Can Science Determine Moral Values? A Reply to Sam Harris
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Can Science Determine Moral Values? A Reply to Sam Harris Whitley R. P. Kaufman
Received: 26 October 2010 / Accepted: 16 November 2010 / Published online: 1 December 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Sam Harris’ new book “The Moral Landscape” is the latest in a series of attempts to provide a new “science of morality.” This essay argues that such a project is unlikely to succeed, using Harris’ text as an example of the major philosophical problems that would be faced by any such theory. In particular, I argue that those trying to construct a scientific ethics need pay far more attention to the tradition of moral philosophy, rather than assuming the debate is simply between a scientific ethics and a “supernatural” ethics provided by religion. Keywords Ethics . Morality . Neuroscience . Utilitarianism We have on our hands what appears to be a genuine new trend. Sam Harris’ new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is but one of a slew of recent books all exploring how we might finally achieve a “science of morality.” [1–5] The idea is far from new; John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century was already calling for ethics to be remade in the model of the natural sciences. However, the dominant position has long been that science is concerned only with the world of facts but has nothing to say about values. The rise of Social Darwinism in the early twentieth century further discredited the idea of a scientific morality, W. R. P. Kaufman (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
for its crude application of Darwinian principles to moral and political thought contributed to a “scientific” justification of such hateful policies as racism, eugenics, and even genocide. But now, with the memories of such excesses safely behind us, we seem to have entered a new era in which the promise of science to solve our moral problems is finally at hand. At least, that is the thesis of these writers. As Harris puts it, this new approach “will transform the way we think about human happiness and the public good” (191). This essay presents a skeptical view of such grand claims. To enter into such a fraught topic is risky, and the polarization of this debate is such that anyone defending a scientific ethics automatically is accused of “scientism,” while anyone rejecting the idea is immediately characterized as being ignorant or antiscience. It is also an unfortunate and widespread assumption, one found (as we will see) throughout Sam Harris’ book as well, that the real debate is between a scientific ethics and a religious-based ethics, i.e. either a natural or a supernatural moral theory. Thus Michael Shermer tells us to “leave God out of the discussion altogether and adopt the methodological naturalism of science,” as if the only real competitor to science in the field of ethics is religion (Shermer p. 17). This is of course a false dichotomy; it is possible to have a wholly secular basis for morali
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