Harris Morality Without God, Science

¶ … Harris

Morality without God, Science without Reason?

Conventional strategies for re-establishing moral authority in an otherwise secular modern world frequently revolve around the attempt to open up a space for "religious" or irrational bases for belief that complement scientific knowledge without either challenging or being challenged by it. As long as this "second culture" can be entertained as a world apart from the prevailing scientific order, appeal to its separate and unimpeachable moral power makes sense -- and in fact, this often becomes the justification for religion in an age ruled by reason.

Sam Harris ostensibly seeks to invert this process in order to ground his own appeal to an unimpeachable moral authority in science instead of in religion. Instead of carving out a separate realm for a God who can then inform moral choices, Harris portrays contemporary life as dominated by irrational and dangerous religions, and then carves out a privileged (but apparently precarious) space for scientistic, secular humanist thought. This oppositional space then provides his moral sentiments with authority that derives from a source outside and deeper than everyday life, and so is not subject to challenge on everyday terms.

The ramifications of this are worth dwelling on. On a conventional level, non-theistic experience is generally characterized as being amoral, "nihilistic" in Nietzschean terms, unable to support anything more than a superficial or arbitrary moral code. Harris reverses this by putatively demonstrating that morality does not depend on theistic experience either, but from the thrust of his rhetoric, he is more interested in arguing that while science can evolve a sophisticated moral code, religion cannot. His examples are chosen to dwell on the least flattering (to secular moderns) aspects of religious expression: terrorism, suicide, child abuse, chauvinism. For Harris, morality can exist quite well without religion, and in fact religion cannot coexist with morality.

Needless to say, I am emotionally repulsed by many of his examples of immoral life: terrorism and serial murder are far from good things. However, I was also disturbed by Harris' selection of these extreme aspects of human experience as examples of "individuals [who] care about the wrong things" -- and by the TED audience's comfortable acceptance of way Harris extends this notion of "the wrong things" to cover strict traditional apparel codes, "ignorance," and, presumably, heretical theories of physics. Caring about any of these things may or may not be right or wrong, but it strikes me that if appealing to an unstated vision of "science" to justify the decision is the future of ethics, then both ethics and scientific inquiry are in dire straits.

Clearly, Harris wants "knowledge to count" -- that is, to have practical meaning for human lives -- but he confesses that in order to do so, "some facts must be excluded." Yet how can a scientific worldview exclude a fact? What are the criteria for doing so? Was an excluded datum ever a "fact" to begin with? Even under the time constraints of a TED presentation, this somewhat radical co-option of scientific credibility needed to be examined more closely, but Harris appears to have been uninterested in doing so.

It is likely that the points-of-view that he would like to exclude are those that take religion seriously. But beyond emotionally charged examples, Harris offers little truly compelling logical support for how excluding religion necessarily gets us any closer to recovering a grounded moral universe in the absence of God. In fact, while I personally suspect it is unlikely that the Taliban "have a point-of-view on physics that is worth considering" this suspicion is not empirically or experimentally grounded. If anything it is arguably far more troubling to contemplate a Taliban that both hates us and incorporates sophisticated knowledge of chemistry, physics, and engineering.