Sam Harris: "The Moral Landscape" (a review)

Having read Sam Harris' publications on atheism, which I liked a lot, I expected to read a scientific book on moral psychology (like „The Righteous Mind“ by Jonathan Haidt, one of my favorites). But my disappointment and frustration with Sam Harris grew with every page I read. It is annoying, arrogant and, above all, bad science.

His project can be summed up in a few words:
As medicine is to health, moral values are to „human well-being“. As there are doctors who tell us how to live if we want to stay healthy, there are, or more precisely: there should be moral experts who could look at the moral landscape and see which values are conducive or well-being, and which are detrimental (= the peaks and valleys of the landscape).

Harris claims that the following three steps should be distinguished:

1. We can explain why people tend to follow certain pattern of thoughts and behavior in the name of morality (that's basically what Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, Roy Baumeister and other social psychologists are doing)
2. We can think more clearly about the nature of moral truth and determine which pattern of thoughts and behavior we should follow in the name of morality (that's the point where Harris parts company with Haidt, Greene et al.)
3. We can convince people who are committed to silly and harmful pattern of thought and behavior to break these commitments and to live better lives (that's the punch line of Harris' project, to make this world a better place).

I would like to add another point: (4) These people we are trying to convince will point out to us that we are totally misguided and that we should repent and change our values and behaviors.

Harris' project of „moral engineering“ is bound to be a failure because it's based on sloppy thinking. Everything is muddled in this theory: Truth, values, usefulness. A sentence like „Smoking increases the risk of lung-cancer“ has a completely different logical structure than a sentence like „Children should honor their parents and support them in their dotage“. The last sentence does not express something that can be verified, it expresses a desire: „X should be Y“. All science can do is to look in which cultures parents are honored by their children, and science can even try to find out if this practice of intergenerational cohesion has good or bad consequences for the society as a whole. But even the most useful practice does not establish a value!

My main objection to his project is: Harris simply does not know what moral values are, how they originate and how they function. He actually criticizes social psychologists like Jon Haidt who just do research on these issues. Harris' approach is strictly top-down: Values are features of a society and they could be implemented and manipulated according to the latest research, much like doctors are able to tell us what to eat and what to avoid (by the way: doctors' advice tend to change quite often...). If science finds out that members of an „honor culture“ are less happy that members of a modern society that treat matters of honor lightly, than these scientists should go to, say, Albania or rural Turkey and tell those people: Look, your values are clearly detrimental to your well-being. You should adopt our values and you'll be all better off! That's nonsense.

Let's do the following thought experiment: If science found out that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the
happiest people in the USA are uneducated, God-fearing inhabitants of small-town America, would Prof. Harris burn his books, start praying and move to Morontown, Kentucky? Of course not.
He would find dozens of flaws in the research, he would point out that correlation does not equal causation. He would dismiss the evidence because his values and his way of life are constitutive of his identity, and of the life of his friends. Nobody changes his or her values just because some egghead comes along with some sheets of statistics „proving“ that my values are sub-optimal.

If scientists in America are unable to convince the majority of their compatriots of the fact of evolution, how will they convince farmers in India or Marocco of the „fact“ that Hindu or Muslim values are detrimental to their own well-being? Even if (and that's a big if!) Harris's science was right, even if (again a BIG „if“!) one could measure well-being objectively and find stable correlations with values, like we do with smoking and lung-cancer, even in this very unlikely case that would be no way to implement these findings.

Values originated bottom-up, and they can only be changed bottom-up, and that's a long and tortuous road to be traveled. We all agree that the mutilation of genitals of little girls in Egypt and Sudan is a crime, that it should stop as soon as possible. But this cannot be done by switching off the underlying detrimental values and replacing them by more enlightened values. The change has to come from within the society, bottom up, over many generations. The last decade in Iraq is a good example what happens when an enlightened power, coming from outside, tries to implement top-down a change of values and way of life in a „retarded“ society.

To sum it up: This book certainly does not contribute to our understanding of how societies function, neither does it contribute to making this world a better place. It's a typical product right from the ivory tower, and it's a bad product into the bargain. If only the theory was good there could be some practical value in it too. But since the basic theory is already flawed, there is nothing to be learned for our daily lives.