A New Look at the Left Wing

Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it. He does not wish to engage “more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy”, he explains in a footnote, because he did not develop his arguments “by reading the work of moral philosophers” and because he is “convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics’, ‘deontology’, ‘noncognitivism’, ‘antirealism’, ‘emotivism’, etc directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” 

Imagine a sociologist who wrote about evolutionary theory without discussing the work of Darwin, Fisher, Mayr, Hamilton, Trivers or Dawkins on the grounds that he did not come to his conclusions by reading about biology and because discussing concepts such as “adaptation”, “speciation”, “homology”, “phylogenetics” or “kin selection” would “increase the amount of boredom in the universe”. How seriously would we, and should we, take his argument? It is one thing to want to “start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and can find helpful”, something that many of us, including many of those boring moral philosophers, seek to do. It is quite another to imagine that you can engage in any kind of conversation, with any kind of audience, by wilfully ignoring the relevant scholarship because it is “boring”.

It’s quite convenient for Harris that he has chosen to ignore the terms of moral philosophy, in particular because he explicitly endorses one of these obscure positions: analytical naturalism. Harris claims:

“Questions about values are really questions about the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, the effects of specific laws on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.”

Here’s a helpful chart:

(Derek Parfit, On What Matters, p. 263)

Harris is claiming that when we talk about morality, our claims can be restated in purely non-normative terms: when we talk about the good, we are actually talking about features about the brains of conscious creatures. This has the effect of making moral claims completely trivial. For example, we could claim that some act is good just because it brings about these desirable mental states. But if Harris’ view is correct, then all we end up saying is: acts that bring about particular mental states bring about particular mental states. Moreover, who are we to identify which mental states are most desirable, or bring about the most benefit, short of doing moral philosophy? Had Harris consulted the literature at all, he would have uncovered these very straightforward, but very significant, difficulties. Harris did his undergraduate work in philosophy at Stanford, one of the top programs in the world; it just seems like a silly mistake to make. For someone ostensibly committed to careful thinking about important problems, Harris makes some incredibly massive oversights and jumps to dubious conclusions.