A Critique of Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape" 

This video is dynamite

"Simply must be" is the alternative of Peterson's "and that's a big problem."

In 2004 you could be called a "public intellectual" just for being anti-religious. Hilarious.

Sam Harris's claim that he has Transcended Philosophy is just an instance of him doing it very badly.

Its impressive how Sam Harris has been able to make a career out of performing rationality whilst failing to meet the most basic requirements of scholarship such as making arguments, reading and referencing the contemporary literature and explaining what opposing views are and why they are wrong.

A little over 6 years ago I read The Moral Landscape. I have no shame in admitting it's what spurred me to pursue a career in philosophy. Throughout it all though, it's becoming clearer and clearer how little philosophy Sam Harris actually does.

What brought me here was the Harris and Peterson debate Pangburn put on in Vancouver. At the time I felt like Harris was making some good points. Now I feel like I just watched two idiots play chess and nobody understood the rules. Great video.

I know it's a late comment but just wanted to say - this is not only a fun dunking on Sam Harris, but a really good explanation of the limits of scientism/positivism and the is-ought problem as a whole.

'Rationality Rules' needs to see this.

This video decreased the amount of boredom in the universe

24:12 Sam Harris' Last Theorem: I have discovered a proof for an objective morality but the margins are too small.

“Consequentialism and moral relativism are correct because they just make sense, bruh.” - Sam Harris

**SUMMARY** • Harris thinks he's solved the is/ought distinction, but hasn't. • The argument he gives for its falseness is based on an invalid inference: that because you can't get an is without an ought, you therefore can get an ought from an is. • He never provides a thorough and coherent definition of "well-being", despite basing his entire "science" of morality on it. • He never bothers to engage with ethicists tackling the same problems as him, and seems to be ignorant of the entire subject of ethical philosophy and it's thinkers in general. • Thus, he ends up using arguments that have been brought up and argued against for hundreds of years, unaware that he's reinventing the wheel. • Instead of engaging with the arguments of other ethicists, he just makes up simplistic arguments like "what if a serial killer thought killing people enhanced well-being?" which are easy to refute. • And at times he just handwaves counter-arguments and entire subsets of ethics by calling them "boring" or "irrelevant". Which is downright childish.

Stumbled upon your channel only weeks ago, and it is quickly growing to one of my favourites.

Sam Harris' definition of well-being is being Sam Harris.

I have a great new theory about physics, namely that everything in the world is made of varied states of water... Though I will ignore all new developments in physics because those of only of interest to academic scientists. Wikipedia has a fantastic article.

That was awesome. In my first semester of undergrad in philosophy, I read the book and felt like I didn’t read anything. Never went back to it till now, and I love that you rage read like I do. If someone writes something and it just strikes me as bad, I’m getting all in and will know every peace of meat that I can get out of it.

I'm convinced Sam writes each of his books in one sitting.

14:00 "just the hypothetical objection from Jeffrey Dahmer" hahahahaha

Sam's argument for not facing the argument...."they waste my time and hurt my paradigm so they are not important "......totally valid

I have spent most of my life studying science but you have really opened my eyes to philosophy! Thank you!🙏💙

Great video-essays, keep it up, proud of you! It's a shame i can't support u. I'm living in a dumpster in eastern europe, but i will tell all my hobo friends about ur channel. Thx for all links in the descriptions!

You know this is a good channel when he, as a marxist, quotes Nozick. Absolutely based

Very well done and thoughtful critique. Feels like you put a lot of work into this. Thank you. You got a sub.

The point about him being childish is something I've noticed too. In his email exchange with Chomsky he comes across that way too, and he also seemed petty. Good video, people need to respect philosophy more.

You earned a subscriber - thank you for the excellent critiques of these very popular intellectuals. I have watched this and the Steven Hicks critiques thus far and look forward to many more.

You are doing a very important work. Thank you for sharing your knowledge in such detailed and well referenced way. A big contrast to a lot of other "influencers" on RU-vid.

I stumbled upon your channel earlier this month. After watching a few videos I just wanted to share some appreciation for your hard work. 👍🌠

I'm glad we all have Sam Harris around to make us all feel good about our argumentation skills. Afternote: To be fair, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a really good wiki to get lost in.

I just came back a couple of years later to rewatch this...still as satisfying as I remember

The very beginning of the video addresses the Nietschiean concern of Sam's moral ground so well, that I can't help myself not leaving a like under this video! Thanks for this quick and simple acknowledgment.

Wow! This was a great video! I hope all of them are this good!

Harris' fixation on neurophysics raises the question: is the holding of correct or "morally right" beliefs in any way distinguishable in terms of brain function from the holding of incorrect or "morally wrong" beliefs?

That transition from sincere philosophical engagement to reading out Patreon names was hilarious.

As an economics student I can say I would mostly use him to despair at widespread misunderstanding of my field. Your hypothetical was deeply chilling ;-;

You can't blame Harris for contradicting himself because he doesn't have free will.

Brocooli is highly underrated

Keep uploading bro, you have a new fan from Perú great video as always 😊

This was incredibly constructed, and super informative. Top shelf content

I got to say, your topic overview, depth-knowledge and argumentation is admirable. Thank you!

I want to listen to your videos on the side, as I focus on getting a heavily modded New Vegas to run, but I just can't because I keep clicking back on the tab with your video in it because your delivery and points are so captivating and interesting.

This is really interesting. Before this video my main critique of Harris was "I don't like how he talks and I don't trust him" lol

This was really eye opening. Thanks for posting.

I can't tell you how impressed I am with this channel's content. You should make a class on producing a video essay of real worth.

Ben Stiller should actually study the philosophical tradition in depth or stay out of it altogether.

Hello, I'd like to take a stab at your criticisms of Utilitarianism at 19:29. * "It is incompatible with a rights-based framework" ­- it all depends how you sum these happinesses together. If you describe happiness as a factor between 0 and 1, then average will make it so that (sqrt(0.25) + sqrt(0.25))² / 2 is preferable to (sqrt(0.5) + sqrt(0))² / 2. That is, if you apply an exponent X before summing (you get a square root when X=1/2), you can tune how much the individual matters more than the collective. Under utilitarianism, there is *some* value of N where killing one person is worth it if it somehow improves the happiness/quality of life of N people. * "If all that matters is the sum total of happiness" - in the example above I made the number a (square-rooted) average by dividing by the number of people I summed up. You can divide by anything you want, such as sqrt(number of people). Just like the exponent, most utilitarians won't give you an exact formula, because they don't claim to know it; I'm merely providing examples of how these two issues can be addressed with mathematics. * "We often don't think about right and wrong in terms of consequences" - yes. Utilitarianism disagrees with this, and most utilitarians frame these thoughts merely as heuristics. * ""The moral luck" argument" - Utilitarianism doesn't claim that someone is or isn't ethical, it claims that some action is or isn't ethical. If an action caused good while intending to cause harm, it accidentally was an ethical action, it's just that in the general case it's definitely not recommendable to try and cause harm, because if you do try to cause harm, you're much more likely to cause harm than good. People should act to do the most good based on their knowledge, and in general people should increase their knowledge in order to more accurately be able to do good. Let's say, somehow, by trying to kill someone in cold blood, I save their life. Did my action end up being ethical ? Yes. Should I go to prison anyways ? Yes, since systematically imprisoning people who try to murder others in cold blood will create an [addtional] incentive to not murder others in cold blood, and certainly, *more* murder attempts result in death than result in accidentally saving a life. This also works in the other direction. According to utilitarianism, people should concern themselves with actually causing good, not just with intending to cause good. It's just that nobody controls everything, and sometimes, inevitably, randomness will make a well-intended action cause harm and a harm-intending action cause good. An ignorant fool causing harm because even though he wants to do good is acting unethically because he refuses to get informed enough to actually cause good. * "Can't judge whether pleasure is good or not" - just like you can squareroot-average over multiple people, you can squareroot-average over multiple instances of someone over time. I'm currently making a video game; at times it can be hard work, but I'm investing in the happiness of my future selves, who surely will be satisfied to have accomplish that. Similarly, someone doing hard drugs all day may be getting a lot of pleasure up-front, but they're probably at a high risk of significantly reducing the happiness of their future selves. * "Which people to prioritize ? Prioritize maximizing pleasure or prioritize minimizing pain ?" - it all depends on how you add together, which formulas you use to average or sum happiness, what you even define happiness to be, etcetera. My point with all this is, consequentialism is a flexible framework from which people derive a variety of ethics, of which utilitarianism is a subset where the value to maximize is some meaning of "happiness". I'm personally not entirely decided about utilitarianism, but I've found that when I evaluate my actions, I always in some form of another care about the consequence. Even things that I've always thought to be dogmatic, like "I shouldn't lie", I realized I'm doing because I want to go towards a world where people are honest, and because I want to recognize myself and be recognized as an honest person. Sorry for the wall of text, good video, nice channel, have a good day !

"Abrahamic religion." Sam Harris would probably be a better example of secular Abrahamism in this context.

I'd been trying to figure out for years what it is that Harris does with so much charisma that makes his points difficult to respond to on the spot, and it's absolutely the penchant for unfalsifiable claims. He just does them in a very smooth way. Thank you so much, I'd pulled my hair out at one point trying to identify it. Wish I'd seen this six years ago, even though it didn't exist yet.

Videos with citations, this is wonderful

I used to think Sam Harris was an example of critical thinking and rationality. I have since changed my opinion. I appreciate how you helped make it even clearer that Harris is far from an example of how to construct rational arguments. Also, I think Sham Harris is somewhere out there. I swear I have seen that man before.

I would love to see your take on Pinker. He annoys me even more than Harris.

I would argue that he isn't contradicting himself between point one and point two. He may have written that a little bit lazily, or you're leaving out clarifying context, but if you listen to him speak on the topic it is clear that he doesn't believe that the ONLY thing you can reasonably value is well-being. Rather, that well-being is the only value reasonable to consider when talking about morality specifically. To value logical consistency, parsimony, etc, is a value with respect to a different goal than morality. Those are values related to discovering and communicating truth, not moral behavior.

Thanks for all this information. I never questioned Sam Harris before, but your content makes me think.

What I love most about this video is the clear irritation in your voice. All the videos that you have done prior have had a clam and steady voice, including your K-Pop take. You can hear the hot and speedyness in your tone, it's wonderful and I applaud you for not completely losing your cool.

imagine this happening in any other field , Fermat:"I have found this marvelous proof that is too long to fit in the margins of the book" hhhhhhh

Enjoying the critique - I found an issue in your argument tho - 9:26 It says Harris assumes (or nueuromania and thus harris) a Cartesian self - Harris explicitly denies the existence of a "self" BECAUSE of his understanding of neurology. I mean, they guy says subjectivity is also an illusion ffs. Harris does not think all causality is bottom up. Harris has pointed out the irreducibly subjective reality of consciousnesses repeatedly in his work - its one of his main beliefs.

Harris' fact/value argument is roughly equivalent to Rand saying that she solved the problem of induction, and then just using a semantic trick to make it seem like she did.

Excellent video. I'm a new viewer to the channel and really liked your critique of Harris. I wrote about this book in my philosophy undergrad class, making the point that it's only really a science-informed utilitarianism. While I had a view of this work similar to Rationality Rules', I've come to completely reject much of Harris's work as nothing more than amateurish and reactionary. As an aside, one of the things that drives me crazy about his books is his burying of arguments in the endnotes. He should include much of what he says in those notes into the main text, as it would improve the books (somewhat).

Thanks for the video and all them resource links.

Solid review. Thanks for sharing!

I remember being a fan of sam harris and then reading about this book. Luckily ive already had classes on the is/ought distinction put forth by Hume. Needles to say my admiration for him declined somewhat. I mean, it is so easy to see that his argument cannot work, even using his own hypotheticals. If a true psychopath claims that inflicting as much suffering to the people is “good” there is no emperical data that can help you prove him wrong. You can disagree with him, as most of us would. We cant tell him to jump of a building like we would to a person that denies gravity. There is a great deal of hubris involved i am afraid. Like wise his book on determinism. Eveything he writes had already been discussed by other philosophers. His works are just good for getting people interested in science and philosophy, and he should stick to that instead of make these grandious claims

The notion that science can tell us what we should value is obviously ridiculous.

I might just not be understanding correctly, but 5:43 doesn't seem like a contradiction. It just looks like you used some semantic ambiguity to make it look like it. When in the first statement he talks about value he implies it's within the larger context of morality and when he talks about value in the second statement it's within the narrower more fundamental context of objective knowledge.

I'm less than 60 seconds in and you've already got me laughing by calling Sam Harris' values 'Christian'. Going to watch the rest, but please don't pull a Jordan Peterson on me.

I wish this had been out years ago, it might have saved a lot of people a lot of time. I tried to read this book myself and "intuitively" gave up, because it seemed to have so little value to anyone seriously interested in moral questions. So glad someone took the time to point out just how useless this book is. Thank you.

Another great video. Knowing about the is-ought distinction is really helpful.

Great video, not only a thorough response to Harris but for the wealth of informational materials at the end!

Nice video. You picked up on the the I noticed when I was listening to the book. Harris rarely argues for or against positions. He usually just states that a position is obviously right or obviously wrong and then moves on without any argumentation. It's quite frustrating. I remember yelling "But you never argued for that, you just assumed it!" in my car when I was listening to the audiobook of The Moral Landscape.

Coincedently a day before this video was released, I listened to one of the discussions between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris (the 2nd one they did on podcasts) and looked a bit into Harris' opinions about the is-ought gap afterwards. I was quite disappointed, because all I got out of it were statements and opinions that to me sounded like any materialistic reductionist view, with barely any given arguments, nevermind any new argument that hasn't been put forward by previous philosophers. Now the fact Harris states in his own book that important philosophical developments are only of interest to academic philosophers says enough in my opinion about his engagement with the existing literature. I think you were spot on on that. Something else: When Derrida was mentioned in that podcast I listened to, Peterson joked ''Well we're simply not smart enough to understand the deeper meaning of his words'' and Harris remarked ''In the course I took about Derrida, I could not understand how fellow students could listen so inspiredly to such a word-salad''. This was really ironic to me since most commenters on youtube that are Anti-Peterson comment the same remarks about Peterson, like Peterson and Harris did about Derrida; mentioning ''word-salad'' and making sarcastic remarks about how they are not smart enough to understand, though when they try to put a point across why Peterson is wrong they indeed dó not seem to understand what Peterson is actually saying, without realising it. In my first year of philosphy one of the more prominent professors of the faculty gave the following advice to everyone: If you are reading a philosophical text and you start to think ''this is just gibberish and word-play, I can't understand how anyone has deemed this meaningful in any sense'', then you should go back and read it again because you most likely do not understand the text as well as you think you do. This has been true for me every single time those thoughts occured and I'm pretty convinced by now this is true for Peterson and Harris in regards to Derrida as well. So for anyone that reads this, whether you're a youtube commenter or a professor or neurologist or whatever, try to remember this advice from my professor, because its starting to look like it's the wisest thing I have personally heard in years.

What is so dreadfully unbearable for Sam Harris about terms like "metaethics", "deontology" or "noncognitivism"? Those are fairly simple terms. It's not quantum physics ffs. Also, you cannot write ethics off as boring, and then proceed to write an entire book about ethics. It just doesn't make any fucking sense.

I read Moral Landscape. My final thoughts were, this is a beginning of a conversation. The conversation is about getting people, as much as possible, to come together and define morals for everyone that wants them. That many religions, philosophies, societies etc find agreement through reason and dialogue. This process, if it comes to pass, would be done in good faith by people dedicated to bring forth a better, safer world. I did not understand it to be a bible, of sorts. I did not think it the end of conversation in philosophy for morality. I do think it can be instructional for steps forward in morality. The rest must be done by those that hold morality important for a better world. EDIT: While late to this discussion party, it appears I have stumbled upon an exercise in philosophical discussion, pro/con, of a sort. I took Logic and Philosophy 50 yrs ago. A short version of my discovery here is, has not changed much. One thing, ‘word salad’ is a term I learned recently, like 15yrs ago, as a pejorative. Those trying the hardest to make points should understand that first. Name calling and silliness in argument accomplishes, name calling and silliness, if your lucky. Enjoy college and keep the debt low. I did and it works. Be well and safe. Peace

I dont see a contradiction in statements (1) and (2) about the distinction between facts and values: In (1), he says "reasonably value", which as I understand it, translates to "using reason to derive it (the value)". Reasoning is the act of thinking or making judgements in a logical manner, therefore logical consistency is presumably assumed here. In fact, the value of logical consistency has to be already assumed (almost by definition) in order for a logical argument to be followed and for a contradiction to occur in the first place, otherwise we can only play tennis without the net. In (2), he asserts that "objective knowledge has values built into it (logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.)", which is in any way in contradiction with the previous statement. It just states that science and reason rely on presuposed axioms which attain to what our primate minds need to begin to understand the world around us and to extract practical knowledge of it. Of course, to suggest that Sam could argue that logical consistency is defined in terms of well-being seems to me an absurd counterfactual indicating a substancial amount of bias. I would argue that the order in which the 3 statements appear is rather arbitrary and almost weird, I would put (2) as the first one, followed by (1). I also think that to say that "well-being is the only thing we can reasonably value" is not only to set a burden of proof right away, but to make a bald and hyperbolic statement that needs strong justification (which Sam somewhat manages to do later in the book). I am not here to defend the ideas that Sam puts forward in his book for what he is, but for what they are. I think that his book is presumptuos and, as pointed out in this video, lacking references and previous work on the subject (which is more massive than Sam seems to want his readers to know). However, though the ideas in the book are not entirely original, he has been good at making his case and it is a far better reading experience that Cuck philosophy seems to want his viewers to think. In short, and I hope I am not misrepresenting his position here (almost for Sam's own sake), he is just saying that adequate reasoning and objective knowledge can only take place once assumed the axioms of logical consistency and so forth; and that once there, the only thing we can reasonably value (at the core) is well-being, since according to his definition, it relates to the states of mind of any conscious being, and everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness in some way or another. No contradiction whatsoever, albeit a bit misleading.

THANK YOU FOR CITING!

the entire book seems like sam saying: "cmon lets just do utilitarianism" which i personally agree with but i'm not going to act like i just solved meta ethics.

Thanks. Very informative and gave me impetus to look into the subject more deeply.

Grateful to have found this video. Thank you.

Most of this video is pretty solid, but the "problems with utilitarianism" presented are very flimsy. - The purpose of a good moral theory is not to be maximally compatible with other moral theories. Yes, while human rights are a very useful tool to improve the world in practice, utilitarianism doesn't suppose they're inherently valuable on their own, only instrumentally valuable. This is a feature, not a bug. - Very few utilitarians claim that the morality of an action is determined by its consequences, and there are much stronger arguments against that view than the one you gave anyway - such as that depending on how you interpret it, it means moral judgment of an action must either change over time as more consequences roll in, or must be postponed indefinitely until all eventual consequences have played out (the end of time), which makes it impossible to put into practice. Most utilitarians instead claim that the *expected* consequences determine morality. - Whether we DO always think about right and wrong in terms of consequences doesn't say anything about whether we SHOULD - a basic is/ought distinction. - The other points given are less "problems with utilitarianism" and more "things different schools of utilitarian thought disagree on because 'utilitarianism' is merely a category and doesn't describe a complete moral theory on its own".

Sam Harris made a companion between “well being” and physical health. Physical health is somewhat undefined on a myriad of issues. How fast should a person run? How much should they weigh? How best to maintain immune system. Etc. But we do have thriving sciences of nutrition, exercise, and immunology. It does rest on the axiomatic assumption of not wanting to be dead. And having a science of morality would rest on the axiomatic assumption of not wanting to be miserable and spreading misery.

Great stuff. Do you have any thoughts on Steven Pinker L's Better Angel's of our nature? As I recall, it was similarly panned by academia but adored in popular press.

Thank you for this! I’ve tried to read this book several times and couldn’t get through it, now I don’t have to

3:30 It's called premise. "We want to reduce human suffering" + "So how do we do that". Sam doesn't push for objective morality, he is just meaning that it is possible to measure morals with a scientific perspective (as premises). I haven't read the book. Science can't answer moral questions, but instead we can use sciene as a tool to for example, calculate how to minimize human suffering. Just an input, not saying Sam is right.

Very intriguing video, I agree with most of your points so far. However, I have one small problem with your "problem with utilitarianism" number 4, at least if you go with Bentham. Injecting someone with heroin does produce short-turn pleasure, but that's not the only aspect of what makes an action good from an utilitarian standpoint. The duration of the pleasure and the consequence of the action are also important factors. So, while it WOULD give him short-term pleasure, the negative effects that it would probably have on his life and the suffering it would cause, not only on him, but on people in his surroundings, outweigh the pleasure it initially produces. Edit: Just got to the part where you mention the felicific calculus. So yeah, if that didn't exist, you could argue that killing people is fine because the adrenaline rush makes you feel good for a little while.

31:10 - Philosophy can help us "love thee more dearly, see thee more clearly, follow thee more nearly" - Ben Stiller.

I'm loving all the book critiques.

9:26 I'd have to disagree with your first point about neuromania. Neuroscience in itself offers no distinction or separation between the states of "mind" and "body" (or alternatively the "spiritual" and the "natural") - on the contrary, it implicitly shatters any distinctions between those concepts. Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it rather difficult to have a duality when only one option exists?

This video manages to be respectful, honest, and yet utterly savage.

I swear I don't even understand half of what you say in a lot of your videos( and I have watched some of them an emabarssing amount of times) but they're so interesting...I love and appreciate them and keep it up

I just finished the Treatise of Human Nature and do not recall any discussion of the is-ought distinction. Can someone please point out where I can find this so I can go back and review it? Excellent video by the way!

Why do you say that his philosophy is fundamentally Christian? I Also don't think that Sam Harris would argue that the Tamil tigers are behaving religiously. He would simply say that they're operating under another pathological philosophy.

This was really really good. thanks.

“Happiness is distinguished from well-being only in this, that happiness is conceived just as an immediate reality, whereas well-being is regarded as justifiable in relation to morality.” -Hegel

Really happy to see people are reading Ray Tallis! Bennett and Hacker's Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience is also wonderful.

Ben Stiller knows what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, and that makes his mix of hubris and intellectual laziness even funnier.

Great refutation! Thank you!

Are these recommended books in the description - especially from "preterhuman" - legal to download? I'm just curious, since i might have clicked on one of the links without knowing that they are direct downloads, and now i feel kinda anxious about that. Thanks anxiety, you really helping me out on a daily basis. Answers are appreciated, have a nice day :)

Damn this was a really good critique. Instant sub!

Haven't finished watching the video yet, but on the note of "Experience is not reducible down to neural states." The example you provide is unconvincing, and I think the fault is the result of our inability to translate experience to and from the neural level to the extent that is likely possible. I would argue that eventually we will be able to allow a blind person experience what red is like. The technology and science isn't there yet, but it's moving in that direction.

He's an expert in one field and thinks that field overwrites all other fields of study.

Great video. I kept getting the feeling while reading Sam's book that he must have written it in only a week or so, it very much feels like Sam's general talks written out linearly. At least, I hope he didn't put too much time into it.

How is it that you go about doing your research? What is your method?