Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Saturday, April 16, 2011

On the Harris-Craig Debate

Sam Harris recently debated philosopher and evangelical theologian William Lane Craig on the issue of whether objective morality is possible without God. The entire two-our event, held at Notre Dame, can be viewed below:

Craig set out to defend the biconditional: Objective morality if and only if God, while Harris attempted to explain and advance his secular alternative. Several summaries and dissections already pepper the blogscape, with many noting that the two speakers were largely talking past each other and concluding that Harris was the greater culprit in this regard. Sam has posted a brief follow-up explaining why he took the tack he did.

The question of appropriate tactics here is a tricky one. Craig has been debating professionally for literally longer than I’ve been breathing, and his technique is by now immaculately polished. A comparative novice would likely have little time to present and explain a positive case if she or he attempted to rebut Craig’s criticisms to the complete satisfaction of a lay audience. It is interesting comparing the Craig-Harris debate with an earlier one Craig had with philosopher Shelley Kagan on the same topic: (note, this debate is in 10 parts, only the first of which is linked here). Kagan does a much better job of interacting with Craig’s arguments, and actually controls the majority of the debate (this is undoubtedly helped by a different format which allowed the speakers to directly question each other). However, I felt at the end that I had a much less clear view of what Kagan’s objective moral theory actually is and how it allegedly works than I did of Harris’ at the end of his debate.

Harris’ refusal to spend much time directly engaging Craig’s criticisms invites the questions: Do these criticisms have any merit? During the debate, Craig laid out what he called a “knock-down” argument against Harris’ moral theory. It goes as follows:
On the next to last page of his book, Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists, liars, and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his moral landscape would no longer be a moral landscape; rather it would just be a continuum of well-being, whose peaks are occupied by good and evil people alike (p. 190).

What’s interesting about this is that earlier in the book Harris observed that about three million Americans are psychopathic, that is to say, they don’t care about the mental states of others. On the contrary, they enjoy inflicting pain on other people (pp. 97-99).

That implies that there is a possible world which we can conceive in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape. The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation. There is no possible world in which some entity A is not identical to A. So if there is any possible world in which A is not identical to B, it follows that A is not in fact identical to B.

Since it’s possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it follows necessarily that human well-being and moral goodness are not the same, as Harris has asserted.

It’s not often in philosophy that one finds a knock-down argument against a position, but we seem to have one here. By granting that it’s possible that the continuum of well-being is not identical to the moral landscape, Harris’ view becomes logically incoherent.

Sola Ratione has offered a cogent criticism of this argument. I think there’s a major additional problem. Craig argues (seemingly on the basis of Kripke’s work) that identity is a necessary relation and that because he (and apparently even Harris) can imagine a possible world in which “good” and “conscious wellbeing” are not identical, then they are in fact not identical in any possible world, including the actual world. What Craig doesn’t deign to mention is that Kripke showed that identities were only necessary between rigid designators like proper names or natural kind terms that pick out the same thing in all possible worlds in which they exist. Even if Harris had truly admitted that goodness and wellbeing could possibly come apart (and he did not; see Sola’s post above), it would not necessarily imply that they are not identical in this world, but only that at least one of the terms is not a rigid designator. This should not be a controversial conclusion to anyone who’s not a Platonist about things like “goodness” and “wellbeing”. Craig has projected Platonic presuppositions onto Harris, but Harris needn’t at all view either “goodness” or “wellbeing” as rigid designators, and may thus maintain their contingent identity.

This also allows Harris to rebut Craig’s earlier accusation that he is merely making a semantic argument, arbitrarily trying to define goodness as conscious wellbeing. On Kripke’s view, at least, only necessary identities can fix meaning, so there would seem to be no problem with Harris arguing that goodness and conscious wellbeing are (contingently) identical, even though we may not recognize them as having the same meaning. As an aside, it’s interesting to see how much, despite his admonitions, Craig himself equivocates between moral semantics and moral ontology in his criticisms of Harris. Craig’s “knock-down” argument proceeds on the assumption that Harris is making a substantive ontological case, yet this assumption is inconsistent with Craig’s claim that Harris is merely engaged in an undermotivated definitional game.

Mind you, Harris may not be philosophically savvy enough to recognize that the above option is available to him, but Craig has no such excuse. His “knock-down” argument is nothing but a disingenuous assault on a straw-man. None of this is meant to suggest that I completely agree with Harris’ theory; I don’t, in fact, but I think Craig’s counterarguments are very poor and appreciable as such by atheists and theists alike.

Craig, in stressing that his case was an ontological one, claimed that he was using moral terms merely in their common senses. Perhaps more than anything else, what I’ve taken away from this debate is the pressing need for critical scrutiny of our commonsense notions of words like “goodness” and “value,” to say nothing of “objective.” This is not the post to further mine that vein, but I’ll be dealing with the topic extensively in an upcoming series in which I’ll lay out my own proposed framework for objective morality.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Reboot

It happens from time to time that real life intrudes into and disrupts the easy routine of e-life. Due to a series of such disruptions, this blog sort of fizzled on the launch pad. Nearly a year later, however, r-life has relaxed its Samsonesque grip on my attention and energies and I am thoroughly re-galvanized for this project, eager--desperate, even--to get back into a regular rhythm of writing (really!).

I've got a few major multi-post series planned: one on the possibility of objective morality (a very hot topic among secularists today, thanks largely to Sam Harris), one on evolutionary psychology (what I hope will be a helpful critique), and one on...well, it's a surprise.

Stay tuned!