Deliberations on a Moral Landscape

I have recently started reading Sam Harris's book "The Moral Landscape". In it Harris addresses the erroneous notion that science and morality are non-overlapping magisteria. It seems that a major proportion of the world regards science as a discipline that can determine whether we can do certain things but not whether we should do them.

Science is defined as: "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world"^1,2,3. Questions of morality exist in a conscious mind. The mind dwells within a brain that comprises approximately 8.5x10¹⁰ living cells. Ergo, both the mind and brain rely on the physical scaffoldings of nature which by definition makes them susceptible to scrutiny. Harris suggests, based on that line of reasoning, that science can in principle supply answers to moral issues.

First, according to Harris, we must accept the fact that human suffering and well-being matter. From that everything else follows. From his point of view, morality is intimately interlocked with well-being, almost interchangeably.

That makes me think. It is not very hard to imagine, at least from an evolutionary point of view, the adaptive values that had made the development of "moral mechanisms" preferable. Pleasure, sadness, happiness, anger, envy, vindictiveness etc. All of those emotions have their uses. But it seems to me that my love to biological and medical sciences had rendered me blind to a more practical aspect of reality. I was so busy chasing ultimate explanations that, in my mind, I have diminished the value of proximate explanations to nearly null.

Nowadays, we do not consider moral issues using an evolutionary jargon. We cannot define an action as "good" according to the manner it affects our fitness, being classical or inclusive. Indeed it would seem ludicrous to consider the benefits of, say, contraception in terms of fitness. We make a trade-off in which we intentionally lower our fitness in order to experience immediate pleasure - qui pro quo. It seems to me that Harris has a point and that the value of our "modern fitness" is governed by variables of consciousness, namely well-being and suffering.

Of course, here rises the obvious claim that "not everything the feels good is, in practice, good". We could argue about the definition of 'good' and 'evil' for a long time, but in my opinion, such arguments fall into the category of "malevolent reductionism". When someone says "I'm here", I don't argue with him about the definition of 'here', reminding him about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and asserting that he has no fixed location to declare. No, I accept his claim within a delineated conceptual zone of agreement. We have no problem doing that with many aspects of our lives: orientation ("I'm here"), design ("this carpet is red"), law ("beyond reasonable doubt"), biology ("this organism is alive"), medicine ("this patient is healthy") etc. Moral issues are no exception.

I'm still far from finishing this book, but I can definitely say that if we do not let our doubts run untamed (yet by no means silenced!) and if we accept both that (a) consciousness is the platform upon which discourse is waged and that (b) well-being and suffering matter, we will be on the right path to a better scientific understanding of morality.

References

1. "Online dictionary". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2009-05-22. "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method . . . such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena"
2. a b c d Popper, Karl (2002) [1959]. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2nd English ed.). New York, NY: Routledge Classics. p. 3. ISBN 0-415-27844-9. OCLC 59377149.
3. Wilson, Edward (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. ISBN 0-679-76867-X.
4. ^ Ludwik Fleck (1935), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact reminds us that before a specific fact 'existed', it had to be created as part of a social agreement within a community.