Sam Harris Can Find No Reason to Live
Sam's latest podcast: "Is Life Worth Living" illustrates Sam at his best and worst. He seems to be getting better and better with his turns of phrase, such as when he characterizes a rhetorical trick as "putting the rabbit in the hat". But Sam is stuck with a couple of very fundamental assumptions that pollute his entire worldview. You won't see it more clearly than in this podcast.
The discussion is all about value. What is "good", what is "bad" and whether X is better than Y. Specifically, whether it is "better" for a hypothetical person to exist or not. Is it "good" to exist?
The problem with this is that value is neither fungible nor ordinal. In spite of Sam's lifelong, heroic efforts to do so, it is not valid to take two situations, X and Y, and say that there is "more" good in situation X and Y. This is trivially obvious in daily life. While we may say that spinach is "good" and gasoline is "good", it makes no sense to ask if spinach is "better" than gasoline. The situation gets more ridiculous when the effort is made to compare all of life experienced by person X with all experience of person Y. This particular discussion goes even further by comparing the experience of a totally hypothetical unborn person X with another hypothetically "born" person Y. The whole discussion doesn't pass the laugh test.
Sam just loves to think of "good" as a quantity, which underlies his "moral landscape" idea. You must wonder if Sam's professional education included a course in mathematics or logic. Sam is very careful and precise in his debates, but perhaps his grasp of logic is self-taught.
Sam has at least one other blind spot exposed in this interview. Both he and Benatar assume throughout that "goodness" makes sense only from the point of view of the individual that is directly experiencing the situation (Sam sprinkles fairy dust over the idea by talking about "consciousness"). This is especially puzzling from Sam's point of view since, as a self-proclaimed expert in Buddhism, he should know that the "self" is, if not an illusion, at least a questionable point of reference. "Value" makes no sense unless you ask "according to whom?" Value also shifts through time and space. A glass of water is priceless to one dying of thirst, but of little value to the same individual (or a different individual) at a different time and place where water is plentiful. Moreover, value is not additive. It makes no sense to ask if water is more valuable to 100 individuals than 50. You just can't do math on value. No comparison. No arithmetic.
The entire discussion can be quickly undermined by asking the simple question: why do people have babies? If we limit the discussion to people deliberately making babies, it's obvious that babies have a value to the parents, grandparents, culture, and society, in general, that has nothing to do with the value experienced by a newborn baby. All by itself, this consideration undermines the ideas presented by both sides of this debate, which I felt was a modern version of the debate over how many angels would fit on the head of a pin.
This laughable debate does teach us two valuable lessons:
The discussion is all about value. What is "good", what is "bad" and whether X is better than Y. Specifically, whether it is "better" for a hypothetical person to exist or not. Is it "good" to exist?
The problem with this is that value is neither fungible nor ordinal. In spite of Sam's lifelong, heroic efforts to do so, it is not valid to take two situations, X and Y, and say that there is "more" good in situation X and Y. This is trivially obvious in daily life. While we may say that spinach is "good" and gasoline is "good", it makes no sense to ask if spinach is "better" than gasoline. The situation gets more ridiculous when the effort is made to compare all of life experienced by person X with all experience of person Y. This particular discussion goes even further by comparing the experience of a totally hypothetical unborn person X with another hypothetically "born" person Y. The whole discussion doesn't pass the laugh test.
Sam just loves to think of "good" as a quantity, which underlies his "moral landscape" idea. You must wonder if Sam's professional education included a course in mathematics or logic. Sam is very careful and precise in his debates, but perhaps his grasp of logic is self-taught.
Sam has at least one other blind spot exposed in this interview. Both he and Benatar assume throughout that "goodness" makes sense only from the point of view of the individual that is directly experiencing the situation (Sam sprinkles fairy dust over the idea by talking about "consciousness"). This is especially puzzling from Sam's point of view since, as a self-proclaimed expert in Buddhism, he should know that the "self" is, if not an illusion, at least a questionable point of reference. "Value" makes no sense unless you ask "according to whom?" Value also shifts through time and space. A glass of water is priceless to one dying of thirst, but of little value to the same individual (or a different individual) at a different time and place where water is plentiful. Moreover, value is not additive. It makes no sense to ask if water is more valuable to 100 individuals than 50. You just can't do math on value. No comparison. No arithmetic.
The entire discussion can be quickly undermined by asking the simple question: why do people have babies? If we limit the discussion to people deliberately making babies, it's obvious that babies have a value to the parents, grandparents, culture, and society, in general, that has nothing to do with the value experienced by a newborn baby. All by itself, this consideration undermines the ideas presented by both sides of this debate, which I felt was a modern version of the debate over how many angels would fit on the head of a pin.
This laughable debate does teach us two valuable lessons:
- "Value" is a slippery idea. Treating it like a measurable quantity leads to many errors in ethical debates. This is most glaringly obvious when money is treated as a proxy for value.
- Basing an argument on the "self", especially a hypothetical self is the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero.
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