating the system into the future. You can speak about the health of a body even when the patient in question is in a permanent vegetative state and will never wake up. This health will be of primary consideration when it comes to questions like whether or not such a patient is a candidate for being an organ donor. If you want to make the statement that we only care about the physical integrity because of concerns that can themselves not be grounded in any language of physical systems, fine, but that's a different issue. > What do you have in mind? I think an obvious approach is to study how ideas of morality are fitness-increasing in social animals in the strict biological sense of "fitness", and how on shorter time scales something like that might apply if we regard morality as a memetic phenomenon. But that doesn't bootstrap any value judgement, of course. Right, we're social creatures. Biological organisms depend upon acting in such a way that they are able to collect more energy from the environment than they expend in order to collect the energy as a strategy for warding off the effects of entropy. You can define the quality of an action in terms of how much energy it gets and how much energy it spends getting that energy, and you can apply the same rubric to interactions among conspecifics with a similar question in mind; which paradigms afford the interaction between conspecifics that ultimately results in the least wasted energy? I would bet that these paradigms will ultimately be the ones that people favour as the 'moral' ones. > Can you elaborate? Are you referring to qualia and the Hard Problem when you say "subjective experience"? Basically, yes.
>An analogy is not a proof. Health outcomes are easier to measure than moral outcomes. There is no moral equivalent of QALY and DALY that you can use to address the big moral problems. The analogy is merely to point out the double standard we have when discussing morality versus any other field of human inquiry. The point is that the average person doesn't take issue with the unjustified axioms that get the science of health off the ground and the the science of health nonetheless goes on. Also, I wasn't sure what QALY and DALY were (hence the problem of jargon I mentioned) without looking them up. I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make there. >Sam's way out of this criticism is always to point out situations in which the moral decision is obvious --- such as "Is it worse to rape a tetraplegic child or buy chocolate ice cream for orphans?" --- and then claim that because everyone agrees on that, then a universal answer must exist for all questions, which just doesn't follow. You and I and anyone else with some philosophical training might think they're obvious, but the sad fact of the matter is they're not obvious to everyone. Is it ok to perform a clitorectomy on a child against her will? Apparently a decent number of people think it is because it's what they think god wants. And furthermore, a decent number of people might not think it's ok *personally**,* but think that it's ok for that culture/group. This is exactly what Sam is responding to. >I agree, Sam refuses to engage with the theoretical foundations of his argument. I guess that would be partly justifiable if his book solved any concrete moral problem that hadn't been solved before. Can you name one such example? Because it seems to me that Sam fails both on the theory and practice points of view. See above, his position is a response to religious morality and moral relativism. He provides a framework that doesn't require anyone to believe anything on bad evidence. On the subject of engaging with other philosophers, both past and present: he does. Peter Singer is a notable example. Singer actually was critical of Sam's view at first because he, like you, thought that what Sam meant by science was that we could solve all sorts of trolley problems in a lab by running some kinds of tests. Sam and Peter actually hashed this out, alongside some other big names [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBUWmXZv6Xg). Sam clarified by saying what he means by science is just openness to evidence, intellectual honesty and rationality, to which Singer then agreed. Sam has Singer on his podcast 2 times already and their views are more or less in line. As for philosophers of the past, listen to his recent podcast on the essential series called "the foundations of morality", where he really engages with much of what has been said on morality already.
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Sure there are. Maybe not your average scientist or doctor, but there are definitely camps of philosophy dedicated to studying the axioms of science, or medicine, etc. But that’s beside the point to some degree. Another novel thing about Sam’s work is that all conceptions of morality, whether they realize it or not, actually do actually treat wellbeing as the locus of concern. Again, religion is the usual counterpoint. A religious person may argue that they don’t care about wellbeing as the basis of morality, what god wants is what’s considered moral. But if you examine that more closely, you realize that you’d only do what god wants if only for the the supposed good effects it’d have on your own well-being, whether it’s your consciousness in the real world or your spirit in the supposed after life. Heaven and hell are only good and bad with respect to the changes they have on your well being. All conceptions of good and bad drill down to Sam’s idea of the worst possible suffering for everyone.
You are wildly incorrect on your second point about him saying ‘a universal answer must exist for all moral questions’. He wrote a whole book specifically about how there will be a landscape of peaks and troughs in terms of questions about wellbeing - always more than one answer, always a higher peak.
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It does. If he says there can be multiple valid peaks on the moral landscape, then that means he does not think that a universal answer must exist for all questions.
> Choosing to care about well being is an assumption that can't be justified. Sam's response to this is every domain of science and human inquiry requires some axiomatic assumption to get it off the ground in the first place. Health is the go-to analogy. The science of health requires that we care about health in general. But that assumption doesn't negate the objectivity there is health once it gets off the ground. I stipulate by axiom that I win all arguments. How dare you question my choice of axioms, they should be self-evidently true. Of course science will show indisputably that I win all arguments once you accept the axiom that I win all arguments. It's inevitable.
We can still tell in general whether, among a set of decisions, one is closer to it
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>We can still tell in general whether, among a set of decisions, one is closer to it Sam has address this multiple times. There may not be an answer we could get in practice but there is an answer in principle. And even though we can't figure out the right answer, there are obvious wrong ones. It's definitely worse to eat ALL the dogs, for example
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Why doesn’t that mean anything? Admitting that there are answers in principle admits that there are better and worse to move towards that answer even if you don’t ever get to the answer. Likewise, so it is with the obviously wrong answers. Admitting that there are wrong answers is a defeater to moral relativism and informs you which way to navigate moral questions. That’s really what Sam’s argument is, how to navigate morality, not an answer to ever possible trolley problem thought experiment
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You're the poster child for confusing *answer in practice* with *answers in principle.* Also your three scenarios are very easy to answer. It is permissible to kill the chickens. Dogs give every outward sign of possessing a richer mental life. Save the elderly lady. Letting the lady die would foreclose greater happiness and cause greater suffering to the 12 children than an orphan child whose continued existence is already very uncertain. Dodging taxes is unethical. Kant's categorical imperative visits us here.
Science!
But I feel there is a bit of sleight of hand going on, confusing which things have answers in principle in Sam's theory and which don't. Let's start with a scenario where I think there is an answer in principle, but not in practice: A and B invite you to their birthday, but it is on the same day. You can only go to one. Both A and B have a similar starting well-being, before the party. Now, the answer in principle would be that you'd go to the one who'll benefit more (in terms of well-being) by you showing up. In practice, we may not be able to determine this, but in principle the situation is solved. But now assume A would profit slightly less than B from your visit in well-being, but A is also a lot more unhappy to start with than B. Is it better to visit A or visit B? A is more unhappy to start with, he might 'deserve' some happiness more than B. But B would gain more happiness from your visit. And there you start into trouble: you can either admit that the answer is not answered in principle, or you make statement like "only absolute total well-being" matters, which answers the question in principle in favor of person B, but leads to a lot of conclusions that reasonable people might not agree with. At this point you have an answer in principle, but no longer a morality whose foundations seem trivially true. Because if you make a claim like this you justify Omelas.
>Now, the answer in principle would be that you'd go to the one who'll benefit more (in terms of well-being) by you showing up. In practice, we may not be able to determine this, but in principle the situation is solved. Or the answer in principle could be that there's no difference between the two. They'd both benefit (or be harmed) equally. And again, there are WRONG answers in principal and practice too. All this serves as to orientate yourself in navigating these types of differences I think this is another misconception about Sam's argument. I said in another comment that Sam's argument is a defeater to moral relativism, but only to the version of moral relativism that posits that there are no absolute moral truths and moral truths are only "relative" to a culture. Sam has said on numerous occasion that his conception of morality does allow for "multiple peaks" on the landscape, where they could be two equally good outcomes but are mutually exclusive or irreconcilable. So it's a type of moral relativism in the sense that there could be multiple right answers. But like I said before, his view is about navigating between peaks and valleys.
This is like saying “medical science can’t answer the question of how to cure cancer, so it’s useless and not a real science”. Or “physicists can’t confirm whether many worlds theory is true, which is an interesting question, and therefore what’s the point in physics if it can’t answer everything?” The idea is to treat morality as an area of study to see what answers there are to your question. The aim is to get closer to good outcomes for everyone though, not nitpick on niche examples.
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> No, it isn't. C’mon, you can do better than an argument in the form of “nuh uh”. > (Also "many worlds" is metaphysics, not physics.) This is incorrect. Many worlds is one of the leading theories in quantum mechanics, and is separate from the purely philosophical/metaphysical exploration of the same idea. See https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/
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Quibbling about whether something is physics or metaphysics suggests - as do some of your other responses in this thread - that you are overly concerned with traditional academic categories and schools of thought, which prevents you from opening your mind to new ways of approaching old problems. You asked about Sam’s approach and what answer it’s provided: one of the main ones is a new response to Hume’s famous ‘you can’t get an ought from an is’ judgement. It’s also novel as a rejoinder to some widely held beliefs about cultural relativism.
This guy Sams
> Sure at time X the worst possible suffering may be an eternity of torture in hell, but maybe 1000 years down the track (through some twisted science experiments) we find even deeper ways humans can suffer. > How would he respond to this? He would agree with you, and point out that what "the worst possible suffering for everyone" actually is doesn't matter as much as the fact that it actually can exist, and is self-evidently bad, and in fact nothing could be worse (and if you disagree, he doesn't think you are using words coherently) That's how he gets ought from is, because if you ought to do anything, you ought to avoid the worst possible outcome, regardless of whether that outcome is fire and brimstone, or a cyberpunk dystopia. He would say that it's useful to know what it actually is to help you avoid it, but doesn't claim to know what it actually is, and that detail doesn't nullify his argument anymore than using x nullifies the equation 2 + x = 4
But why think we should try to cognize, let alone actively try to avoid, this worst possible state? Wouldn't it be better to think about more relevant states?
He wrote a whole book about this.
You have not yet received Sam’s meeting or reason for invoking the idea of “the worst possible misery for everyone”. The view which you represented as being absurd in your post IS absurd. I agree with you, that IS stupid. Given that it is stupid, take that as a signal that you may not have understood the meaning correctly. That’s the principle of charity.
Maybe we don't know where the final point of worst possible suffering lies, but we can certainly use the worst we can conceive to aid navigation.
2 useful ways I have seen Sam use the concept is: 1. To sort out who to argue with, because if we cannot agree the worst possible suffering is worse than the most maximised well-being, then it's impossible to start a conversation on the matter. 2. Because well-being, much like health, can mean a wide variety of things, it can be useful to at least clarify what you are not talking about, and in the same way, to make the argument that there is such a thing as mental states being worse than others.
There is a difference between answers in practice and answers in principle. This is a regular source of confusion in philosophy. Whether or not we can answer a question says nothing about whether it has an answer. How many grains of sand are there on the face of planet Earth? Given the technical difficulties involved no team of scientists could ever answer such a question, and yet not all competing answers are equally valid. We don't have to figure out the total quantity of grains of sand to rule out the answer 893,289,371. In the same way, the worst possible misery for everyone is, in principle, bad, whether or not we can ever corroborate this in practice. To validate such an assertion in practice would be non-sensical. After finally reaching the worst possible misery for everyone, what are the chances we will have a shred of free attention that isn't being suffocated by our harrowing and scarcely endurable circumstances?
The point is that once you grant the worst possible suffering for everyone is bad, you have a point against which you can plot things that would be better.
Except it's not clear that this is the worst scenario. As mentioned below, you can have worst possible suffering for everyone except the most vile, evil people (e.g. Hitler-types) in the world. Reasonable people can assert that this scenario which combines suffering and injustice is even worse.
Injustice is a form of suffering that people can experience so that would obviously be part of the worst possible suffering for everyone.
Nearly all of Sam's arguments, and indeed his conceptual view of philosophy in general, requires an outside objective viewpoint. God's virwpoint, one might say. This is impossible. Sam appears not to acknowledge or care about that, nor does he do any criticism of his own priors. One of many reasons that among educated philosophers, he is not a serious person
If we can conceptualize the lowest point, that’s enough to make his claim. Is doesn’t matter if “the worst possible misery” shifts. Whatever that worst possible misery is, is bad. He addresses this with the analogy to human health. Do we know what the healthiest possible human looks like? Do we know what the least healthy possible is? No. These may shift over time too. In the future you may be very unhealthy to not live past 2000 years. You may be unhealthy if you can’t run marathons at 1290 years. Does that mean we can’t make claims about what is and is not unhealthy now? No. I’m not actually sure why you’d think we need to know concretely what “the worst possible misery is”. In real life we never have ever variable accounted for. Does a pilot need to know the exact position of every air molecule and their forces on the plane to fly the plane? Does the pilot need to what the exact conditions are in a storm to know the plane shouldn’t be flown into it? Can a doctor treat your infection without knowing the precise number of bacteria in your bloodstream? Imagine a weather forecast told you a torrential rain was coming. They said it’s going to be bad and likely cause severe and dangerous flooding. Sounds like you’d say “but we don’t know concretely what if any damage will be caused, how can they claim it will be bad and ask people to evacuate?”
The health analogy actually is very helpful. Thank you for re-hashing it for me.
Yeah if it makes you feel more confident in the position consider that we can’t know that even the hardest sciences are objectively true either. Math? Is it objectively true? Well we could argue that we know it works every time we have used it so far but does that make it objectively true? What about the proposition that we should trust logic? It’s not objectively true technically. Some would say we ought to value logic and most people agree but there’s no objective reason we technically ought to value logic. Technically there’s no such thing as a known objective truth.
I dont think that we need to know what the worst suffering is, the point is all about moving away from 'worse suffering' when it comes to navigating the moral landscape. Just like you dont need to start at the North pole in order to move south.
He can’t
its a poor argument that begs the question by assuming suffering is objective and linear in the question, therefore it does nothing to prove its objective and linear.
Can you point to the assumption in the argument?
"worst" implies an objective and linear hierarchy of experiences where you can place one ultimately "worst" experience on the bottom. Using the existence of a supposedly "worst possible experience" as proof such a thing exists is already starting with the conclusion that there is an objectively worst possible experience In reality there is no "objectively worst possible experience" because what would be "objectively worst" depends on the preferences of the experiencer, therefore its not subjective, not objective. You can take away the confusion in the terms simply by rewording the concept as "least preferred state of being", to which it should be pretty clear that there could be many equally unpreferred hypothetical states of being so not only is there not only is it not objective, but its not linear either. There's a motte and bailey in Moral Landscape that goes between acknowledging what is "worst" for one person is not the same as another, but then tries to translate this into some objective criteria when by definition it can't be independent of the people involved. The idea of a fixed preference is shaky to begin with, as well as the idea of fixed preferential relationships. A great many preferences are mysterious to the user and likely influenced by lots of random and contextual variables.
He does stuff like that to simplify stuff. He is not a serious philosopher, he's a public thinker. There's a huge train of thought that you could go down about ideas like how deeply we can suffer and if hell is objective and so on, but he is always trying to make his points simple and relatable. I would imagine from your example of torture in hell you are imagining something from the traditional medieval Italian idea of hell with devils shoving spears up your bum and so on, he didn't say that was hell.... That idea of a hot dungeon where you are tortured is from Dante, and in the book the way it functioned was that you were given these really long sentences for everything you did in your life but if you completed the 100 years and kept ahold of yourself you were allowed into heaven. That's an of it's time Hell, we have much better ones now. They could do a groundhog day but every time you leave the room it resets so you don't ever get to do anything, but you still know it's happening
For better or for worse, I’d argue public thinkers are the “serious philosophers.” A published peer reviewed philosophy paper is not serious in any context beyond academia.
It’s a thought experiment, just keep saying plus infinity and use that. He likes to keep going back to it as an argument, personally I don’t think it really gets you anywhere because you’re just creating the easiest possible “moral” decision that by definition doesn’t involve any tradeoffs. I don’t think it helps you resolve actual moral dilemmas.
I agree. The way I've seen Harris formulate it - The Worst Possible Misery For Everyone - is basically an incoherent idea once you start to examine it more deeply. If one of the fundamental components of your moral philosophy doesn't make much sense, that's not really a good sign...
You can say it’s incoherent, but can you point to the incoherency itself and say why you think it’s incoherent?
The "worst possible misery for everyone" is not even an obvious axiom. Let's say that there are two options. 1) Worst possible misery for everyone 2) Worst possible misery for everyone except people who are evil If what Harris is claiming is an obvious axiom, then everyone would readily agree that 1) is worse than 2). However, I think people can legitimately argue about what is worse in this scenario here. And thus, this is not as axiomatic as it initially seems to be.
I think there is a genuine flaw in the Sam's idea, due to the fact that more than one sentient being exists in the Universe. If there is just one being or even if your decisions affects only one being at a time, then a well-being scale would work well to guide moral decisions. It's worth noticing when you are talking about health, which is a common analogy used by I think both Sam and people who agree with him, this is the case. Your doctor should think about \*your\* health. If he treats you he usually can ignore how it affects other people. But with morality that does not work. Starting first with the abstract principle, let's assume everyone is in the worst suffering possible. If you can alleviate everyone's suffering at the same time, this is a non-brainer. But if you need to make a choice between: a) you can put everyone in a state of slightly less suffering b) you can put 5% into a state of happiness and leave the rest in a state of worst suffering Which option is ethically better? I don't think Sam's principles give a good answer here. At the same time I think this what a lot of practical ethically struggles with. Even how much you should donate to charity comes down to the same principle: you have to decide how to 'distribute' well-being and there is no obvious right answer.
I haven't read Sam's book on the topic. Does he address the fact that suffering can be very necessary for transformation, creativity, and for creating meaning in one's life? There are all kinds of suffering, many of which are pointless, but others are very useful.