As well you should (even if I suspect you think it’s clever). Honestly, whatever you think of Sam Harris, that article was terrible. It shows no understanding of how science and Ph.D programs work (and I say that that as someone with an Ph.D. in biology).
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It is undoubtedly a screed, and I had some reservations about posting it. I’m sure what you say about the scientific aspects of the article is true–I very much doubt that he was awarded his Ph.D as a result of some conspiracy of university financial officers and fMRI partisans. Still, I do think Harris leans pretty heavily on his credentials as a big smart brain doctor, despite that having little to do with ethics, politics and the other morasses he regularly wades into. I decided to post it anyway, as it was the only article I could find on the fly that addressed all of the elements I felt were important–his shoddy argumentation, his aggressive militarism and support for Empire, the frequent drubbings he has received from actual philosophers, and the extreme punchability of his face.
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BTW, speaking as an ex-neuroscientist: the early fMRI crew were rather dodgy, and a lot of their findings are now under serious dispute. And most of the psych/neuro researchers I knew had absolutely fuck-all exposure to philosophy and ethics.
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The beginning and the end of my interest in Sam Harris was finding out how thoroughly and seemingly effortlessly Noam Chomsky clowned him, This was compounded by Harris not even realizing he had been defeated to the point where he asked Chomsky for permission to publish the exchange.
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I intended it as a good sample of the articles’ foaming-at-the-mouth nature. I didn’t get all the way through it, but the whole argument seems to be that Harris had rich parents and therefore is a total fraud and a scumbag…?
The impression of the “clowning” depends heavily on buying into Chomsky in the first place.
Their conversations and points of view never really met at all, that is true. But interpreting that as Chomsky “schooling” the poor, dim Harris is very much a consequence of being familiar with Chomsky and thus finding his angle comprehensible.
When Harris argues the importance of intent and Chomsky replies: “… you would have discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland, etc. There is at least as much reason to suppose that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa.” - that’s a complete misunderstanding of what Harris meant by intentions.
As far as I can be trusted as an interpreter of his views, the intent in question is a matter of: “What end state do I wish to bring about in the world?” Every major global power needs to play dirty to some degree to safeguard its interests - US plays dirty, China plays dirty, Russia plays dirty, Germany played extremely dirty, so did Japan, EU mostly tries to keep its hands clean but it’s also pulling dirty tricks behind the scene. That’s just the reality of global power play and people (usually poor, vulnerable, non-white) die as a result. But in service of what is this violence committed?
Japanese fascists in China intended to enslave the population and strip the land of all resources. Hitler in Poland intended to commit total genocide. Soviets intended to turn the states they controlled into totalitarian puppets and sacrificial buffers. US intends to turn the states under its influence… into small copies of itself. Which is a pretty fucking great deal. Before the fall of the Iron curtain, my country had been a Soviet satellite and now it is arguably a localized variant of the US socioeconomic model, embedded in all the western political alliances and networks. The current state of affairs is incomparably better for me as a citizen in virtually every aspect, starting with freedoms of speech, information, assembly, travel and sexual expression, through economic conditions and opportunities and independent courts, to my ability to directly participate in the political process and governance.
Of course it’s not perfect but it’s miles better than any conceivable alternative. And Chomsky doesn’t get this. (For an even more vivid example of why intentions matter in global power struggles and how that influences final outcomes, see North and South Korea.)
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Agreed. It is trivially true, unless you’re an absolute and uncompromising pacifist.
But to say that this:
Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them
is logically equivalent to this:
Some courses of action are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for attempting them if there’s no other way of stopping them
ignores the existence of two sets of people:
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Those who do not hold the belief in question but are willing to aid those who do, whether for money, status, misguided loyalty, pursuit of their own agenda (e.g., local insurgency or vendetta), the sheer joy of killing and destruction etc.
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Those who do hold the belief but are not going to act on it because they’re e.g. scared, squeamish, or lazy.
I don’t think killing is justified for those in group 2, whereas for group 1 it’s no less justified than it is for true believers set on acting on those beliefs.
So given an appalling belief that logically implies an appalling course of action, actually holding that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient justification for killing. It is the intention and opportunity to carry out the action that matters.
Harris’s attempt to conflate belief with action seems to be:
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sloppy thinking; or
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a disingenuous attempt to marshal a good argument in support of a bad one; or
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deliberate controversy-courting through an inflammatory choice of words to express (imprecisely and inaccurately) a banal truth.
Again, you’re conflating belief with action. It is the intention and opportunity to start a nuclear war that justifies extreme measures, not the belief that leads to that intention.
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Until it’s an action, it’s a proposition. Any attempt to pre-empt an action is necessarily acting on a proposition.
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Harris’s use of the word “believing” in the second half of the quote indicates that the word “proposition” in the first half carries the meaning of “truth statement” or “belief” rather than “plan”, “scheme”, or “proposal”.
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See, this is exactly why you can’t take things out of context and expect the meaning to remain intact. He’s not talking about abstract beliefs, he’s talking about those beliefs in action. In the article from his blog you linked to earlier he states the following (emphasis mine):
The larger context of this passage is a philosophical and psychological analysis of belief as an engine of behavior—and the link to behavior is the whole point of the discussion.
If it was just idle speculation on abstract beliefs that nobody ever acted on then clearly it wouldn’t be justified, but that’s not what’s happening.
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But the words do not support the meaning imputed to them, regardless of context. You can’t say “It may be justifiable to kill people for holding certain beliefs”, and then say “but by ‘holding certain beliefs’, I really mean ‘planning to carry out despicable actions in accordance with those beliefs’, and even then only if there’s no other way to stop them”.
Well, you can, but not if you want to be taken seriously, and not if you don’t want people to criticise you for the prima facie meaning of your words.
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Nonsense, it’s clear from the paragraph of text your quote was from what the meaning is (the preceding sentence was: ‘The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably.’). Sentences in the english language can make reference to previous sentences via context, this is how language works, doing this is normal and doesn’t justify what seems to be a pretty intellectually dishonest view of what he’s saying to me.
Well that’s a riot…
US foreign policy is to keep as many states open for business to US multinational corporations as possible, whether those states adopt democratic forms of government or not is immaterial.
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Chomsky asked Harris to address Harris’ own misquoting of Chomsky in his own book. Chomsky showed how it was misquoting. Harris refused to admit this. Harris does not look well in this part of the exchange, nor should he.
Chomsky is also correctly understanding what Harris meant by “intentions” - and better than Harris understands his own argument. Chomsky is instead pointing out the deep logical flaws in this argument that intent justifies deaths.
To say that “every major global power needs to play dirty” is a separate argument than the one Harris is making. Harris’ argument is that intent makes dirty play clean.
Chomsky’s point re: fascists is one worth repeating. To say it another way, intent can hardly be a reliable measure of how awful, destructive or evil an action is because villains always think they’re heroes. Their stated intent is pure, and they probably believe it too. Humans are rarely capable of doing massive horrible things for decades without some kind of justification.
And this is what Chomsky rightly took apart as Harris’ stance.
It then boggles the mind that Harris thought he won this exchange. That to me is more about the power of denial.
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About the best I can say is that he was better than his brother.
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I honestly don’t understand this. How has Christopher Hitchens annoyed you? He certainly had strong views but they were always very cogently argued.
The problem with CH is that he was an asshole.
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2011/12/the-problem-with-christopher-hitchens/
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My overriding impression I took from him was that he spoke forcefully about things precisely because he thought they should be different. There is much in the world that is crap - one philosophy about this is to say we should improve it by addressing those problems head on, and if a few people are offended on the way, then that’s just the way it is.
I actually think there are better strategies to dealing with these problems, but then I’m not subject to FGM or genocide. For that reason, I can’t criticise CH for his approach because he’s done far more to challenge very serious global issues than I ever have.
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Sure, he did argue forcefully and with conviction for his apparent beliefs. But I think what matters is what a public figure says, not how they say it. And a huge part of what CH said, especially later in his life, was vile, mendacious horseshit.
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