Thread: TED: Sam Harris on science and morality

Just going off of what is present in the video and nothing else external to this (as this is all I know of Sam Harris):

Originally Posted by Think

a)says something which is superficially quite nice but has ugly implications

What, pray tell, are the ugly implications you are speaking of in particular?

Originally Posted by Think

b)says something so in tune with the cultural zeitgeist that it makes my skin crawl (protip:any view that is intellectually fashionable is 99.9% likely to be wrong)

I'm confused here I suppose. This talk is rather superficial, and some of the details are sort of silly, but frankly I expect nothing less from TED talks (namely, cocktail philosophization which makes the viewers feel real smart). I don't, for example, believe necessarily that corporal punishment (when delivered by the parents at any rate) is "wrong" in any obvious objective way.

But beyond that... it's also intellectually fashionable to oppose racism. On that note, it's intellectually unfashionable to scientifically inquire into the potential physiological and genetic trends and differences between racial, supraracial, or subracial groups. I think the former in principle is a correct attitude, and the latter is an incorrect attitude.

Just because an attitude or belief is intellectually fashionable doesn't make it wrong (do you really believe that entire races might be subhuman?), but it does make it subject to all sorts of excesses that more thoughtful people must always be vigilant against. And just in this talk considered in isolation, he doesn't get into the niceties enough to indicate whether he really is taking this attitude in any way to excess or not.

Also, I question just how intellectually fashionable it his to harbor this sort of attitude towards morality. It seems to me that it is more fashionable to write off differences in a culture's moral teachings compared to your own just as a cultural difference without making a value judgement either way, though I might be wrong.

And at any rate, yes, his messages are so broad that he's avoiding the difficult and fraught questions that inevitably come from holding any principle at all.

c) flaps his jaw and makes noises without his propositions actually committing him to any position whatsoever.

He's merely outlining how to consider morality outside of a religious context without giving into moral relativism. It's not completely devoid of content, but I suppose his points are obvious to you. As silly as it may seem, they might not be to everyone. I've known of plenty of people who contend that all atheists are sociopaths since they have no moral code because they don't believe in a god.

Originally Posted by Syme

It's treated as axiomatic because people have come to realize that morality is a purely social construct whose terms and ideas and starting assumptions don't reflect anything that actually exists in reality. No matter how self-evident it is to you that correct morality consists of whatever you think it consists of.

Yes, morality is a societal construct, but you can't say that the entire content of all moral codes are simply arbitrary, can you? You're not even going to admit that there are built-in propensities for certain behaviors as well as certain conditions which tend to make individuals content and certain conditions which tend to make them suffer? This sort of human preprogramming can serve as the basis for a moral code or at least the pattern for what would constitute a sound moral code.

Humans are not just born as blank slates which can be socially engineered to any arbitrary degree. Just ask a neurologist if you don't believe me.