This is the text of an email I wrote to Scott Barry Kaufman after listening to this podcast.
I listened to the interview you did with Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast today - and I had already heard you speak with both Robert Wright and Sean Carroll. Personally, I think I found those conversations more satisfying as I think that you had a greater opportunity to express your view.
I subscribe to Making Sense (and to The Psychology Podcast!) and have a very high regard for Harris. However, I think that, for my taste, his temperament leads to some limitations in perspective which you, I feel, do not share.
Let me try to explain. Harris is a proud post-Enlightenment thinker. Which, of course, is a great virtue. I - and you too, for sure - also place immense importance on both rationalism and empiricism. Where I think the strength becomes a weakness is in the failure to accept that in the areas of consciousness and ethics (or, more widely, 'value', which incorporates aesthetics as well as ethics), empiricism and rationalism, while claiming to be objective, are inevitably imposing their own metaphysics, which they deny. There is as yet no 'fact of the matter' when it comes to consciousness and, leading on from that, no 'fact of the matter' in ethics.
Utilitarians, for whom I, like you, have great respect, create a framework which can be analysed using hard reason. I speak from experience having recently read Peter Singer's Practical Ethics - the most hard-nosed book of philosophy I've encountered, including texts on critical reasoning and bioethics - and Toby Ord's The Precipice. I agree with their arguments - it's impossible not to: they are so well reasoned. Yet one has to start out by accepting the premise that happiness, utility, preference is a 'given' and has some kind of objective numerical rather than subjective 'feeling' value. Of course, a life is a life: each person counts as one and no more. And yet the utilitarian will still place, for example, greater moral weight on the life of the fully conscious human adult mother, with her plans and history and ongoing sense of self, than on the 30-week old foetus. I agree. And yet this is to make an ethical judgment based on premises we simply have to accept, given the metaphysics of utilitarianism rather than anything derived from certainty.
The concept of 'value' in life has become essentially something like π rather than anything related to how a conscious being might actually feel in a given moment. But, in common-sense, everyday experience, 'value' in life is complex, many-layered, variable and ephemeral. For the utilitarian, though, that common reality of life is too hazy, too ill-defined. In short, it cannot be put into an algorithm.
It is either a sleight of hand, this elision between the so-far-limited empirical data and the claim that 'this is all there is', or a blinkeredness arising from certain temperaments. I think it is the latter.
One hears in the voices of staunch utilitarians the greatest affect coming through when they discuss the reasoned processes of working through thought experiments or mathematised models of ethical problems.
One gets little sense from them of the possibility of the sublime, the aesthetic, the transcendent. There is such an allergy to religion - which I, as an atheist, understand - that they cannot see the ways in which religion or spirituality offer a purposive or aesthetic path toward a life of greater ethical depth.
While I support the importance of utilitarianism as a model for thinking about political, social and also some personal ethical decisions, it is, like the concept of Kantian duties or the that of natural laws, only part of the story. It is a vital part, but still just a part. It is the missing section which is the only section that can lead to transcendence.
Likewise, Harris's views on the benefits of meditation - I am not thinking here of his views on the peak experiences he senses intermittently or through psychedelics, but of the idea of subduing the 'self' - are similarly diluted by what I see as the intense reliance on rationalism and empiricism as founding pillars of his metaphysics. The awareness that there is no homunculus is one that can be supported by neuroscience. But that's not, in my view, the point when it comes to what really matters.
What really matters when it comes to living a good life is, as Iris Murdoch puts it in The Sovereignty of the Good, the suppression of 'the fat relentless ego'. Our task is not to appreciate that the self is a created illusion arising from emergent properties or whatever, but to remove the persuasive, distorting, self-interested veils of prejudice, desire, resentment, jealousy, ignorance, envy, greed and so on. The task is not one of apprehending the reality of consciousness, but of developing virtues. You can still be a psychopath without a homunculus, but not, I'd argue, with a sense of what Murdoch describes as the virtue of love leading you to the truth and thus to the good.
Virtues are bound to values. Valuing the other, the good, the true, the beautiful, the just.There is a useful - a real - analogy here between ethics and aesthetics: both develop through attentive care, education, careful reasoning and experience in terms of depth, breadth, richness and nuance. To believe that there is a formula that can be applied in all situations is irrational and goes against empirical evidence.
However, it seems to me that if one is temperamentally placid and perhaps touched less by affect and aesthetics and rather more by fact and reason, it is tempting to disregard (disvalue) the complex, value laden, emotional and aesthetic content of perception. If it cannot be quantified, it is disqualified from judgment. This seems to me to be an unjustifiable and unrealistic position to hold.
You mentioned in the interview a tendency to hypomania. Me too. Consequently, I can have intense aesthetic and affective responses to people, places, things and events. If this is part of one's reality, along with the seemingly connected tendency to profound feelings of grief, one is likely to experience life very differently from the temperamentally balanced. This does not mean that one has any less capacity to be rational; but it does mean that value is foregrounded.
The ethical in this context can never be slimmed down to a formula. It is part of life because value is part of life. So, one has to be very attentive to ensuring that value-perception is honed, sharpened, clarified. That is the burden of responsibility. The blessing is that values are clearly evident.
I don't know if you have read Iris Murdoch's work - I am inclined to think you may have. If not, it is philosophically dense and detailed, but it seems to me that her thesis makes sense and adds value (!) to a debate which is currently held in the clutches of those whose inclination is to whittle the ethical down to laws, maxims, duties and equations without granting the individual any conceptual significance.
It seems to me that her ideas would be a good fit with your project. I have written a few blog posts on Murdoch and her views on art and unselfing - I have linked to three of the more relevant.
I link here to a piece I wrote on reading Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Inner Level. They mention the two concepts of narcissism which you discuss. Their take is that the more unequal the society, the greater the prevalence of both forms. I wondered if you had considered this? Indeed, you imagine a good society - and the inequality in evidence in both your country and mine (the UK) is perhaps the greatest barricade to the creation of any ideal of a good society. Wilkinson and Pickett have some ideas on how to lessen inequality and it seems to me that unless there are political and societal changes, the number of individuals who will have the fullest potential to achieve transcendence will be sorely limited. That said, the fewer people who attain a mind-set in which blinkered, polarised and self-seeking motives are subdued, the lower the chances of societal reform. It would appear that the two revolutions need to be concurrent. They have to 'hold hands': the wide-scale fact-world of politics and the small-scale value world of the individual. One without the other is lost.
This, in my view, is the ambition above all others. This is where transcendence transcends.
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