More on Morals

Sam Harris, Marc Hauser, and Michael Shermer on Science and Morality

Deontologists are Covert Consequentialists

BY SAM HARRIS

REGARDING THE ORIGINAL DEBATE IN SKEPTIC, VOL. 20, No. 4 between Marc Hauser and Michael Shermer on the extent to which science can determine human values—here are my two cents:

I believe that deontologists are nothing more than covert consequentialists. Why is it wrong to harvest the organs of 1 to save 5? Because none of us wants to live in a world where we can be dragged out of a doctor’s office and murdered, and our children orphaned, at any moment. Those who recoil at the dictates of such a myopic, utilitarian calculus, do so because they sense that its wider consequences would be horrific.

Similarly, I think that a concern about “means” arises out of a (usually very visceral) feeling that different means entail different consequences. It is a mistake to stop our analysis of consequences at body count. If the experience of pushing the fat man is importantly different from the experience of flipping a switch (no doubt it would be), leaving the average pusher wracked by guilt and nightmares, then the two scenarios are not morally equivalent. Hence, our very different responses to them. Nevertheless, it may be better, in certain situations, to have a professionally callous person (or even a psychopath) in place to do a good and necessary thing that a normal person might be too squeamish to do. If there were no real choice but to push the fat man—to save a million lives, say— such a person might be the only “switch” available.

Our moral intuitions are clearly fallible and difficult to change. This is why I think the greatest moral gains come from system-level changes in our public policies and institutions—not from getting everyone’s intuitions to track real-world consequences more accurately. We aren’t sensitive enough to very large harms (e.g., distant genocides, destroying the environment for future generations), and we are extremely sensitive to smaller ones. Consequently, perfectly normal people are capable of committing atrocities, while it often takes a psychopath to commit some lesser evil.

As I wrote in my first book, The End of Faith, to learn that your grandfather flew bombing missions over Dresden in WWII is one thing. To learn that he killed a woman and five little girls with a shovel is another. No doubt he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights. But we all know, intuitively, that it would take a very different sort of person to wield the shovel.

As for the challenge you pose, Marc—I think it misses the point. You put a lot of weight on diversity of opinion and draw great significance from the fact that certain people can’t be persuaded by good evidence and arguments—or, indeed, can’t even be convinced to care (or to admit that they care) about human well-being. You also draw a line between scientific empiricism and “reasoning” that I don’t think exists. Reasoning, while remaining in contact with reality, is always apt to become an act of “science,” whether one is in the lab or not. And there’s no telling which scientific findings (narrowly defined) might become suddenly relevant to our thinking about the well being of conscious creatures. As for how I can justify grounding all notions of right and wrong and good and evil in the well-being of conscious creatures—I’ve written a lot about that, much of it subsequent to publishing The Moral Landscape, and won’t review it here. I even had a public essay contest on the topic: http://bit.ly/1pOZ7G7 and http://bit.ly/Uk8cwR