SarahC:
The point is, if you want universal morality, you have to exclude some points of view. If you want to be Sam Harris, you have to declare you won't listen to some people. If you want to claim that science can resolve questions of morality, it can only do that among people who already agree on a number of fundamental values. Nobody else counts; you have to override them, perhaps by force.
That is indeed so. But the additional trouble is that arguments based on "the well-being of conscious creatures" and such fuzzy concepts won't even be able to provide a clearly defined position with which people could genuinely agree. All they will provide is a rallying point for some existing ideological forces that will gather around it guided by emotion or interest.
Moreover, once "science" is taken to be authoritative for resolving moral questions, then in any realistic human society, it is only a matter of time before the very notion of "science" degenerates into a fig-leaf for ideology and venal interest. (Which has in fact already happened to a large extent in some fields that modern governments rely on as an authoritative guide for policy.) Thomas Hobbes put it best:
[The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.
Harris's inability write a whole book about this topic without being able to grasp this essential point is, in my view, enough to dismiss him as an altogether incompetent thinker.
But when do I get to kill people? Can I start with rednecks, people named Vladimir, and the sadistic bastard who wrote my homework?
Seriously, I think you and I agree -- Sam Harris can't really run a shortcut around all moral debate the way he's claiming he can. All he's really doing is telling people who share a certain set of values that they should go ahead and act according to those values because everyone else is heinous and "not worth listening to."
Sam Harris has a new book, The Moral Landscape, in which he makes a very simple argument, at least when you express it in the terms we tend to use on LW: he says that a reasonable definition of moral behavior can (theoretically) be derived from our utility functions. Essentially, he's promoting the idea of coherent extrapolated volition, but without all the talk of strong AI.
He also argues that, while there are all sorts of tricky corner cases where we disagree about what we want, those are less common than they seem. Human utility functions are actually pretty similar; the disagreements seem bigger because we think about them more. When France passes laws against wearing a burqa in public, it's news. When people form an orderly line at the grocery store, nobody notices how neatly our goals and behavior have aligned. No newspaper will publish headlines about how many people are enjoying the pleasant weather. We take it for granted that human utility functions mostly agree with each other.
What surprises me, though, is how much flak Sam Harris has drawn for just saying this. There are people who say that there can not, in principle, be any right answer to moral questions. There are heavily religious people who say that there's only one right answer to moral questions, and it's all laid out in their holy book of choice. What I haven't heard, yet, are any well-reasoned objections that address what Harris is actually saying.
So, what do you think? I'll post some links so you can see what the author himself says about it:
"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.
Frequently asked questions: Definitely helps clarify some things.
TED talk about his book: I think he devotes most of this talk to telling us what he's not claiming.