DCP has an exciting new update on one of his upcoming books

[drumdude]

Here are my notes (with a few contributions of my own) from Hyrum Lewis, There Is a God, 110-112:

If morality can’t be deduced or derived from matter and only matter is truly real, can another source for it be identified?

Lewis cites the example of the vocal “New Atheist” Sam Harris and his book The Moral Landscape. In that book, Harris contends that we can get morality from science.

Now, at first glance, such a claim seems pretty obviously silly. Compassion can’t be proven good in a cyclotron or a chemistry lab. Does botany tell us anything about whether slavery is wrong? Can a microscope demonstrate that torturing animals or abusing small children is immoral? Don’t we already know that murder is evil before we enroll in a course on evolutionary biology? Has any scientist ever engaged in laboratory or field research for the sake of constructing (or falsifying) a moral system? (You may recall Sir Karl Popper’s contention that “falsifiability” is a requirement for a scientific theory to be meaningful.)

But Harris’s argument isn’t that obviously ridiculous. In The Moral Landscape, he contends that we can base our morality on science by determining, scientifically, what promotes “well-being” and then deciding, on that basis, what we ought to do. For example, living in community makes us happier than living in isolation, thus contributing to our well-being, so the promotion of community and living in community are moral goods. Donating to charity also enhances human well-being, so it is also demonstrably moral. There is no need to invoke God here, he says. All we need is science.

Where, though, does Harris get his principle that we should pursue happiness, or well-being? Where does that should come from? Isn’t that already a value-laden or moral judgment? And, if it is, was it scientifically derived? Was it deduced from counting lichen spores or finding exoplanets? Is it falsifiable? And why couldn’t someone, instead, declare that we should pursue domination, or power, or pleasure? Or control? Or enlightenment? Or growth or experience or “fulfillment”? Or expanded Lebensraum for the Aryan race? How can one distinguish between those goals “scientifically”? Evolutionarily or biologically, couldn’t someone make the case that the true moral imperative is the maximum spread of his genes? Why not? How does one determine “scientifically” that happiness or well-being is the one proper moral goal? Isn’t that a nonempirical leap of faith?

Lewis cites Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography (161-162) as saying that his work in philosophy “brought moments of delight, but these [were] outweighed by years of effort and depression.” Still, even though his own personal unhappiness was often the result of his effort, he continued, as he saw it, to “pursue truth.”

And can science really determine what brings happiness or well-being? Will expanding the welfare state maximize happiness? Many think so. But many others argue that increased dependence on government welfare will, in the long run, reduce human happiness. Does the prosperity that results from free trade outweigh the jobs that it sometimes destroys? Marital fidelity has been shown to be a contributor to human happiness, but not a few people have found happiness, as they imagine, through promiscuity.

It appears his book on the new atheists (prominent 20 years ago) will be written without ever having read their books. Rather, Dan will read books criticizing their works.

Dan can post devastating questions like “ Where, though, does Harris get his principle that we should pursue happiness, or well-being?”. Checkmate, atheist! Sam Harris may have answered that question in his book, but by avoiding the burden of actually reading “The Moral Landscape” Dan can stay blissfully unaware of the answer to that.

I expect Dan’s book to be a masterpiece of ignorance and straw manning. Which is a bit ironic, because when people on his blog ask similar questions about Mormon apologetics he often refers them to read the books his friends have written.

Rules for thee, not for me seems to be the modus operandi at Sic et Non.

[Gadianton]

The problem with the Afore here is he's begging the question. One metaethics says the good is based on happiness (roughly utilitarianism). Another metaethics says the good is based on God.

Sam Harris can't derive the good from happiness. But the Afore can't derive the good from God, he just assumes it's true.

The challenge for Harris -- how do you get any ought from any is?

The challenge for the afore -- the Euthyphro: is it good because because God wills it or does God will it because it's good? If the later, we're all in the same boat, trying to get an ought from an is. If it's the former, it's divine command, and appears arbitrary.

The problem with the Afore and Lewis's numbskull thinking, is that intuitions such as "torturing children is wrong" obviously come from biology independent of whether God wills it or some mystical code says so. There are people who don't think such things are wrong, and science can show us that they are cognitively dysfunctional in a variety of ways. So it's NOT intuitive for everyone.

Here's how ridiculous the Afore's position is. His fake scriptures say "men are that they might have joy." On the one hand, humans have this thing called happiness that science can demonstrate is a function of brain chemicals; even if happiness doesn't reduce to brain chemicals, we do know it supervenes on brain chemicals. If brain chemicals aren't working right, men won't be happy. Now, for reasons truly inexplicable, God has authorized utilitarianism for the Afore by saying, "men are that they might have joy". We all believe that the pursuit of happiness is the root of good, it's obvious that we'd all think such a thing because any being is going to pursue their happiness as if that's what they should do. But in the case of Harris, the guy is out in left field, he has no grounds for thinking it whatsoever! But for the Afore, because it's written in scripture he assumes comes from God, oh, it's fully grounded now and "oughts" that correspond to basic everyday morality are hereby validated.

The cynical take would be that since men have such a strong desire to be happy (this is all rather tautological since our brain chemistry forces these thoughts upon us) that obviously if men are going to pretend to speak for God, it's certainly not surprising that God is revealing what is the most obvious thing in the world.

[Marcus]

Also, DCP is falling back once again on plagiarism, under the guise of 'notes.' (I'll leave just one example here and put the rest in the DCP plagiarism thread, so as not to derail.)

Here's just one passage from Lewis, page 112, from the section that DCP said was in his "notes," and below that DCP's plagiarism:

...If slave defenders like John C. Calhoun were correct that African-Americans were happier under slavery than under freedom, would that justify slavery? Would a painless genocide be acceptable so long as it produced happiness for the killers? If happiness is our criterion, then slavery, genocide, and murder would all be morally correct under certain conditions, yet we all know that painless murder is still murder...

P 112, Hyrum lewis

DCP's "notes"

John C. Calhoun evidently contended that African-Americans were happier as slaves than they would have been as free men. Assuming for a moment that he was right, would that have morally justified slavery? Enslaving others may well have increased the happiness of the enslavers. If eliminating a subset of society could make the remainder of the populace happier, would that be morally justifiable? (Imagine that the genocide could be accomplished painlessly, perhaps even without inducing anxiety. Would that make a difference?) Is there a calculus for determining how large a number of people might ethically be eliminated?

If happiness or well-being is the criterion, cases can surely be imagined in which enslaving others or committing murder or genocide would increase well-being or happiness for at least some portion, larger or smaller, of the population. But all normal people know, without needing to research it or think deeply about it, that even painless murder is morally wrong. How do we know this? On the basis of what do we know it?

As usual, I noted in blue DCP's exact copies of wording, but the entire passage is nothing more than a shameless plagiarism of his BYU colleague's work. Stating at the beginning: "here are my notes (with a few contributions of my own)" , especially since he never actually quotes Lewis, does not mitigate his intellectual theft.

[Marcus]

Sometimes you just have to laugh. At the end of a post where DCP plagiarizes other's thoughts about whether some people should be considered more important than others (DCP: "If eliminating a subset of society could make the remainder of the populace happier, would that be morally justifiable?"), Allen Wyatt, ever the empathetic, demonstrates his opinion on the matter:

Allen Wyatt
4 hours ago

I graduated from Ricks on April 22, 1976. I was married on April 29, 1976, in SLC. By June 5, 1976, when the Teton Dam failed, we had set up house in Logan. Good thing, as the house in which I lived (a basement apartment) was washed away...

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6866654328

[bolding added by me.]

[drumdude]

(DCP: "If eliminating a subset of society could make the remainder of the populace happier, would that be morally justifiable?")

This is essentially what happened in the Mormon Space Opera, a.k.a. "the war in heaven."

Either an ultimate all-knowing God created those who followed Satan knowing they would follow Satan, or good and evil exist independently from God. In which case Sam Harris' atheist morality stands on its own without God.

Dan can't have it both ways. Either everything (including goodness) comes from God and Mormon theology is wrong, or goodness is independent of God, and Sam and Dan agree.

[Physics Guy]

I'm a theist but I'm at least somewhat skeptical of the argument for God from morality. I figure that morality, like consciousness, must be some kind of emergent property, kind of like viscosity only more complicated. And the fact that things like that do happen, in a world where the basic rules are only about particles moving, is a humbling demonstration of how reality is both vast and intricate. So there is at least something that is much bigger than human minds, even if it is only the universe and not the even bigger God who could have made any universe. Really appreciating that intricate vastness, as opposed to just glibly mouthing it, seems to me to be a step toward theism.

(Conversely, really appreciating how unimaginably alien to the human mind a God would have to be could be considered a step from theism toward atheism. Perhaps there is some middle ground.)

Perhaps human minds are too small to trace exactly how morality emerges from matter. Perhaps we are forced, in our ignorance, to describe morality with an additional axiom of its own, in kind of the way that the Second Law of Thermodynamics currently stands as an independent axiom in physics even though microscopic mechanics already determines everything that can happen. If this is so, then first of all gleeful repetitions of rhetorical questions about cyclotrons and compassion, and the like, are misguided arguments which only flaunt ignorance.

Cyclotrons are just as useless for demonstrating cell division as they are for demonstrating compassion, yet cell division can be seen clearly with microscopes. So the actual argument, here, is weak to the point of vacuity: not every instrument can do everything; so? Worse, these kinds of triumphant rhetorical questions rely for their rhetorical impact on a childish conception of science as one big grab bag of fancy-sounding terms that clearly all seem interchangeable. The rhetorical questions about slavery and botany only sound good if one knows nothing about science; to anyone with even a good high-school education they are cringeworthy. Botany is the study of plants, people. Who ever suggested that it might explain human morality?

Secondly, it's unclear how any non-materialism does any better than materialism at deducing morality from a smaller set of axioms. The mere existence of God doesn't seem to imply anything at all about what we should do or not do. One has to stipulate a second axiom, either about what God wants us to do, or about morality as a principle that exists independently of God such that it's more than a tautology to call God good. If a theist is allowed to invoke such an additional axiom, then so can an atheist. And the atheist can quite consistently invoke morality as an axiom for practical purposes, in our current state of ignorance, while reserving the hope that we will one day be able to replace the axiom with a deduction.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Isn’t human morality, at its core, regulated cooperation and conflict mitigation? From my POV behavior, and I’m talking about universal behavior that begets complexity and systems that, hrm , adapt, last, and scale over time base themselves, either knowingly or not, on cooperation and violence mitigation?

So, my point, is to assert morality isn’t derived from anything and it isn’t contingent on an inherent nature, but rather earned as an evolutionary trait that works, that allows for complexity to arise and to mitigate conflict. Anything that works against that can rightly be determined to be immoral.

- Doc

[drumdude]

Isn’t human morality, at its core, regulated cooperation and conflict mitigation? From my POV behavior, and I’m talking about universal behavior that begets complexity and systems that, hrm , adapt, last, and scale over time base themselves, either knowingly or not, on cooperation and violence mitigation?

So, my point, is to assert morality isn’t derived from anything and it isn’t contingent on an inherent nature, but rather earned as an evolutionary trait that works, that allows for complexity to arise and to mitigate conflict. Anything that works against that can rightly be determined to be immoral.

- Doc

If there is a God (in the Christian sense, not the Mormon sense) then that God could dictate morality. That thing is after all the creator of everything. It would be like imposing a law on the ants in your ant farm, you get to dictate whatever you want; you have total control.

But I think you’re right that absent the traditional Christian God, you are left with basically the social contract theory. This is true for atheism and Mormonism’s concept of a limited God who is just an exalted man.

[Gadianton]

Second Law of Thermodynamics currently stands as an independent axiom in physics even though microscopic mechanics already determines everything that can happen

Let's say "happiness" or "joy" (as Dan's scriptures put it) is one of these states. Given Dan and his bro have appealed to intuition of the obvious, I will do so also; a parent is happy when children complete their homework. A parent should, therefore, encourage their children to complete their homework. We don't need to get into microstates, but we do have a story about macro states -- there are a bundle of related concerns about children being able to survive in the world that this is ultimately, biologically connected to. A basic understanding of that connection is important, otherwise, a parent could, rather than encourage children to do homework, go to the street corner and buy a substance that produces a similar feeling with less effort, and we say the parent shouldn't do that.

Assume we can basically agree on this framework up to this point. I think even Dan could be convinced that becoming addicts will ultimately make these biological happiness stories fall apart and result in minimizing happiness. The problem Dan is going to have is that the "oughts" we speak of in such a framework are contingent upon the goal happiness. He probably can't clarify himself very well here, but at times he seems to demand there to be oughts "in themselves" or something like this, something not contingent upon any goals whatsoever, they just are -- transcendental obligations.

Okay -- assume he's right and something like a "transcendental obligation" is real. Assume that unrelated to any material goals, "help child with homework" falls out as a true moral imperative rooted in transcendental obligation.

Now suppose I know about Bayes rule. to check whether my intuition that "helping child with homework" is a true transcendental obligation, I must test it against the alt-hypothesis that my intuition comes from the story about biology and sociology in the first paragraph. I will find that Dan can't come up with a single candidate for a transcendental obligation that isn't greatly complicated by the powerful material explanation. He will be the first to agree with this, in fact, as he's obsessed with citing articles about the material benefits of abstaining from tea and living a religiously prudish life.

[Gadianton]

Either everything (including goodness) comes from God and Mormon theology is wrong, or goodness is independent of God, and Sam and Dan agree.

Dan may agree radically more so than Sam. In the clips you've posted, he hasn't admitted to his true beliefs about morality. Dan couldn't care less about God. He cares about his own personal immortality and the guarantee to travel and eat indefinitely. He's been very clear that without an infinite afterlife filled with personal consumption for him, everything we do in life is meaningless. A planet of cows will feed Dan for ~5 million years. Without a sky filled with such planets just to get Dan started on his immortality, it would be a meaningless act for Dan to help an older person across the street, for instance. See Scratch's signature, but he's gone on about this at length, including with Gemli.