Sam Harris needs to come out of the wardrobe

Posted by jgrant, 2011-10-06 10:18:06

Harris' work regarding Morality and Philosophy falls far short compared with his work on Religion (The End of Faith). The Moral Landscape was disappointing and so is his recent essay 'Lying'. No surprise as he appears to be a Kantian. While he claims to not agree with all of Kant's Philosophy the problem is that he agrees with any of it at all. Some of his recent writing seems to indicate that he borrows from Objectivist ethics/morality but is still in the closet or embarrassed about his tendencies. The similarity of some of his writing on morality with some points of Objectivism and the conspicuous absence of any credit toward Rand's philosophy is disingenuous at best. Whatever noble views he has of man he sure didn't get them from Kant.

The dilemma is obvious, any Objectivist knows it well: the shrieking crowd psychosis that pure rationality in the form of Objectivism can elicit, is astounding. In this way we draw the same discrimination as does Homo-sexuality or Atheism.

Sam, you need to come out of the Objectivist wardrobe(hopefully that's where you are, you seem much too intelligent to seriously be a Kantian).

Anyway this review by Sechum on his recent essay 'Lying' sums it up clearly ...

For the most part, I respect Sam Harris' work, particularly his book "The End of Faith," where his commitment to honesty in critiquing faith- and revelation-based theism was, to my mind, both needed and refreshing. It seems, however, that Harris' work on morality in general, and in his argument for the wrongness of "Lying," has missed the mark.

Harris I think implicitly objectifies the moral values of trust, loyalty and fairness, and the moral properties of right and wrong as they all pertain to the subject and practice of lying. He also, in his advocacy of the rightness of truth-telling and the wrongness of lying as a rule, seems to ignore or tacitly minimize the illusion of conscious will, the complex biological, psychological, and cultural determinants of choice, the ethical necessity of lying (or at least not complete truth-telling), and the current state of Moral Error Theory.

...

From my perspective, inveighing against lying, or eschewing and dismissing it as morally wrong, betrays a certain naive, moralistic idealism (or 'moral realism') based on reified, and therefore false or incoherent notions of right and wrong. It also betrays reactive, and I think regressive, notions and values of trust, fairness, loyalty and betrayal.

In the end, lying is merely a social strategy that can be employed appropriately, inappropriately, or not inappropriately in serving one's and others' actual or perceived best interests. At one level such a strategy can be used to merely gain personally at the expense of others. At another level it can be essential to the individuation and integration of the personality, particularly when doing so requires the individual to therapeutically separate from repressive values and the "old ethic", and when such essential separation presents various consequential collisions of duty that can only be resolved through a creative confrontation between conscious and unconscious values, and the willingness to bear the burden of due diligence and guilt in doing so.

Because lying is consequential, and in certain cases significantly so, it is a practice that is, to Harris' point, best avoided where possible. But pace Harris, lying is not wrong or immoral per se, and while I think it is worthwhile to creatively find ways to avoid lying and tell the truth (even if not the whole truth) if and where possible, prudent, advisable and appropriate to do so, it is not always possible, prudent, advisable, or appropriate to do so.