Sam Harris tries to derive "ought" from "is."

[Jim__]

I believe he is being serious here:

FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of wellbeing for many sentient creatures, to the degree that wellbeing is possible in this universe.

FACT #2: While it may often be difficult in practice, distinguishing between these two sets is possible in principle.

FACT #3: Our “values” are ways of thinking about this domain of possibilities. If we value liberty, privacy, benevolence, dignity, freedom of expression, honesty, good manners, the right to own property, etc.—we value these things only in so far as we judge them to be part of the second set of factors conducive to (someone’s) wellbeing.

...

FACT #9: One can, therefore, derive “ought” from “is”: for if there is a behavior, intention, cultural practice, etc. that seems likely to produce the worst possible misery for everyone, one ought not adopt it. (All lesser ethical concerns and obligations follow from this).

The intervening steps can be found here. Does anyone think this derivation is valid? I sure don't.

[trotsky]

1. Sam Harris is crazy!

Everyone knows the only place you will find a genuine "ought" is in a collection of stories written by superstitious Bronze Age nomads. Duh.

[struggle4progress]

3. Sam is shallow. When I read Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" in

elementary school, I got something from it. When I read Paine's "Age of Reason" in high school, it made a permanent impression on me: Paine is naive as a philosopher, but his rhetoric at least has verve, and his ideas are often actually interesting. Twain's "Letters from Earth" or "Diary of Adam" are not at all sympathetic to organized religion, but they're great fun to read. I've posted excerpts from Kautsky's famous attempt at a Marxist analysis of early Christianity here, because whether or not his history is completely correct, he at least has a point of view and offers potential insights. There's no shortage of challenging writers: sadly, Sam is not among them

[struggle4progress]

2. Sam isn't a particularly deep or careful thinker. His rhetorical style

demonstrates that rather convincingly

FACT #1: There are behaviors .. which .. lead to .. misery for everyone. There are also behaviors .. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to .. wellbeing for many .. to the degree that wellbeing is possible ...

There's no way to extract anything useful from such a sophomoric word salad: it consists of grandiose abstract generalities uttered as if they were timeless insights: There are behaviors .. which .. lead to .. misery ... There are also behaviors .. which do not -- yada yada yada. Nausea threatens when the reader arrives at to the degree that wellbeing is possible: my freshman English composition teachers would have red-penciled lines like that and thrown the work back to me with some biting sarcasm in the margins about "weasel words" and a demand that I should rewrite the mess to "actually say something"

In the spirit of fairness, I clicked the link but found nothing to engage me. Sam is a slacker. When I last looked at Hume, I at least found the text interesting: he is lucid, and a light actually flows from his pages; though I did not find his arguments convincing, whether or not I agreed or disagreed with his conclusions, I could actually see the world through different eyes. Philosophy, of course, cannot reveal "truth" to us but can only help us "make our ideas clear" -- and so a good philosopher with whom one disagrees constantly can still be worth examining, even if one is never persuaded. But Sam doesn't really challenge me at all in any fruitful way

[Jim__]

4. All he really seems to do is derive "ought not" from "ought to avoid."

I agree. He's not a very careful thinker.

[ZombieHorde]

9. Sounds to me like he is trying to reiterate the "Four Noble Truths". nt

[Odin2005]

5. I normally like Harris, but that is full of fail. In fact he fails with "FACT #1"

Wanting well-being and disliking misery are SUBJECTIVE VALUE JUDGMENTS that cannot be justified with facts of the world.

Somebody give this man a logic lesson.

[Jim__]

7. When I first saw that argument, I thought it might be a spoof site.

But, it looks like Harris sero=iously made that argument.

[iris27]

8. The poorly designed site and over-the-top text formatting

(the worst possible misery for everyone!!!1ELEVENTY!) made me think so as well at first. Given that samharris.org is the first return on a Google search, though, if it's not his, then someone has done a spectacularly poor job of managing his web presence.

Maybe this explains why I didn't make it more than a few pages into "The End of Faith" before putting the book back on my shelf. His writing style gives me a headache.

[Unvanguard]

11. Fact #1 says nothing about the goodness or badness of well-being and misery.

It is simply an observation that some forms of conduct tend to increase well-being and others tend to increase misery--surely true.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

6. Logically flawed semantic gamesmanship

I see the general direction he's trying to take, and it's a stretch at best.

[Unvanguard]

10. The meat of the argument is in Fact #8.

Unfortunately, there Harris simply suffers from a lack of imagination.

Edit: Fact #3 may suffer from a similar lack of imagination insofar as it is possible to construct very different bases for value judgments.

[LAGC]

12. I think what he's saying is...

That science can inform us about morality, by measuring the outcomes of various belief systems.

Although I agree his Fact List is kind of a convoluted way of saying it, I do agree with his basic premise in dismissal of Hume's argument.