Harris' 'objective basis for morality' argument is flawed. He imagines the 'worst possible misery for everyone' as providing an objective basis for moral knowledge. Yet there is a problem with this:
1. Even if we could understand what the 'worst possible misery for everyone' universe looked like (which we do not), there would be no action that would be universally 'worst miserable' for everyone. The worst possible misery would be slightly different for everyone, depending on what they subjectively found worst miserable.
2. Therefore we can draw no legitimate moral knowledge from this supposed 'objective' basis for moral knowledge, even if we accepted Harris' axiom about well-being. What objective moral laws or truths can we draw from a situation that provides only the subjective knowledge that this or that scenario is worst miserable for this or that person? The example is self-defeating. It shouldn't be surprising that when we check out this supposed objective basis for moral knowledge we only find a mirror of the subjective disagreements concerning morality.
On page 39 of TLM Harris says:
Quote:
"It is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone"
This premise is meaningless and useless. For a start we do not know what the worst possible misery universe for each person is, so we cannot know how to avoid behaving in such a way as to avoid it for 'everyone'. It is a useless place to start, unless we wish to defer doing morality for who-knows how long.
Also, even if we did know what the worst possible misery for each person was and this was practically avoidable, this would be different for every individual, so in moving every individual away from their worst possible misery, we would be able to gain precisely no moral knowledge of the kind that Sam Harris would like, whereby we can scientifically tell the Taliban they are bad. We cannot move from moving everyone away from their own worst misery, to anywhere else. Harris' argument of 'worst possible misery' actually ends up being an argument for moral relativism.
There is also another massive problem for Harris which magnifies all his other problems. Harris says that the well-being of conscious creatures must be the basis for deciding values. Yet he does not seem to provide a working definition of what consciousness entails or a justification of his definition as a dividing line in terms of well being. If we assume that Harris has a broad definition in mind, simply ‘the capacity to feel well-being or otherwise’, we must include the well-being of all conscious creatures in the entire universe into our ‘worst possible misery for everyone’ formula. If it wasn’t bad enough already, perhaps if we start removing Harris' anthropocentric arguments and replace the words ‘human’ and everyone’ with ‘all conscious creatures in the universe’, we can see how distorted, truly subjective and meaningless his supposed objective basis for morality becomes. We have to start wondering what the worst possible misery for individual tadpoles looks like, if they have the capacity to feel pain and how much tadpole worst possible misery equals one human worst possible misery, (if we presume that all human worst possible misery is an equal amount of misery, which is almost certainly either meaningless, undecidable or wrong). As anyone should see, this is only going to lead to truths of the most subjective kind.
