I recently made the mistake of listening to a podcast that had Sam Harris in it. Whenever I am exposed to Sam Harris, I get a kind of migraine until I am able to express fully how terrible he is, and then relief sets in. Sweet, sweet relief. Now, if you happen to be a fan of Sam Harris, I would recommend instead you read another racist utilitarian, John Stuart Mill. His racism is far more dignified, and he has the honour and privilege of being one of the earliest incarnations of a white feminist!
“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”
Harris’s general philosophy is that pain = bad, pleasure = good. It’s hedonistic utilitarianism, but this time, Harris suggests that we use science because nobody has thought of using science to determine morality before. Morality has always been so wishy washy and soft in the past, and Harris wants to ram hard science down its eager throat. Pain of course is objectively bad, pleasure is objectively good. Claiming objectivity in morality has always tended towards zealous dogmatism in the past, but now with science, that objectivity must be true, and Harris’s dogmatism is justified.
“What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? … In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. … it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.”
What the dogmatism of Sam “Nuke The Muslims” Harris, and even John “Brutally Subjugate The Indians” Mill to a lesser extent, fails to take into account is that the objectivity of pain as a moral compass doesn’t hold up in the slightest. The gym rat maxim of “No Pain, No Gain” literally requires pain. Getting hella swole isn’t often thought of as morally bankrupt, if perhaps a bit douche-y, yet objectively it must be. Boxers fighting for a prize belt must also be engaged in Holocaust-levels of immorality, given their premeditated intent to inflict pain on one another. And don’t even get me started on those sexy BDSM freaks in the sheets; mixing pleasure WITH pain is just an ethical nightmare!
Just go with it
Yet Harris never mentions those because they’re not predominantly engaged in by Musli… I mean because they’re obviously not unethical behaviours. The thing that distinguishes them is consent. The boxers have agreed upon certain rules and regulations before entering their fight; the magic and wonder of BDSM is underscored vehemently by an emphasis on consent; and if some bro wants to tear his quads by going for that one extra rep, more power to him. Without consent, these activities turn into assault, rape, and non-consensual lifting. I don’t know what that last one would be like, but I certainly don’t want to find out.
Please don’t make me lift
What Sam Harris seems to miss is that human beings are quite capable of making their own decisions. I guess science hasn’t gotten to that part just yet. If a woman chooses to wear a Burqa, fine. People are agreeing to be punched in the face, and if that’s okay, certainly a choice in attire is okay. If she is coerced into wearing a Burqa, that becomes less fine. Issues of age and capability certainly impact consent, but ultimately it is not up to Sam Harris to decide who gets to agree to what, and what their available choices can be. It is very easy to paint a culture we don’t belong to as being intrinsically coercive (the hypocrisy being how ignorant we are of the coercive factors insidiously lurking within our own), but it is the inhabitants of that culture that ought to have the right to choose which direction they wish to go.
Let’s let Saudi Arabia determine which direction our culture goes with regard to our media’s portrayal of women
People in general seem to have a hard time letting others live out their lives, because we know what’s best and if they’re doing something different, they must be barbaric savages, unfit to make their own decisions. This isn’t a call for relativism; my autonomy is worth just as much as yours. This is a call for the respect of autonomy, and to engage only in consensual interactions. Rather than, you know, nuking a religion, like only a genius ethicist could conceive.
Blog for Chumps 
May I troll here? 😉
» right to choose
Why should a culture (or anyone) have this ‘right’?
Whence does this right derive in the first place?
» People in general seem to have a hard time letting others live out their lives…
Why should someone be able to live out their life?
» my autonomy is worth just as much as yours
Why should I accept that either of these is worth more than nothing? By what are you measuring ‘worth’? Some consequentialist, utilitarian notion? Why should anyone accept this worldview?
» engage only in consensual interactions
I’ll assume that this is your adopted worldview. Why should anyone else agree to these terms? Nietzsche, for one, wouldn’t agree.
Just passing through…
Considering my trolls in the past have preferred to post cartoons of a butt taking a dump (true story), you can troll away. I’ll try to sum up a response to all your points, however tongue-in-cheek they might be.
I believe we are biologically compelled to morality. Our closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, have been shown to display moral behaviours (getting upset if there is a discrepancy in reward for equal work, taking care of disabled community members, etc.). Our drive to recognize an intrinsic “worth” in others (and ourselves) is ingrained in our evolutionary lineage. Obviously the recognition of that “worth” is going to fluctuate wildly across perspectives, especially now that we’re humans and our societies are far more complex, which is why we’ve been trying to figure out moral codes and the nature of rights since we started recognizing our own complexities. A rejection of that worth (such as through racism, sexism, and so on) is simply reframing it through a prejudicial lens (attributing worth only to in-group members, for instance). Universal nihilism, in my view, is just plain bunk.
How we recognize and measure that worth will vary, but ultimately the only way that isn’t flawed by prejudice or other irrational mediators of perspective is to spread it out evenly across everyone (For the sake of relative brevity I’ll ignore the worth of animals and nature). The way that worth will manifest, then, will be highly individual and subjective. Some people are in to being degraded during sex, for instance. The only rational way to recognize that naturalistic worth in others is then through dialogue, to see how they wish that worth to be respected.
People who reject this way of thinking would, I can predict, suggest that there are some groups of people who are immune to a dialogical approach, perhaps through religious fundamentalism or just plain idiocy. These are attempts to dehumanize the out-group, and are indeed tactics that may be used against us in turn for those who do not wish to engage with us either. Another reason people might reject this is because dialogue necessarily requires equitable power relations (for example, a dialogue between a prisoner and his warden is compromised based on the premise alone), and people typically don’t like giving up their power.
As to what Nietzsche might think, that guy is long dead. I crave approval only from the living.
The trouble with live and let live is it only works if it’s reciprocal. Everyone wants to be left alone, but not everybody wants to leave other people alone.
What sort of works, at least up to a point: your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, and I will enforce that rule personally.
All of morality and ethics is interpersonal. If people didn’t have to deal with other people there would be no need for any concept of right vs wrong. If our world were ruled by a more activist and interventionist deity then there would be no need for us to debate right and wrong. What we live in is a world where the wheels of justice grind slow, but exceedingly fine. The feedback loop is too slack for us to learn better how to get along with each other. Do what you can get away with is the whole of the law, except whether you’ve gotten away with something or not depends on the time frame. The flip side of what you can get away with is “just you wait!” But the victims can’t afford to wait, and the perps don’t have to wait.