Just as ideas of "moral relativism" have become more widespread among the public, there has been a reaction from intellectuals who have been starting to argue that morality is universal. The leaders of this movement are mostly members of the New Atheist movement which seeks to challenge religion in public life, transcending just a separation of church and state. The New Atheists want to prove that religion has no intrinsic value, that essentially science can replace whatever benefits religion has, or at least what motivations continue its existence. Fellow traveler Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, described religion as shrinking over time as science has been able to give more satisfying explanations for just about everything. The scientific revolution in the 17th century under Bacon, Galileo, and Newton explained the workings of the universe purely by the natural laws of mechanics, contradicting the claims of medieval science. The 18th century enlightenment gave a basis for political authority by human reason. Darwinian evolution explained in the 19th century how all life including human nature itself was the result of blind natural forces, following geology's contradiction of biblical accounts of the age and formation of the Earth. Today the secularist hope is that morality and the purpose of life too can be explained without reference to God or the supernatural.
These thinkers wish to challenge the notion of non-overlapping magisteria, coined by Stephen Jay Gould. Religion and science are said to each be accurate in their own field of human knowledge. As was said in an episode of the Simpsons dealing with evolution, how would you like scientists giving sermons in church? More broadly, for those secular intellectuals suspicious of science, science cannot answer the only questions which really matter, the moral ones
One of the four horsemen of New Atheism, Sam Harris, has taken up the challenge to the enduring ethical dilemmas brought about by the is-ought distinction and the naturalistic fallacy in a gallant effort to refuse to religion its longtime monopoly on universal morality. Harris' target is also secular moral relativism, associated with fashionable postmodern nonsense, which weakens the claim that morality can be based on a secular, rational basis without religion.
The is-ought distinction was formulated by 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume not as an absolute separation between fact and value but rather that there is something missing between the two. "But if you insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce that reasoning. The connection between these propositions is not intuitive. There is required a medium which may enable the mind to draw such an inference, if indeed it be drawn by reasoning and argument. What that medium is I must confess passes my comprehension; and it is incumbent on those to produce it who assert that really exists and is the original of all our conclusion concerning matter of fact."- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1748. Hume thought that it couldn't be shown that there was anything else that could be true except for fact and logical deduction, which led him to a mild skepticism and later developed into positivism.
Harris' argument is pretty straightforward. The is-ought distinction does not mean that science cannot determine human values, only that being scientific in of itself is not enough to be valued. This strict dichotomy is unrealistic as scientists do work with a code of ethics in their field, much as the medical profession does. Science itself is built on a certain moral view, that we should use evidence gathered by repeated observation to improve health and the quality of life. He goes on to his main argument that since all feelings be they right or wrong are dependent on physical states of the brain, then science which gives us knowledge of these brain states can discern what leads to "good" brain states and minimizes "bad" brain states. Because facts relate to the real world, ought is not being conflated with fact but something external, and so the is-ought gap is closed. Harris' scientific realism trumps Hume's positivism.
I agree so far, that is-ought is not an absolute wall of separation and understanding morality is based on what facts tell us. But Harris' next task is to articulate what exactly is the criterion for good and bad. He asserts it to be "the flourishing of conscious creatures" or "the maximization of total well-being for conscious creatures". By well being he means the age old concept of happiness. We should want more of what is good for us and less of what is bad. That certainly makes us happy when the good outweighs the bad. His moral landscape is a thought experiment in which morals can be seen as a landscape of high peaks correlated with the greatest joys and pits of the worst suffering. Harris wants to use science to steer us away from the deepest pits and towards the peaks using the knowledge of science, much as we would use to navigate our surroundings with GPS.
The most important question with The Moral Landscape is, why is happiness good? What makes it so? I can assert that suffering is good and pleasure is bad and not either be in logical contradiction or factually wrong. The happiness criterion of Harris is consequentialism: "the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures." Consequentialism, aka teleological ethics, concerns how acts relate to desired ends. The question for the consequentialist is do all people desire the good? The naturalistic fallacy, often mistaken to be the same as is-ought, is that just because something is desirable does not make it good. That is because I can desire what is bad for me and others. I can eat rat poison, I can steal and harm others and enjoy it while I am doing it. That people do want what is good is an old belief going back to Socrates, that all people desire the good and do not intentionally do wrong but for a lack of knowledge. Those who steal may think it is in their benefit, but stealing gives others reason to harm you and legitimizes others to steal, and do you want to live in a world where you can't trust anybody? This seems like an appeal to enlightened self-interest, but it also deals in positive consequences.
Modern economics and much of psychology works on the assumption that everybody pursues what they believe to be in their own interest even if it is not. Morals he too would argue are based on consequences because some people have better lives than other, objectively. Because people don't have free will, and are governed solely by physical processes, they do what they do given their genetic makeup and environmental influences. Presumably the way to a better life is first to gain knowledge about these factors, and then to either develop ways to live with or even change them.
Harris ends up with a sort of Utilitarianism in which we ought to act in the most useful way to maximize everybody's happiness. Utilitarianism in contrast to altruism and egoism is agent neutral, happiness should be for the self as well as other equally. Here then is the additional question of why maximize someone else's happiness? I know the practical benefits this gives, but why not egoism? He gives the Neo-Darwinian account of how altruism became adaptive through inclusive fitness to advance our genes by favoring kin and by engaging in reciprocity; "the biology of our moral impulses, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and sexual selection explain how we have evolved to be, not merely atomized selves in thrall to our self-interest, but social selves disposed to serve a common interest with others." Inclusive fitness operates at the level of the gene and the general consensus is that genes select at the level of the individual, not for the group, and so is selfish in a way.
Utilitarianism however isn't about pleasing others to ultimately benefit ourselves, which is rational or enlightened egoism, but is the position that happiness is agent neutral, everyone's happiness is the same. Why ought we take the well-being for ALL conscious creatures and not just ourselves, as egoism would entail, or just for others and not ourselves as altruism entails? Harris then has two different challenges 1) happiness is to be desired according to consequences and 2) I ought to maximize the happiness of everybody.
Harris's answer to egoism can be discerned from his philosophical materialism. Harris denies that there is a thing as as an autonomous self with free will that can or even does act independently. Citing neuroscience, brain activity occurs milliseconds before a thought becomes conscious to us. While he is right about that, acceptance of his position on free will as well as his utilitarianism depends on acceptance of philosophical materialism.
Whatever one's ontology is, Harris makes a cogent argument from his own. This is a valuable work just for the relation of scientific realism which most atheists/agnostics hold to ethical realism which not every atheist/agnostic holds given the influence of moral relativism and subjectivity in contemporary thought.
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