Could someone provide a quote or two showing that Sam disagrees with any of the above? Steel-manning only a little, I believe Harris’ goal isn’t to find the One True Definition of morality, but to get rid of some useless folk concepts in favor of a more useful concept for scientific investigation and political collaboration. He antecedently thinks improving everyone’s mental health is a worthy goal, so he pins the word ‘morality’ to that goal to make morality-talk humanly useful. Quoting him (emphasis added):
[T]he fact that millions of people use the term “morality” as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time. [...]
Everyone has an intuitive “physics,” but much of our intuitive physics is wrong (with respect to the goal of describing the behavior of matter). Only physicists have a deep understanding of the laws that govern the behavior of matter in our universe. I am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-being).
I think this view is more sophisticated than is usually recognized. Though it’s definitely true he doesn’t do a lot to make that clear, if so.
I don’t think he would disagree if he read it, which is why I thought it was worth submitting. i’m not attempting to change his opinion so much as attempting to dissolve the debate which he is attempting to take sides on. Sam Harris’s argument is right if we accept the premise that good=good(1), but wrong if we accept the premise that good=good(2).
My purpose is merely to point out that the choice of whether to use good(1) or good(2) is arbitrary. My aim is to make it explicit. The debate as framed by Sam Harris implicitly assigns good the value of good(1). You can’t just do that implicitly when the crux of the debate is about the definition of good.
I think you misunderstand the premise. There is no known absolute “good” or “bad” in his description. There is just the landscape of peaks and valleys which we don’t know the shape of. So the two “goods” you described can be two peaks partially intersecting each other.
Could someone provide a quote or two showing that Sam disagrees with any of the above? Steel-manning only a little, I believe Harris’ goal isn’t to find the One True Definition of morality, but to get rid of some useless folk concepts in favor of a more useful concept for scientific investigation and political collaboration. He antecedently thinks improving everyone’s mental health is a worthy goal, so he pins the word ‘morality’ to that goal to make morality-talk humanly useful. Quoting him (emphasis added):
I think this view is more sophisticated than is usually recognized. Though it’s definitely true he doesn’t do a lot to make that clear, if so.
I don’t think he would disagree if he read it, which is why I thought it was worth submitting. i’m not attempting to change his opinion so much as attempting to dissolve the debate which he is attempting to take sides on. Sam Harris’s argument is right if we accept the premise that good=good(1), but wrong if we accept the premise that good=good(2).
My purpose is merely to point out that the choice of whether to use good(1) or good(2) is arbitrary. My aim is to make it explicit. The debate as framed by Sam Harris implicitly assigns good the value of good(1). You can’t just do that implicitly when the crux of the debate is about the definition of good.
I think you misunderstand the premise. There is no known absolute “good” or “bad” in his description. There is just the landscape of peaks and valleys which we don’t know the shape of. So the two “goods” you described can be two peaks partially intersecting each other.