The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris
Of course, no technology is ever perfect. Once we have a proper lie detector in hand, well-intentioned people will begin to suffer its propensity for positive and negative error. This will raise ethical and legal concerns. It is inevitable, however, that we will deem some rate of error to be acceptable. If you doubt this, remember that we currently lock people away in prison for decades—or kill them—all the while knowing that some percentage of the condemned must be innocent, while some percentage of those returned to our streets will be dangerous psychopaths guaranteed to reoffend. We are currently living with a system in which the occasional unlucky person gets falsely convicted of murder, suffers for years in prison in the company of terrifying predators, only to be finally executed by the state. Consider the tragic case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of setting fire to the family home and thereby murdering his three children. While protesting his innocence, Willingham served over a decade on death row and was finally executed. It now seems that he was almost surely innocent—the victim of a chance electrical fire, forensic pseudoscience, and of a justice system that has no reliable means of determining when people are telling the truth. 68
We have no choice but to rely upon our criminal justice system, despite the fact that judges and juries are very poorly calibrated truth detectors, prone to both type I (false positive) and type II (false negative) errors. Anything that can improve the performance of this antiquated system, even slightly, will raise the quotient of justice in our world. 69
Do We Have Freedom of Belief?
While belief might prove difficult to pinpoint in the brain, many of its mental properties are plain to see. For instance, people do not knowingly believe propositions for bad reasons. If you doubt this, imagine hearing the following account of a failed New Year's resolution:
This year, I vowed to be more rational, but by the end of January, I found that I had fallen back into my old ways, believing things for bad reasons. Currently, I believe that robbing others is a harmless activity, that my dead brother will return to life, and that I am destined to marry Angelina Jolie, just because these beliefs make me feel good.
This is not how our minds work. A belief—to be actually believed— entails the corollary belief that we have accepted it because it seems to be true. To really believe a proposition—whether about facts or values— we must also believe that we are in touch with reality in such a way that if it were not true, one would not believe it. We must believe, therefore, that we are not flagrantly in error, deluded, insane, self-deceived, etc.
While the preceding sentences do not suffice as a full account of epis-temology, they go a long way toward uniting science and common sense, as well as reconciling their frequent disagreements. There can be no doubt that there is an important difference between a belief that is motivated by an unconscious emotional bias (or other nonepistemic commitments) and a belief that is comparatively free of such bias.
And yet many secularists and academics imagine that people of faith knowingly believe things for reasons that have nothing to do with their perception of the truth. A written debate I had with Philip Ball—who is a scientist, a science journalist, and an editor at Nature —brought this issue into focus. Ball thought it reasonable for a person to believe a proposition just because it makes him "feel better," and he seemed to think that people are perfectly free to acquire beliefs in this way. People often do this unconsciously, of course, and such motivated reasoning has been discussed above. But Ball seemed to think that beliefs can be consciously adopted simply because a person feels better while under their spell. Let's see how this might work. Imagine someone making the following statement of religious conviction:
I believe Jesus was born of a virgin, was resurrected, and now answers prayers because believing these things makes me feel better. By adopting this faith, I am merely exercising my freedom to believe in propositions that make me feel good.
How would such a person respond to information that contradicted his cherished belief? Given that his belief is based purely on how it makes him feel, and not on evidence or argument, he shouldn't care about any new evidence or argument that might come his way. In fact, the only thing that should change his view of Jesus is a change in how the above propositions make him feel. Imagine our believer undergoing the following epiphany:
For the last few months, I've found that my belief in the divinity of Jesus no longer makes me feel good. The truth is, I just met a Muslim woman who I greatly admire, and I want to ask her out on a date. As Muslims believe Jesus was not divine, I am worried that my belief in the divinity of Jesus could hinder my chances with her. As I do not like feeling this way, and very much want to go out with this woman, I now believe that Jesus was not divine.
Has a person like this ever existed? I highly doubt it. Why do these thoughts not make any sense? Because beliefs are intrinsically epistemic: they purport to represent the world as it is. In this case, our man is making specific claims about the historical Jesus, about the manner of his birth and death, and about his special connection to the Creator of the Universe. And yet while claiming to represent the world in this way, it is perfectly clear that he is making no effort to stay in touch with the features of the world that should inform his belief. He is only concerned about how he feels. Given this disparity, it should be clear that his beliefs are not based on any foundation that would (or should) justify them to others, or even to himself.
Of course, people do often believe things in part because these beliefs make them feel better. But they do not do this in the full light of consciousness. Self-deception, emotional bias, and muddled thinking are facts of human cognition. And it is a common practice to act as if a. proposition were true, in the spirit of: "I'm going to act on X because I like what it does for me and, who knows, X might be true." But these phenomena are not at all the same as knowingly believing a proposition simply because one wants it to be true.
Strangely, people often view such claims about the constraints of rationality as a sign of "intolerance." Consider the following from Ball:
I do wonder what [Sam Harris] is implying here. It is hard to see it as anything other than an injunction that "you should not be free to choose what you believe." I guess that if all Sam means is that we should not leave people so ill-informed that they have no reasonable basis on which to make those decisions, then fair enough. But it does seem to go further—to say that "you should not be permitted to choose what you believe, simply because it makes you feel better." Doesn't this sound a little like a Marxist denouncement of "false consciousness," with the implication that it needs to be corrected forthwith? I think (I hope?) we can at least agree that there are different categories of belief—that to believe one's children are the loveliest in the world because that makes you feel better is a permissible (even laudable) thing. But I slightly shudder at the notion, hinted here, that a well-informed person should not be allowed to choose their belief freely ... surely we cannot let ourselves become proscriptive to this degree? 70
What cognitive freedom is Ball talking about? I happen to believe that George Washington was the first president of the United States. Have I, on Ball's terms, chosen this belief "freely"? No. Am I free to believe otherwise? Of course not. I am a slave to the evidence. I live under the lash of historical opinion. While I may want to believe otherwise, I simply cannot overlook the incessant pairing of the name "George Washington" with the phrase "first president of the United States" in any discussion of American history. If I wanted to be thought an idiot, I could profess some other belief, but I would be lying. Likewise, if the evidence were to suddenly change—if, for instance, compelling evidence of a great hoax emerged and historians reconsidered Washington's biography, I would be helplessly stripped of my belief—again, through no choice of my own. Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.
This does not mean, of course, that we have no mental freedom whatsoever. We can choose to focus on certain facts to the exclusion of others, to emphas
As to whether there are "different categories of belief": perhaps, but not in the way that Ball suggests. I happen to have a young daughter who does strike me as the "loveliest in the world." But is this an accurate account of what I believe? Do I, in other words, believe that my daughter is really the loveliest girl in the world? If I learned that another father thought his daughter the loveliest in the world, would I insist that he was mistaken? Of course not. Ball has mischaracterized what a proud (and sane and intellectually honest) father actually believes. Here is what I believe: I believe that I have a special attachment to my daughter that largely determines my view of her (which is as it should be). I fully expect other fathers to have a similar bias toward their own daughters. Therefore, I do not believe that my daughter is the loveliest girl in the world in any objective sense. Ball is simply describing what it's like to love one's daughter more than other girls; he is not describing belief as a representation of the world. What I really believe is that my daughter is the loveliest girl in the world for me.
One thing that both factual and moral beliefs generally share is the presumption that we have not been misled by extraneous information. 71 Situational variables, like the order in which unrelated facts are presented, or whether identical outcomes are described in terms of gains or losses, should not influence the decision process. Of course, the fact that such manipulations can strongly influence our judgment has given rise to some of the most interesting work in psychology. However, a person's vulnerability to such manipulations is never considered a cognitive virtue; rather, it is a source of inconsistency that cries out for remedy.
Consider one of the more famous cases from the experimental literature, The Asian Disease Problem: 72
Imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.
Which one of the two programs would you favor?
In this version of the problem, a significant majority of people favor Program A. The problem, however, can be restated this way:
If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
Which one of the two programs would you favor?
Put this way, a majority of respondents will now favor Program B. And yet there is no material or moral difference between these two scenarios, because their outcomes are the same. What this shows is that people tend to be risk-averse when considering potential gains and risk seeking when considering potential losses, so describing the same event in terms of gains and losses evokes different responses. Another way of stating this is that people tend to overvalue certainty: finding the certainty of saving life inordinately attractive and the certainty of losing life inordinately painful. When presented with the Asian Disease Problem in both forms, however, people agree that each scenario merits the same response. Invariance of reasoning, both logical and moral, is a norm to which we all aspire. And when we catch others departing from this norm, whatever the other merits of their thinking, the incoherency of their position suddenly becomes its most impressive characteristic.
Of course, there are many other ways in which we can be misled by context. Few studies illustrate this more powerfully than one conducted by the psychologist David L. Rosenhan, 73 in which he and seven confederates had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals in five different states in an effort to determine whether mental health professionals could detect the presence of the sane among the mentally ill. In order to get committed, each researcher complained of hearing a voice repeating the words "empty," "hollow," and "thud." Beyond that, each behaved perfectly normally. Upon winning admission to the psychiatric ward, the pseudopatients stopped complaining of their symptoms and immediately sought to convince the doctors, nurses, and staff that they felt fine and were fit to be released. This proved surprisingly difficult. While these genuinely sane patients wanted to leave the hospital, repeatedly declared that they experienced no symptoms, and became "paragons of cooperation," their average length of hospitalization was nineteen days (ranging from seven to fifty-two days), during which they were bombarded with an astounding range of powerful drugs (which they discreetly deposited in the toilet). None were pronounced healthy. Each was ultimately discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia "in remission" (with the exception of one who received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder). Interestingly, while the doctors, nurses, and staff were apparently blind to the presence of normal people on the ward, actual mental patients frequently remarked on the obvious sanity of the researchers, saying things like "You're not crazy. You're a journalist."
In a brilliant response to the skeptics at one hospital who had heard of this research before it was published, Rosenhan announced that he would send a few confederates their way and challenged them to spot the coming pseudopatients. The hospital kept vigil, while Rosenhan, in fact, sent no one. This did not stop the hospital from "detecting" a steady stream of pseudopatients. Over a period of a few months fully 10 percent of their new patients were deemed to be shamming by both a psychiatrist and a member of the staff. While we have all grown familiar with phenomena of this sort, it is startling to see the principle so clearly demonstrated: expectation can be, if not everything, almost everything. Rosenhan concluded his paper with this damning summary: "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals."
There is no question that human beings regularly fail to achieve the norms of rationality. But we do not merely fail—we fail reliably. We can, in other words, use reason to understand, quantify, and predict our violations of its norms. This has moral implications. We know, for instance, that the choice to undergo a risky medical procedure will be heavily influenced by whether its possible outcomes are framed in terms of survival rates or mortality rates. We know, in fact, that this framing effect is no less pronounced among doctors than among patients. 74 Given this knowledge, physicians have a moral obligation to handle medical statistics in ways that minimize unconscious bias. Otherwise, they cannot help but inadvertently manipulate both their patients and one another, guaranteeing that some of the most important decisions in life will be unprincipled. 75
Admittedly, it is difficult to know how we should treat all of the variables that influence our judgment about ethical norms. If I were asked, for instance, whether I would sanction the murder of an innocent person if it would guarantee a cure for cancer, I would find it very difficult to say "yes," despite the obvious consequentialist argument in favor of such an action. If I were asked to impose a one in a billion risk of death on everyone for this purpose, however, I would not hesitate. The latter course would be expected to kill six or seven people, and yet it still strikes me as obviously ethical. In fact, such a diffusion of risk aptly describes how medical research is currently conducted. And we routinely impose far greater risks than this on friends and strangers whenever we get behind the wheel of our cars. If my next drive down the highway were guaranteed to deliver a cure for cancer, I would consider it the most ethically important act of my life. No doubt the role that probability is playing here could be experimentally calibrated. We could ask subjects whether they would impose a 50
Science has long been in the values business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective.
To say that judgments of truth and goodness both invoke specific norms seems another way of saying that they are both matters of cognition, as opposed to mere sentiment. That is why one cannot defend one's factual or moral position by reference to one's preferences. One cannot say that water is HfD or that lying is wrong simply because one wants to think this way. To defend such propositions, one must invoke a deeper principle. To believe that X is true or that Y is ethical is also to believe others should share these beliefs under similar circumstances.
The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?" is generally a scientific one. Believe a proposition because it is well supported by theory and evidence; believe it because it has been experimentally verified; believe it because a generation of smart people have tried their best to falsify it and failed; believe it because it is true (or seems so). This is a norm of cognition as well as the core of any scientific mission statement. As far as our understanding of the world is concerned— there are no facts without values.
Chapter 4 RELIGION
Since the nineteenth century, it has been widely assumed that the spread of industrialized society would spell the end of religion. Marx, 1 Freud, 2 and Weber 3 —along with innumerable anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists influenced by their work—expected religious belief to wither in the light of modernity. It has not come to pass. Religion remains one of the most important aspects of human life in the twenty-first century. While most developed societies have grown predominantly secular, 4 with the curious exception of the United States, orthodox religion is in florid bloom throughout the developing world. In fact, humanity seems to be growing proportionally more religious, as prosperous, nonreligious people have the fewest babies. 5 When one considers the rise of Islamism throughout the Muslim world, the explosive spread of Pentecostalism throughout Africa, and the anomalous piety of the United States, it becomes clear that religion will have geopolitical consequences for a long time to come.