Morality is defined as justice and love and so on. There are those who say justice and love have no real authority or force and are just human inventions or opinions. There are those who say they are objective, that is they are right no matter if everybody disbelieves in them.
The religious people in the objective camp never tell you exactly why values are binding. They often just use God as a hook to hang them on. But you never see why you should obey God's moral rules. "Why should moral rules be right just because God makes them?" You seek a reason you can understand and all you get is doctrine. "Good, love and justice are grounded in God's nature, and that is why they are right and obligatory. Don't ask why for explanations have to stop somewhere." So why stop with God then? Sorry if objective morality is right no matter who thinks they know it is and what it entails, then that who must include God. Hauling God in backfires.
Many argue that people like Sam Harris also go around in circles. They shout, "Why should it be moral to care about wellbeing? Harris is only guessing that morals and wellbeing mean the same thing".
The truth is they think, "We don't want to think that morals are opinions therefore we will deny that they could be and affirm they are just true and right."
That is not an argument. It is a form of moral subjectivism. "I feel I don't like this. I feel like treating a person according to how they behave and its about how I feel." If someone feels objective morality must exist, that doesn’t prove it's subjective—just that their reasoning might be emotionally motivated. The problem is that as far as intention goes, their morality is subjective to them. If it is not moral subjectivism it is psychological moral subjectivism. Both of those would be a form of moral scepticism. It is nonsense in the sense that you cannot call yourself moral if you are about how you feel about others not about them.
Moral subjectivists usually say morals are just feelings and otherwise do not exist and it does not matter for there is still order and people are acting like morality really is true. What? If morals are just feelings and not real then it does not matter if there is chaos or not. By wanting order you are saying that you want morality to be real after all.
Objective morality people in fact are playing a word game. We live in a world obsessed with feelings and desires so we should not be so trusting of those who crusade for objective morals. You can only study and make up your own mind.
Sam Harris says that moral values such as love and compassion and justice are objective and not matters of opinion. But the problem seems to be is that he sees them to be about health and wellbeing. And also that he thinks science gives us morality for it can measure those things and how to get them. So justice would be keeping a bad person away from others but not punishing them as such. The dispute is between those who think he redefines justice and love as wellbeing and those who think there is more to them than that.
It is a fact that all who moralise in fact do a lot of guessing. Even if you believe in retribution, there is no clear way of how to best go about it or to be sure exactly how bad the criminal is for you cannot see how they are wired or their intentions and all keep secrets and some forget to relay their secrets. So the lack of clarity alone would not prove anybody right or wrong with regard to morality. However morality has to be reasonably practical otherwise it is garbage.
One critic says that ought implies can and Harris denies free will so he has no real morality at all.
I would leave that aside however. Would he be right about morality if we really were free agents?
Critics say that if we were naturally all psychopaths that would mean if we get our wellbeing from hurting others then that is good.
Critics say that as we are not the only sentient creatures what if we feel that as say cats don't have the privileges and advantages we have, that cats should come first?
Critics say that though morality would ideally be about wellbeing it is not that simple. In other words, hurting a harmful person to stop them may be a necessary unavoidable evil and still morally right.
Interestingly we have Kant who said that ethics is deontological meaning certain things are wrong no matter how much good they do. For example he said that we must not lie even to save millions for if everybody lied life would be impossible. That as rigid and cruel and insane as it sounds is an attempt at an indirect way to maximise and promote human welfare.
Christians say we must obey God for God sees more than we do and knows what is best even if it is not necessarily the best right now for you.
So if ethics whether it is about doing the most good regardless of rules or keeping the rules is interested in wellbeing in its own way then what?
We find that critics of Harris are confused.
All really give pointers to what they hope is morality. If Harris does that best then he has won the argument. It is not about giving a perfect moral standard but the best one.
HAIDT HELPS US AGREE LARGELY WITH HARRIS
Jonathan Haidt says that there are at least six moral foundations and Harris's account only fits two of them. One is harm/care. Two is reciprocity/fairness.
Many easily accept Haidt's account of morality, but Harris' has been met with comparatively intense resistance and controversy.
There is a but.
In Lindsay's Everybody is Wrong about God we read, "Both Harris and Haidt are right, though at first it seems impossible. Haidt and Harris seem to be talking about the same topic on two different levels. Haidt is talking about the moral systems that individuals and groups adhere to, and Harris is clear that he is talking about something else that would include evaluating the moral frameworks themselves, and thus the people who adhere to them by extension."
So Lindsay says he agrees with Harris that morality is about helping people to flourish.
Haidt said we are "selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves" in his book, The Righteous Mind, page 255. It is selfish in the way wanting to be royalty is. Thus if we think we are part of this bigger thing, say part of God, that is another form of selfishness. It is selfish if it is true. And it is selfish if it is not. If it is not true then the evil of lying to yourself must be happening at some level. This is an additional manifestation of selfishness. This shows that a grounding of morality, an explanation for why it is valid, must not come from God or religion but from somebody like Harris.
Clearly even if Harris were wrong he would be pointing in the right direction. Now if we cannot get a clear solid morality but that is the best we can do we must remember the fundamental rule of morality, "Nobody is obligated to do what they cannot do but to do what they can." All critics complain that God is needed to ground morality. The opposite is true.
The important things here are, that pleasure and pain are not sovereign masters meaning we are their masters and must subject them to rules.
Yes but putting down limits on them does not mean they are not our masters. A master is necessarily limited as is the slave. Alcohol is your master if you find it more fun if indulged every other day. The rule is part of the fun.
LAST WORD
Harris is a good reply to arguments like this:
"Many businesses and entities today such as clinics have to use and embrace what scientific disciplines have learned about biology, physiology, anatomy, chemistry, physics and much more more. But no scientific discipline can tell you what you morally should or should not do. It may say you should treat a chest infection with an antibiotic but only if you choose to but it cannot tell you that it is morally right or wrong to make that choice or otherwise. It can tell you how to put a terminally ill person to their rest but not if it is really morally good, fair and loving to do so. So science then is not about morality all. The word for it is amoral. It is not about right and wrong. It is up to persons not science to worry about that. Science being used to do moral good does not mean it is about being morally good any more than a knife is bad for being used to stab somebody."
Harris then is correct. Wellbeing and morality can be counted as the same thing. They ought to be even if that sometimes does harm and if it is rather unclear on occasion. Who says that morality has to be perfect? Better one that is less than what we might want it to be as long as we can ground it.
Science knows when you are trying to hurt somebody. Hurting is a matter for science. While morality is said to be different from hurting, hurting is an ingredient of it. So science has something to say about that part of morality. Morality works with what is there so if that is all the far you can get that makes causing pain as good as the same as immorality.