Sam Harris on Free Will

The religious instinct is not merely limited to belief in God and supernatural agents. And to varying degrees, even hard-core atheists tend to be religious in this sense, since they still adopt beliefs that may be religious in origin. It's a little too convenient that when one denies the existence of God, most other beliefs are not similarly rejected, but why should this be the case?

If we reject God, we can't simply assume the reality of the continued identity of the self (or even its very existence), an objective basis for morality, a rational basis for science, the existence of free will, the reality of the external world, the very idea of objective truth, etc. We need to mount arguments and evidence in support of these ideas if we want to be able to have a right to such beliefs.

And Sam Harris thinks we're lying to ourselves if we believe that our wills are free. His arguments are not particularly interesting or new here (and to many not even convincing). Harris may have just written a concise little book on the subject, but he's no Nietzsche, who clinched the case against free will and the self even more concisely, in less than a paragraph:

A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a superstition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’. . . . Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently —’.

But where Harris is interesting (and I've subscribed to this line of thinking for at least a decade now) is in what he has to say about the implications of the denial of free will: it doesn't de-humanize us. This recognition humanizes us because it helps us to understand that instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing blame around, as we're wont to do, maybe we need to be more compassionate and understand that people are not fully free, and that their actions are at least partly to blame on circumstances and other causal antecedents...

While I agree with a good number of points made by Harris, there is at least one fundamental point on which he seems to be utterly confused: his denial of free will cannot be a scientific conclusion when he argues that there is no possible world in which free will could, even in principle, exist. If this is not a testable claim that could be decided by empirical evidence but simply by conceptual analysis (as I would be perfectly happy to do), then this is a philosophical conclusion... and people say philosophy doesn't make progress :)

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Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig - Where Do Objective Moral Values Come From?

Whatever its perceived weaknesses (and the critics have been relentless on some technical points), Sam Harris' recent book, The Moral Landscape, has recently reinvigorated the discussion concerning the objectivity of moral values and obligations. To religious people, the answer seems obvious: if moral values are to count as objectively binding, they must be grounded in God's commands. After all, morality comes from God, doesn't it?

Philosophers since the time of Socrates have rejected this approach (known as divine command theory) on the grounds that, in the absence of any independent set of reasons, God's commands would turn out to be completely arbitrary, and hence objective perhaps -whatever that means- but certainly not moral.

The difficulty most philosophers have had upon such a realization, however, has been with figuring out what might be able to count as a positive objective standard for moral values. Sam Harris thinks that moral values can be grounded in science. William Lane Craig thinks moral values can only come from God. A fascinating and perplexing debate ensues in which Craig accuses Harris of defining morality into a tautology, while Harris accuses Craig of doing exactly the same thing. And they're both right. Go confirmation bias!

Now, while the discussion below provides lots of great food for thought worth pondering, it seems to me that by defining morality in their own particular ways (a move that's ultimately inescapable), both philosophers were probably preaching to their respective choirs, and that the chances either of them might have gained new supporters who didn't already agree with their take on the issue are probably nil.

I'd say the debate was very interesting, and even though I tend to lean more in Harris' direction, I'm not sure either speaker won the day on the basis of the relevant arguments alone...

Both managed to undermine each other's position rather well, but neither managed to overcome such blows once they were dealt, and both were more than happy to go off on tangents irrelevant to the main point of discussion while still managing to provide thought-provoking arguments.

I'd declare the debate a draw, with both participants seriously injured by the other. Perhaps it was an act of martyrdom undertaken for our sake :)

I'll be posting more interesting talks on this topic soon, but in the meantime, here is philosopher Peter Singer with some thoughts on the subject.
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Has Dilbert Refuted Sam Harris?

You've probably seen Sam Harris argue that science can answer moral questions because science deals with facts and values are a sort of fact (logic buffs should see straight through the problems with this argument). Lots of thinkers have weighed in on this issue, but as far as I'm aware, no one has challenged the idea of values to begin with... except Dilbert :)


I'll be posting a series of presentations on the topic of science and morality in the weeks to come.
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