Sam Harris and Scientism

Since I took a passing swipe at his work in my recent post on Steven Pinker and scientism,
it seems worth noting that Sam Harris, the noted new atheist polemicist, has issued a
public challenge to anyone interested in refuting his recent book on how science can
determine human values, offering $2,000 to the best rebuttal essay and $20,000 to any
writer who can persuade him to recant his central argument outright. That argument he
distills as follows:
Here it is: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious mindsand
specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and
suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully
constrained by the laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end).
Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall
within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice). Consequently, some people
and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with
respect to what they deem important in life.
The reason hes issuing this challenge, he says, is that most of his reviewers have insisted
that hes mistaken without supplying anything like persuasive evidence. Since I found
many of those reviews quite persuasive in their criticisms, I turned with interest to his
essay-length response to his critics. Heres his summary of the existing rebuttals to his
thesis:
there are three, distinct challenges put forward thus far:
1) There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone
elses. (The Value Problem)
2) Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not
about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of
view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)
3) Even if we did agree to grant well-being primacy in any discussion of morality, it is
difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure wellbeing scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of morality. (The Measurement Problem)
This seems like a fair summary of what seem like compelling points. And how does Harris
respond? By way of an analogy:
Lets swap morality for medicine and well-being for health and see how things
look:
1) There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone elses.
(The Value Problem)
2) Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about
the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of
science. (The Persuasion Problem)
3) Even if we did agree to grant health primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is
difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health
scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)

While the analogy may not be perfect, he concludes, I maintain that it is good enough to
obviate these three criticisms. The concept of well-being is to morality as the concept of
health is to medicine, and while people who deny that the pursuit of conscious creatures
well-being is the proper end of any moral system may be entitled to their opinion, they are
in the same position with respect to moral dialogue as Christian Scientists, homeopaths,
voodoo priests, and the legions of the confused are with respect to medical conversations.
They have perverse and even self-destructive ideas about how to live, and their position
is rightly excluded from rational debate.
Except that Christian Scientists, homeopaths and voodoo priests do not actually exemplify
problems 1, 2 and 3 in Harriss medicine analogy. They do claim to value health, both for
themselves and others, and indeed they generally claim to be driving at roughly the same
goals as the doctors at Georgetown University Hospital: The extension of life, the normal
functioning of bodily systems, the cessation of pain, and so on. And the reason that they are
generally excluded from serious debates about medical science is not because they refuse to
agree about what that science ought to be driving at; its because they do agree about what
it should be driving at, and their preferred approaches can be empirically demonstrated not
to work. Send one cancer patient to an oncologist and another to a witch doctor, and one of
the two is much more likely to survive and no matter how blurry the proper definition of
health may be, the cemeteries are filled with clear examples what it doesnt look like,
offering a negative example that no rational person can deny.
But this is not remotely the case in debates about morality. If I say to Harris, the good is the
beautiful and the beautiful the good, and therefore the best and most morally admirable
society is the one that produces the most beautiful artifacts, the loveliest lyric poetry, and
the most scintillating prose, and this remains the case no matter how low the inhabitants of
that society score relative to our own on subjective measures of personal well-being, we are
in disagreement on a much more fundamental point than the Christian Scientist and the
surgeon. The latter two are aiming at the same goal with different methods, whereas I deny
that Harriss goal is necessarily the one we should be pursuing in the first place. And
whereas the voodoo priests worldview is ultimately refuted scientifically by the corpses of
his patient, there is no comparable scientific refutation that Harris can offer to someone
who sides with Orson Welless Harry Lime:
Not that the Lime worldview cannot be refuted! But the methods of the microscope and
laboratory do not suffice to do so whereas, again, they do generally suffice, given even
trial and error and a large enough sample size, to refute the arguments of witch doctors and
pseudoscience-spouting gurus. In the latter case, there are sick people and dead people to
back up one sides assertion about what counts as medicine; in the former case, there is
only the bare presupposition, hanging unsupported by anything dispositive.
Of course there is nothing necessarily wrong with starting from presuppositions. As Harris
goes on to note, doing science requires as much:
science is based on values that must be presupposedlike the desire to understand the
universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesnt share these
values cannot do science. But nor can he attack the presuppositions of science in a way that
anyone should find compelling. Scientists need not apologize for presupposing the value of
evidence, nor does this presupposition render science unscientific. In my book, I argue that
the value of well-beingspecifically the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for

everyoneis on the same footing. There is no problem in presupposing that the worst
possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality
consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it.
There is no problem is presupposing it, I agree. But there is also no necessary reason why
one must presuppose it in order to pursue moral inquiry. And this is not the case, again, with
the analogy to sciences presuppositions that he offers. The pursuit of knowledge about the
universe is definitionally integral to science (you can look it up!), and you are simply not a
scientist if you dont embrace the assumption that the universe is intelligible to reasoned,
evidence-based investigation. But the aim of avoiding the worst possible misery for
everyone is not definitionally integral to morality; it is one possible definition of the good
that morality pursues. And, once again, the scientific method cannot settle the question of
whether that definition is correct.
I have no problem, and nor should anyone, with Harris declaring that he favors a particular
moral system, defining its terms to the best of his ability, and then explaining why he thinks
scientific inquiry can help us maximize the end that system privileges. If you know what
moral ends youre driving at, then clearly science can be of assistance in your quest; the
idea that the two spheres of inquiry never overlap is obscurantist and silly. But he would be
much more persuasive on that narrower point if gave up on the broader one, and reconciled
himself to the fact that his style of utilitarianism is not the self-evident and scientific
foundation for all sensible moral inquiry that he believes it to be.
Though in that case he would also be out $20,000.