How the thesis from my essay on morality aligns and conflicts with Harris's thesis

How my essay came to be

Years ago, I read Sam Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape, found it compelling, and essentially agreed with what he wrote. I did not really know his reputation as a philosopher at the time so I was one of those who stumbled onto comments in r/philosophy, r/askphilosophy, r/badphilosophy, etc. and was confused by the general disdain they had for him. This lead to many one-on-one conversations to get to the bottom of the dismissal of Harris as a legitimate philosopher and to defend some of his positions which I thought were clearly correct. In the process, over the course of a couple of years, I ended up developing my own metaethical position and started to realize that it deviated from Harris’s thesis.

At that point, I really wanted to present my philosophical position to people in the field of philosophy, but the problem was that there was not a subreddit with the critical mass and desired target audience to post my half-baked thesis for the open discussion I wanted. r/philosophy is really for work by professional philosophers, about professional philosophers, or essays that are thorough and with substantial arguments. r/askphilosophy is open to anyone to post, but is for those who are seeking specific answers from those who are knowledgeable in the field. So when I wrote a short essay, along with a story about discovering a professional philosopher on reddit who seemed to have a similar position, and then posted it presented as a question to r/askphilosophy, it was quickly removed by the moderators. They gave a few suggestions of subreddits where it might be more appropriate and said with more work I could post it to r/philosophy. So over the next four months, I worked on it and fleshed it out best I could to try to meet the requirements of r/philosophy. When I posted it, I half-expected it to get deleted, and my backup plan was to post my new essay to r/askphilosophy and ask what I could do to not get my post removed. I thought this would be a legitimate question because I would genuinely be seeking advice from better and more experienced writers of philosophy.

To my astonishment, not only did it not get deleted, it ended up making the front page and ultimately received 1700+ votes with 50k views. I was encouraged by the votes and exposure - it seems some people found my essay intriguing, but I took the upvotes with a grain of salt. What I wanted to see were comments that expressed an alignment of similar ideas or at least ones that disagreed and presented compelling arguments. It seemed many were just dismissive or tangential to my essay. Nevertheless, I will continue my goal of spreading my thesis on morality to those who are interested, and I hope to some day get to present my thesis to Sam Harris.

My thesis from my essay

My full essay can be found here, and below is my thesis from that essay:

Morality is an arbitrary, vague, social construct. In other words, it is a loosely defined concept that depends on the discretion of those using it for communication to determine what it is. More generally - all concepts intended to represent reality are arbitrary, vague, and social constructs. Scientific facts are assertions about aspects of reality but must be communicated using these social constructs. Answers to questions about morality, being that they are constrained by reality, are scientific facts but only when sufficient convergence of the meaning of morality has been established - which is at the discretion of social beings.

What we ‘ought to do’ is equivalent to, in some sense, the concept of morality. Morality can be thought of as a pattern such that when our actions match this pattern sufficiently, we can say that we ought to do these actions. Knowledge of reality cannot lead to a determination of what this pattern is. So this gap, often referred to as the is-ought gap can be understood as: reality cannot determine what morality is. Science, as an approach to understand reality, therefore cannot tell us what the concept of morality is, but rather what adheres to it once the pattern is defined, or possibly reveal internal contradictions within the concept. More generally - all concepts representing reality adhere to the is-ought gap dynamic: reality cannot dictate what any concept is, even if we choose to have it constrained by reality. This general form can be thought of as the reality-concept gap.

Harris's thesis from The Moral Landscape

Here is Harris's thesis as described by him in his essay contest description:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully constrained by the laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice). Consequently, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

How my thesis aligns with Harris’s

I agree with Harris’s overall thesis that moral facts exist and are on the same footing as other scientific facts. This is because I believe scientific facts must be communicated through concepts that represent reality, that these concepts are social constructs, and morality is no exception. Harris often compares truths of morality to truths about health to reveal what he sees as an incorrect double standard between the two regarding scientific factual claims.

Naturally, I assert that health is a social construct like morality, and my essay which uses the concept of morality as a focal point to illustrate the relationship between concepts and reality, could just have as easily focused on health. That is to say, like Harris, I see no reason to make a distinction between these concepts as they relate to truths about reality. It should be noted that this aspect of Harris’s thesis, in which we agree, is what he wants his contribution to discipline of moral philosophy to be, but has been generally been met with scepticism and criticism. I will discuss how I do not think these rebuttals are actually conflicting with this aspect of his thesis, which he calls unity of knowledge, when I discuss how my thesis contrasts with his.

How my thesis contrasts with Harris’s

Harris created a contest to write an essay to prove his thesis in The Moral Landscape is incorrect. The preamble to the announcement of the winning essay describes an overview of common criticisms of his thesis and gives the winning essay which is described as a good representative of these crticisms. I encourage everyone to read the winning essay, but here is an excerpt that I would like to focus on:

You claim that what is good (the basic value question) is that which supports the well-being of conscious creatures, and that what one ought to do (the basic moral question) is maximize the well-being of conscious creatures. But science cannot empirically support either claim.

I now agree with this criticism, but do not think it undermines Harris’s unity of knowledge aspect of his thesis. I think to best illustrate my view is by applying Harris’s thesis onto facts other than those relating to morality, like the population of Wyoming.

Harris’s thesis applied to Wyoming’s population (as I would imagine):

Wyoming is defined by a set of particular coordinates on the map. The number of individuals living in Wyoming is fully constrained by the state of reality. Therefore, the answer to this number will have a right or wrong answer and will completely fall within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice).

His critics might respond with something like:

Science cannot empirically support what the borders of Wyoming are. Therefore, the population of Wyoming cannot be solely a scientific finding.

My interpretation of this hypothetical analysis is that each is correct to some extent, but each is not seeing the entire picture. Wyoming has an imaginary border that is really just a social construct. Harris fails to see his critics’ points that Wyoming’s true borders cannot be found by science, it has no true borders, and that the borders, however determined, have a critical role in what the population of Wyoming is. However his critics are wrong to draw the conclusion that the border is not in the domain of science. To communicate facts about reality, we must arbitrarily define concepts that represent reality by an agreed upon manner. When we are interested in communicating about some aspect of reality, we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere so that everyone knows what is being communicated. In regards to Wyoming, we literally have to define the borders. When it comes to more sophisticated and nebulous concepts like morality, the borders are more abstract. In morality, I consider these borders to be analogous to what are commonly called values.

Harris also asserts that science can determine our moral values. I agree with this in the way that I think science can be used to determine geographical borders - which unfortunately has been amply demonstrated with the science that goes into gerrymandering. However, I think Harris is implying another sense of the word ‘determine’, as in to discover our moral values, that which are independent of human discretion. I agree with this only in the sense that logic is an aspect of science, and we can use logic to find internal conceptual contradictions. The values we have that define morality can and almost certainly will have contradictions. What Harris seems to fail to acknowledge is that, just like the borders of Wyoming, our values are ultimately at our discretion.