Sam Harris Anyone?

Curious...

[video=youtube;sIK2vlE6UIk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIK2vlE6UIk[/video]

 

You may want to add some comment to your post before its locked.

 

Sam is a god.....far more moral than Jesus, because unlike Jesus/Bible in John 14:6 and Acts 4:12, if it was up to SAM, moral non-Christians would avoid eternal torture, and could get into "heaven".....so of course Sam is more loving than Jesus is.

 

Yeah, what Spooky said. Rule 11. You need to add some of your own comments and questions or the thread is going to get locked.

 

I like Sam and he is at times positive about spirituality and his book Wake Up is a big achievement and one of my favorite books.

 

Sam 'Chomsky Made Me Cry' Harris?

I'll just leave him in the discount bin, thanks.

 

Without a transcendent anchor for morality you don't have anything but moral relativism , and by the way I disagree 100% with your signature as just because something is invisible doesn't mean it doesn't exist and if we go by Nde science , there is good evidence for the soul , The after life and even a general firm of a theistic God .

Without God morality is subjective and one mans butchery of 1 billion people is another mans "helping an old lady across the street "
It all becomes opinion nothing more .

- - - Updated - - -

I think of all 4 of the so called 4 horsemen of atheism
Sam Harris could be the most open to and will eventually leave atheism .
Right now he can't do that without losing his money err I meant fan base

 

As a percentage of the population, people who get sent to prison have a much much higher rate of religiosity, so obviously god brings down people's morals instead of raising them up.

 

Actually, Sam is far more moral than Jesus of the Bible, because if Sam had Jesus' alleged super-Ninja X-men superpowers Sam would let the Hindus into heaven and avoid brutal savage torture in Jesus' Auschwitz (the "lake of fire" in the Bible)....but Jesus and pals obviously won't, as the following verses show: John 14:6, Acts 4:12, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-10, John 3:18, John 10:27-28, Matthew 10:32, Luke 12:8, John 5:2, John 3:36, John 6:47, Acts 16:31, Romans 10:9.

Sam: civilized.
Jesus: savage.

 

It's going to be pretty hard for Sam to accept the Bible's belief that the world is around 6000 years old, or it's belief that the sun revolves around the earth, or that killing gays is perfectly moral, however......he's smarter than Jesus, for one thing.

WallStreeter, if you had Jesus' magic superpowers, would you have, in the last 2000 years, have taken about 0.01 seconds out of your schedule (he could just snap his all-powerful fingers) and told the world directly that killing gays (the main book about Jesus says to kill them, in multiple places so they really mean it) is wrong, that the Bible got it wrong? Would you? Seems the loving thing to do - I would of course. How about you?

 

You mean like the Bible saying to kill gays....THAT "morality"? Or that sending good, moral, hard-working non-believers to a "lake of fire" is a good moral thing to do...THAT "morality"? No thanks, I can do better on my own, using my common sense, and trying to love everybody.

 

Overall, I like Sam. I listen to his podcasts, have read some of his books, and I think he makes a lot of valid points about religion. My favorite thing about Sam is how good he is at humiliating people, intellectually. He reduced Cenk, Ben Affleck, and Maryam Namazie to blathering idiots. My favorite was probably the destruction of Ben Affleck. In fact, it was so good that I now use it as a preliminary measure of a person's intelligence--if they think Ben won that debate, I immediately dismiss them as morons.

All of that aside, he has some problems. The first is that he overemphasizes the role of Islamic ideology, as an independent variable, and doesn't give enough credit to the political and historical legacy of the region--I believe he thinks religion is responsible for 80% of the insanity, and I think it has a much smaller contribution, maybe 30%, though it is a factor. There can be no question that Islam is "the mother lode of bad ideas."

I also think he is completely wrong about using science to determine moral values. He writes, with quite a bit of confidence, as if he resolved a long-standing philosophical problem--the truth is that he did virtually nothing, and the book was almost a complete waste of time. Utilitarianism in another guise is still utilitarianism. I do believe that one of the things we atheists must admit is that materialism implies relativism, and there is no escape from that. It must be owned; otherwise, the religious will mock us, as they rightfully mock secular humanists who try to derive universal morals from thin air.

Oh, and he is too liberal! That being said, he's a great guy. You should watch his interviews on the JRE--good stuff.

 

Ah I get why u don't trust the bible now .
You must have grown up in a young earth funny home .
I know this is going to be a shocker to you but the bible never says anything definitive about the agecofvthr earth or universe . Young earth creationism is a relatively new teaching .

I believe in the bible yet I also believe that the earth is 4.4 billion years old .

And about Jesus snapping his fingers to make us all not kill gays , God gave us all something called free will . Without free will we can never love .
One of my best friends is a super strong believer and he's gay .
As pope Francis says "who am I to judge ""

And I'm sure you probably are cherry picking the bible on killing gays .

 

Yea he's great at destroying Hollywood stars and I'm cool with anything that intellectually destroys Hollywood lol, but he did get ko'd badly in his debate with William lane Craig .

I like your honesty Ricky in admitting that materialism necessarily leads to moral relativism as you are one of the few atheists I know that admits this .

Ricky if you have a had the believing in God , what about the soul and after life .
I'd suggest looking at stuff that john beloff and roger penrose wrote on the soul and afterlife .
Both are atheists but both admit that the evidence for the soul and afterlife warrant belief by their fellow atheists .

 

I'll have to watch that debate, since I've never seen someone defeat Sam in a debate!

I'd argue that religion has the same problem with relativism but fails to acknowledge it. Both groups pull it out of thin air and move the goal posts as necessary. I will agree that taking god's word as an incorrigible proposition and then anchoring morality to it is less prone to variance over time. The secular humanists are putting themselves in a more embarrassing position, though. They are claiming to use science and reason to deductively reason about everything in the world, but they fail to acknowledge that universal human rights and values are pulled out of thin air. If you want to see what a truly atheistic, materialist society looks like, look no further than China. This is why they don't adhere to our calls to end human rights violations--they simply don't believe we are making any sense!

I read Roger's theory about consciousness years ago, but I've forgotten a lot of it. I'm still undecided on the nature of consciousness, but I obviously lean in a materialist direction. I still need to do some thinking. As for a soul and afterlife, it doesn't bring much value because I don't believe any of the things that are said about those topics make any sense. For instance, I am very confident that the bible is wrong about creation, souls, and morality, even IF there were a creator; therefore, belief in a soul, were I to have one, would change very little for me.

 

I know that's what William Lance Craig has told you, but it is far from the truth. Incredibly far. Harris has done far more to establish a reasonable and objective measure of morality than any religious text has, including my own religious texts. The only moral system that requires a God is Divine Command Theory, which is highly subjective. Within DCT, there is only one moral law: obey God. Murder, rape, theft, slavery, etc. can all be easily justified in DCT. They are very difficult to justify within Harris's.

 

IMO, one of Sam Harris's better performances, and a rather thorough deconstruction of WLC's baseless claims regarding morality.

 

Harris never goes beyond some modern rehashing of utilitarianism. It's better than what comes from religion because it is anchored to well being, which can at least be scrutinized to some degree, but it is not the solid foundation some secularists like to claim it is.

At the end of the day, we are still back to utilitarianism.

 

One of my biggest complaints about The Moral Landscape, and I loved the book, was that Harris didn't really do his homework on utilitarianism, or acknowledge his theory as utilitarian. He said that his notions were distinct because utilitarianism didn't distinguish between higher, intellectual desires and base ones. Which means he was either unfamiliar with Mills's famous quote (one of his most well known) about Socrates, or he chose to ignore it. Mills and Bentham always did a good job of owning up to the debt they owed Epicurus and Lucretius, and it was sad to see that Harris did not do the same for his utilitarian predecessors.

Still, Harris's book was the Comic Sans of utilitarianism, and I mean that in a good way. It was a gentle, easily-digestible introduction meant for the general, non-academic public to come away with the realization that maybe science has something to say about morality, and maybe you don't need God for morality. Yep, utilitarianism has its problems, and I'm not a utilitarian myself, but Harris does a good job of giving it a strong foundation from which a better exploration can continue. And, as you indicate, at least there is an anchor from which to further explore and extrapolate. If utilitarianism in general, and Harris in particular, is Comic Sans, most religious texts are wingdings. At least with utilitarianism you come away knowing what the foundation is; with the Bible, Kant read the Sermon on the Mount and saw his Kingdom of Ends and a justification for deontology, Kierkegaard saw an embrace of moral absurdity Abraham's sacrifice, Fletcher his situational ethics in Jesus's summation of the Law, and Piper pure hedonism in pursuit of an afterlife.

 

That's a great summary, and I agree with everything you just said. I remembered making some of the same observations while I was reading it and thinking "Has he not read any of these guys?"

Honest secularism is certainly better than religion, and I would never claim otherwise, but I've always felt a little insecure about some of the bold assertions these guys make, Sam Harris included. As I've said before, I'm more inclined toward moral relativism, so it is hard for me to rest my case on Sam's ideas, but within the context of a restricted set of parameters, Sam's ideas are solid. Nothing is perfect, and accepting ambiguity is a part of the growing process away from superstition, but I think it is better than nothing.

 

And here's where I think it is useful to bring up a distinction that an old ethics professor of mine once made: relative isn't the same thing as subjective. Everything subjective is relative, but not everything relative is subjective. Time, for example, is relative. If I sit here on earth and we synchronize our watches, then you go off in a spaceship at 2/3rds the speed of light, when you return, more time would have will have clicked by on my watch than yours. Time is relative to velocity and proximity to massive objects; it is not, however, subjective. If I'm being tortured and you are having a threeway with Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Alba (or substitute your personal tastes here), then I will definitely feel like time has ticked by more slowly, while you will feel that it has been racing, but our watches won't care. Time "cares" about our physics in an objective (but relative) sense but not our palate (in a subjective sense). Hence ethics, like time, can be full of ambiguity without being frivolous. Unlike what some theists claim, it isn't a choice between absolutism and absolute chaos. Though am guilty, as you have seen in our economic discussions, of erring too far toward absolutism.

 

It's really, really tough sometimes. How can we say that a psychopath who uses others for gain is wrong? Because we agree that hurting people is bad? Relative to our situation it is certainly bad, but relative to the psychopath it is perfectly legitimate, as long as he can get away with it. Where is the morality anchored? We can speak of having laws in place that make that behavior difficult because it is usually harmful to many people. It is better if we have laws to punish that kind of behavior, but there is nothing outside our consensus opinion of what is good for us that has any power. Again, we all end up making appeals to our own self-interest or emotional state to justify ethical claims. I'm not sure where it ends, which is why I usually try to identify mutual interest and then build upon that toward developing consensus on what should or shouldn't be done. Unfortunately, we evolved as animals in small groups, so our moral architecture is quite limited and not built to accommodate the complexity of the modern world.

What's your take on it?

Economically, I just try to think about what would work for me and most people, though I acknowledge that this can change depending upon circumstances. Obviously, I understand why the ultra wealthy would want low taxes, and I understand why the starving poor would want to tax them. I try to find a happy medium that prevents too much concentrated power, but that is about the extent of my commitment to economic ideology. I love to analyze how markets work, but to say what should be can be much trickier.

 

Well, I'm working on a much more detailed response. There is definitely a lot I agree with there, and you may find that my answer fits into your "emotional state," category. IMO, we have four overarching options (with plenty of suboptions) within your psychopath scenario:

1) The psychopath is evil. There is some sort of universal moral standard that he is violating.
2) The psychopath is good. Let's all be psychopaths!
3) The psychopath is neither good nor evil because there is no standard of good and evil.
4) The psychopath is neither good nor evil. There is a standard of good and evil but the psychopath, like a machine or an animal, can't understand or act upon that standard. We can't call a psychopath evil of killing someone for the same reason that we can't call a rock evil for tumbling off of a cliff and killing someone. The psychopath is not a moral agent, capable of good or evil.

I favor four (if the length of the description compared to the other three didn't make that obvious). I don't see the psychopath as evil for the same reason that I wouldn't consider a child (and, let's face it, children go through a somewhat psychopathic phase when growing up) to be evil--because there is a mental capacity that I consider necessary for moral agency that psychopaths don't have and that children take a while to develop: empathic concern/perspective taking. A consequence of this, however, is that there isn't a good metaethics for this--we can't really answer, "Well, is it good that someone has this mental capacity or isn't it?" Morality, if I am right, is just a part of this mental capacity, sometimes leading to conflicts in values when we try to abstract from that capacity. Hence, it is a very good standard for applied ethics, though not without complexity in normative ethics.

 

Exactly, so there is this idea that morality is contained within the individual and not outside of it. In the absence of this moral architecture, of which there are several components (guilt, empathy, etc.), a person cannot be considered a moral agent. To the extent that he can be judged, it is only as a defective agent who is unable to participate in the process of moral reasoning.

Secondly, what are we to say about the ones who have this moral machinery? It has been shown that people who are perfectly capable of feeling those emotions can selectively apply it, and these people can find acceptance within a social group, though they may be perceived as immoral by another group. In the case of the holocaust, once the in-group/out-group distinction was triggered, among other things, the moral apparatus was essentially turned off with respect to the Jews. So, the things we attribute to morality only apply to certain groups at certain times--it is localized. I'm sure you are aware of the numerous instances in which this social dynamic of selective tuning is present. I don't think I need to give examples!

When the moral apparatus is working perfectly and an agent is confined to his in-group, under normal circumstances, a person is a moral agent and capable of engaging in moral reasoning. If this person steals something from another, he feels guilt, is saddened, and is punished by the group. For some reason, an impulse temporarily overrides his moral impulses and he commits the violation, but he is guilt-ridden and remorseful afterward. However, sometimes the machinery just doesn't work, or the member belongs to two social groups, one of which is elevated above the other.

So morality is socially contingent and context-dependent--it has no existence outside of these parameters. Moral activity always involves at least two parties, and these two parties must belong to the same moral sphere. In other words, calling soldiers who kill during war immoral is a false statement within some groups, and it is a true statement relative to others. A gang member who shoots a rival gang member but is loyal and ethical within his own group is relatively moral, depending upon the reference group.

As we can see, this formulation of morality allows for all kinds of variations and could potentially result in what we, from outside the sphere, would be consider immoral. Assume you had two communities at war with one another. Now assume we are within a third, impartial group, with no allegiance to either of these other two. What is our position on the killing? Well, because neither party is a part of our own group, we either ignore it (this is what usually happens), or we decide to include one or both groups within our moral sphere. All of a sudden, either one of the two parties engaged in killing is now committing moral atrocities and must be stopped. Why? Because we have included both groups within our moral sphere. Obviously, you can see how complicated this gets in real life.

In summary, we have a scenario in which there is no moral sphere (the psychopath), the moral sphere that exists within a given group, moral spheres that pertain to multiple groups (some will supersede others and create deep conflicts), and the sphere that explicitly excludes some groups from the moral sphere, but we do not have a sphere that contains all spheres, or a super-set .This is the scenario in which humanity finds itself and is the source for all of the moral confusion. Practically speaking, because morality has this subjective and context-dependent dimension, it is impossible to make all of the moral directives line up. Some attempt to include everyone in their moral sphere, even non-human agents, and this presents obvious problems as well, namely determining how to balance the grievances/interests of one group over another. In fact, I would say that one of the primary differences I find between conservatives and liberals, on the extreme ends of the spectrum, is that liberals will attempt to include everyone in this moral sphere, which obviously results in tremendous confusion and irreconcilable conflicts (egalitarianism). On the other hand, conservatives will try to clearly define the moral sphere, eliminate ambiguity, and to exclude all who don't fit within the category, and this obviously comes with a whole slew of other problems (xenophobia).

There is only one way out of the ambiguity for me, and that is to anchor morality to self-interest/individual well being/etc. In the case of the psychopath, though he may not feel any internal drive to engage in moral behavior, he can still acknowledge that one system of rules is generally more suited to his interest than another. This doesn't mean he won't violate them, but he will at least allow for the establishment of rules and deterrents to limit the behavior of others. For example, a psychopath may not reallycare about running red lights, but he acknowledges that there are good reasons for it and is willing to pay taxes, report crimes, etc., for the purpose of maintaining order. He may be indifferent to the process, but you can reliably assume that when he is not benefiting from the violation of a rule, he has no interest in seeing it broken, and he may actually attempt to stop it in some fashion. In this way, he is engaging in ethical behavior, even though he lacks the moral architecture one would normally associate with ethical behavior. In other words, he has an interest in the establishment of rules and deterrents. Obviously, the psychopath can find numerous opportunities to exploit this and, as we've seen in game theory, there are scenarios in which it is better for him to cheat than not cheat, hence the importance of reliable enforcement mechanisms.

In the case of people who have the moral architecture, self-interest is a useful anchor in determining ethical norms and behaviors because not only can the moral person acknowledge that a given set of norms is within his self-interest, he has the additional capacity to self-police, so his compliance with ethical norms will tend to be quite high. Through a reasoning process, he can also expand his moral sphere more deliberately and reliably than one who does not make appeals to self-interest (one who relies only on direct perceptions and the moral architecture as it pertains to in-group associations), and he can also potentially shrink it according to need. Of course, there will arise inherent contradictions in terms of balancing one's abstract notions of self-interest with the very visceral moral emotions that pertain to actions or situations that involve other group members. Similarly, one's self-interest may be so important and critical that the moral machinery is superseded by self-interest.

Politically, I tend to restrict the moral sphere to maximize my own self-interest and the interest of my group, and there are spheres within spheres, or sets within sets--families, friends, communities, states, sub cultures, civilizations, etc. This is true for everyone and is how humans generally associate themselves. Personally, I tend to balance the competing needs within the spheres and restrict their outer limits more than others. Subconsciously, I am trying to reduce the ambiguity that comes with a more expansive sphere as the more the sphere expands the more likely it is that one of the more foundational "spheres" will be compromised. In other words, groups that are more similar, overall, will receive more favoritism than other groups. Some people want to expand this sphere equitably and comprehensively--some want to include other species. I don't think this maximizes self-interest, but I acknowledge that their moral architecture is working a little differently, quantitatively speaking, and that it is legitimate, with respect to how their minds operate. Similarly, they cannot objectively question my position either.

It's interesting to note that the evolutionary origins of this architecture lie in self-interest (replication). Obviously, moral emotions have value in themselves now and can no longer be directly linked, as I've implied, but it does lend some credence to my argument from self-interest.

The ultimate problem is that we cannot reconcile everyone's needs or conceptions of morality within one comprehensive system, and I conclude that morality is relative, though as we've agreed, objective in the sense that there is an external reference group when evaluating any given agent.

 

Okay, truth be told, this entire response deserves a well-constructed response that I'm not capable of delivering tonight. I just got through some minor surgery, and I'm not in a condition to respond in the a manner that this information deserves at the moment. As much as we may disagree on the specifics, this is one of the most amazingly detailed and well-constructed arguments that I've seen on PF. I know you have directed many people to this thread, and I'm glad you have. This is exactly the sort of well-defended position I've hoped to find here on PF. For any impartial viewer who may be tuning in, let me just say now that the burden of proof is on me (obviously) and that the opposition has done a masterful job of arguing likewise. Good bull. I'd never expect less from a Texan. I'll provide my response when I am physically and mentally up to the challenge.