[Please see also Ten Serious Questions for Sam Harris]
I can’t seem to let go of Sam Harris’ extremely weak arguments for “impos[ing] wisdom or compassion [on us] from the top.” I observed below that when Harris uses the example of an irrational preference for smoking to defeat Francis Collins’ argument for the existence of God, the same analogy could just as well apply to self-sacrifice. But here’s a better example of Harris’ flawed arguments, both moral and political.
He argues that people should be forced by the state to give their property to others (or to serve others in other, undefined ways) because doing so helps promote “human well-being” which he defines in terms of “a felt experience” of fairness (felt in the sense that those who suffer unfairness experience “negative emotion”). Giving our earnings to others makes us feel better, but we also suffer from incontinence, in that we are too focused on present, selfish interests to be “as moral, [or] as happy as [we] could be.” So the state will make us happier by committing what Harris calls “necessary theft” against us, for our own good as well as to serve a “fairness” that, again, he does not define but which appears to be a type of emotional harmony. That sense of emotional harmony has allegedly been bred into us by evolution, so that (to “simplif[y]...enormously”) evolution gave rise to “social emotions” and “moral institutions,” which “became the basis for cultural norms” which he defines as morality. So evolution gives us a tendency toward serving others’ interests, but we sometimes need a little coercive push from the government to be good and happy.
Yet the exact same argument can be made in reverse. Evolution—as Richard Pipes and Larry Arnhart and others have observed—has also bred into us a sense of individual autonomy. We feel a very strong emotional sense of “mine” and “thine,” which does not need to be taught to children—indeed, efforts to teach children not to feel this have largely failed. We feel good when we get things and we feel bad when those things are taken away from us. The “social emotion” (if you will) of personal dignity and dominion over our possessions is a strong one, and it serves human well-being. I think Harris would concede this. To have our things taken away from us and given to others against our will is a felt experience that fills us with negative emotions. On what grounds does Harris privilege the first set of negative emotions and felt experiences over the second? What objective, rational grounds does he use to distinguish between the emotional “warm glow” of giving, and the emotional “warm glow” of keeping?
Harris gives us no answer. He leaps over the need for that proof so deftly one hardly notices it in his argument. But, indeed, the form of his argument could easily prove the exact opposite position: that giving and caring for others is a form of incontinence which the state should punish! Since Harris has given us no substantive reason to prefer self-sacrifice to selfishness, then we can reverse his premises and conclude that although we have a normal emotional tendency to personal autonomy and possessiveness, we have a streak of short-sighted incontinence in us that leads us sometimes to share things, or give things to the poor, leading to all sorts of social problems—moral hazard, rent-seeking, inefficient resource allocation—and therefore that the government should forbid us from being charitable! Why not? Doing so would help safeguard human well-being by ensuring that people kept their resources, diminishing mendicancy, and protecting people from acts of excessive compassion that lead to negative emotions.
Or how about this? All beautiful women should be forced by the state to have sex with men who desire them. The men certainly desire the women (for good evolutionary reasons), and we can “objectively” measure that desire. The women have no legitimate claim to their beauty, since they were just “lucky” enough to be born with it and didn’t earn it. And women enjoy sex—they just have a streak of incontinence that leads them to hold out, which gives me a “felt experience” of “negative emotion.” It would make the women better people to give their bodies to me, and certainly I would feel better. So the government should make us both “as moral and as happy as we could be” by committing “necessary rape” and forcing Charlize Theron to go to bed with me.
The reason such arguments are laughable are twofold. First, Harris has not shown self-sacrifice to be a moral ideal; he has simply pointed to “negative feelings” and “intuitions,” as if these were proof enough, when they are not; he must analyze these feelings and intuitions to see if they are justified by some objective standard, and since he doesn’t, his conclusions are arbitrary and we can make a similarly structured argument for anything. Second, even if it is true that we (sometimes) feel better when we act charitably toward (certain) others, and even if it is true that people are often short-sighted and tight-fisted, that is still not an argument for “forcing” people to be “as moral, or as happy as they could be.”
Update: I competely missed this part of Harris' post:
Several cited my framing of the question—“how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep?”—as especially sinister, as though I had asked, “how many of his internal organs can one person be allowed to keep?”
But I wonder how Harris really would distinguish these two...? After all, he contends that a person who owns property is not entitled to it if he didn't earn it:
Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it.
And as we have seen, he believes a person should be compelled to serve the needs of others because it makes them better people, and ultimately happier people. So if I’m not entitled to things I haven’t earned—not entitled to inherited wealth, for instance—why am I entitled to the bodily organs I was “lucky” enough to be born with? And would it not make me a better person if I gave a kidney to a person who needs it? And if the government should “impose...compassion from the top,” why should it not forcibly take my bodily organs and give them to others who need them? Harris gives us no reason at all to distinguish the “necessary theft” of property from the “necessary theft” of bodily organs, and the latter would follow just as easily from his premises as the former. But I guess one violates his intuitions and the other does not.
Update 2: Lexee_99 at in the forum at Harris’ website says that my argument here is “not fair.” But it is not enough just to say that it is “not fair” (Harris has himself already said so)—one must show why is it not fair. Why would Harris not compel a person to give up her bodily organs, or indeed her whole body, to serve my emotional demands? my “felt experience” of “negative emotions” at the “unfairness” of not having something I want? Harris denies that people can have legitimate claims to things they didn’t earn, and says we must “create value” for others in order to act morally; moreover that it is right for the state to force us to “create value” for others. He gives us no limiting principle to these claims, so my question remains: why is my observation unfair? Why would Harris not extend these principles to their logical conclusion and force Charlize Theron to sleep with me? Harris? Lexee_99? Anyone? Let's hear a substantive argument.
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