renowned atheist and utilitarian Sam Harris talks about ethics at TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
discuss!

one poster at felicifia, Robert Wiblin has opposed Sam Harris's ideas in his blog

Sam Harris has defended his speech against criticism here

recently elaborated his speech at Google Authors and has announced his new third book on the topic, called The Moral Landscape

It's a huge call, obviously, but I expect Sam Harris's new book to be the best piece of utilitarian writing since Peter Singer's Practical Ethics. He writes with such honesty and clarity that I just cannot imagine this book being anything other than brilliant.

I watched his speech when it came out on TED, I did not incline for nor against his position, but found it rather vague, trying more to spread a meme on science being useful to morals than to make tangible claims.

What I utmostly hated though was the title of the video, "Science can answer moral questions". I don't know if he was the one to choose it or if someone else did, but anyone minimally knowledgeable of moral philosophy will know that assertion is false. Science cannot answer moral questions, science cannot answer questions on whether something ought to be or not to be. Science can:

- aid in defining moral answers to moral questions according to our disposition,
- help us define growingly complex moral questions as new scientific capabilities become available,
- help us make moral answers real due to scientific capabilities,

and all this is not the same as to say "science can answer moral questions", because science cannot answer moral questions. Morality can. Moral philosophy. Not science. Science =/= morality.

So seeing the vagueness and the apparent ethnocentrism of his speech, along with its title, I am not surprised he received criticism. I don't think his speech was optimal, and I strongly suggest they change the name of his speech on TED if he wasn't the one to choose it, I'd like to make him get the message if there's a way. At least he gets the title right in his upcoming book: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values; that, for sure, is something science will be able to more specifically determine sooner or later in a descriptive manner.

As for the quality of his upcoming book, RyanCarey, I can't really agree with you at this point on it being outstandingly utilitarian. Maybe it'll be good, I don't know. I wasn't very impressed with his speech, it did make some use of utilitarian values but... time will tell.

My exposure to SH bears out Mike's, tbh. His MO seems to be to appoint himself spokesperson for a viewpoint and then make grandiose but not that meaningful statements about it (eg he's said he'd prefer to remove religion from the world than rape - but what would doing either actually entail? Similarly, IIRC, he's quite a liberal hawk, who frequently regurgitates the 'if you value freedom, you should support military intervention' canard as though one follows logically from the other).

All that said, it would be really nice to have a famous consequentialist from somewhere besides philosophy to help popularise the idea.

As Sam Harris posts new essays in defense of utilitarianism I'll post them up. Here, he targets what he refers to as an "unimaginative reading of wellbeing". A good read.
http://www.samharris.org/faq/full_text/but-what-if-beating-children-is-actually-good/

Hello everyone, new to the forum but have really been enjoying the posts I've read so far.

Ryan, I was wondering what leads you to call Sam Harris a utilitarian? I am not disagreeing with you, much of what he says in this talk and others has lead me to believe he has consequentialist leanings, like his talks at the Beyond Belief conference where he mentions his sympathies for Derek Parfit's "Reasons and Persons." Also, on his personal website he has a recommended reading list, one book of which is the Singer collection "Writings on an Ethical Life", as well as "Reasons and Persons", "Living High & Letting Die", and the history book I learned initially of from Singer's Guardian booklist, Jonathan Glover's "Humanity." He also has books of the non-consequentialist sort though. It makes me wonder where his sympathies really lie; hopefully they will become apparent when his new book comes out.

I vaguely remember hearing Sam Harris describe himself as a consequentialist, possibly in an earlier TED talk. I've never heard him mention utilitarianism at all.

Living High and Letting Die isn't meant to a consequentialist book, as I understand it - I think Peter Unger believes in intuition as the guiding principle for identifying acts as good or bad, despite his book being a severe critique of certain kinds of intuition.

Hmm, apparently he has written the following in his "The End of Faith"

This linkage between happiness and ethics is not a mere endorsement of
utilitarianism. There may be ethical questions that escape a utilitarian
analysis, but they will be questions of ethics, or so I will argue, only to
the degree that anyone is in a position to suffer on account of them. I
have elected to bypass the categories of moral theory that usually frame
any discussion of ethics—utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and deontology
being the most common. I do not believe that these categories are
as conceptually distinct, or as useful, as their omnipresence in the literature
suggests.

Regardless of what he calls his system of ethics, it sounds awfully like utilitarianism to me. He says that questions of ethics are factual questions of conscious wellbeing. Furthermore, states of affairs lie on a landscape of hills and valleys, in which those scenarios more conducive to wellbeing should be preferred over the others. If that isn't scalar hedonistic utilitarianism, I don't know what is.

Hmm, several years ago, he committed himself to moral realism and consequentialism in his talk "Can we ever be right about right and wrong. He involves these labels in his talk with about 2 mins to go in the first half of this talk

"I am not utilitarian. I believe ethics must be more useful." - Sam Harris, in his previously mentioned quote

Choose if you will:

a) He's not aware of the paradox. He is indeed not utilitarian while being utilitarian, in which coarse case, why should we bother to label him using the term "utilitarian" at all?

b) He's aware of the paradox. He recognizes he balances ethical value regarding its usefulness towards well-being, yet wishes to separate himself from utilitarianism, in which undercover case, why should we bother to label him using the term "utilitarian" at all?

He calls himself a "secular humanist", and uses the same kind of ethical approach (whether good or bad) I see in authors with little basis on academic moral philosophy. If he doesn't stand on a firm philosophically established ethical normative theory to make his point... I don't see a reason why we should label him like if he did. But please, tell me what you think of this.

I think along the lines of ChrisCruise.