*quality *doublepromote

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by gwiz665.

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, May 5th, 2011 5:42am PDT - doublepromote requested by gwiz665.

*talks

Adding video to channels (Talks) - requested by gwiz665.

Thanks for the doublepromote and quality, gwiz! It's a very interesting discussion, and I have to give a shoutout to the audience here, what a Q&A! Usually theres a bunch of people asking far-off timewasting questions that seems to take forever to ask. These people were right to the point, and asked interesting critical and hard questions! Hands down!

I really enjoyed this, the only thing I was a little disappointed in was that Sam used pretty much identical material to his debate with William Craig, so a lot of the first half of it is rehashing previous arguments, however as mentioned by @BicycleRepairMan the questions at the end were excellent, and I thought he answered all the questions, including the ones from Dawkins with a great deal of intelligence.

Atheist porn! Woo hoo!! Now I can eat second breakfast and watch this.

Brilliance from 42:00 when Harris talks about the grief pill. Talk about having something stick in your mind for a day.

He did really skirt around the happy pill issue though. I had my virtual hand up during one of his previous talks and wanted to ask that question, so I was glad when Dawkins brought it up. However Harris restructured the hypothesis to make it easier to answer; which was disappointing. On top of that; his answer largely just exposed his entire argument as not really solving what it proposes to solve.

He asks us to accept (which I do) that there is a baseline for misery; therefore there can be a measure of 'true' results to human happiness.

If this is true then there will also be a baseline of success and measurable results for a happiness pill. He avoided this and gave more specific examples of what the happiness pill would be; thereby introducing several strawman problems with it.

Dawkins even chipped in (42:10) 'well you slanted again; it wouldn't have to be like that'.

When you reduce Harris' proposition and the main problem with it; it comes down to that. Whether morality can be measured and tested in a scientific way; therefore allowing decisions to be made based upon those measurements.

The argument against actually manifested itself most strongly when he was discussing the grief pill hypothesis. He answered the question with another question: 'When would you take that pill?'; which ultimately breaks down his entire argument. If there is something fundamental that prevents his proposition from answering that question; then it shows how his proposition is unworkable beyond the 'low hanging fruit' brought up by one of the audience.

Besides, if we did implement his ideas it would require measurement based planning. As a software developer that has spent time developing to measurement based management, and as a Brit with a very measurement based government, it's my opinion that measurement based planning leads to the 'tail wagging the dog'.

With measurement based planning; the actual real world goals that you are trying to achieve will always take second place; and will even be forsaken in the interest of achieving measured results. In Harris' scenario, this would eventually translate to the use of the happiness pill; rather than making decisions about the real world in order to achieve that happiness.

So let's take the straw men out of the happiness pill hypothesis (as Dawkins intended), using a scenario from the movie The Matrix where everyone is hooked up to a machine that feeds them a virtual life that provides mental sustenance. Of course, the purposes of this was quite different to the happy pill hypothesis; but the scenario is right. In the story Agent Smith actually said (paraphrasing) "We did try to give the humans a life of bliss, but eventually they rejected it. There is something about them that requires misery.", but let us suppose that that life of bliss worked out just fine.

In that scenario, we have now perfectly succeeded in achieving Harris' goal of measurement based; scientifically engineered happiness for all. However, I think most people would agree that the scenario is abhorrent and undesirable.

Harris also answered this problem with another (quite woolly) question (paraphrasing): 'How close would we want that happiness to track reality?'. Again, if his proposition cannot answer that question, then it is largely unworkable.

If I was Harris, I would explicitly state that his proposition is exclusively in regards to making real world decisions; and not about engineering happiness at an individual level.

Sam's argument seems to be a logical one, not a scientific one. I may be missing something.

>> ^L0cky:

He did really skirt around the happy pill issue though.(...) He answered the question with another question: 'When would you take that pill?'; which ultimately breaks down his entire argument. (....) If I was Harris, I would explicitly state that his proposition is exclusively in regards to making real world decisions; and not about engineering happiness at an individual level.


I don't think he skirted around the issue or broke down his argument. Part of his point, which is also embedded in the title in the book, is that a one-shot ultimate happiness pill isnt possible, or even desirable, which is why he describes a moral landscape, as opposed to a moral scale. I think the comparison with health really nails it: you can be fat an eat unhealthy, for instance, and still be "healthy" in the sense that you dont have terminal cancer or a severe depression etc. The definition of health, in other words, is not really a scale, but a landscape, where you can literally be Lance Armstrong with x number of tour de france medals and going strong and still be what doctors would call "terminally ill"

What is sure, in medicine , however, is that if you do have cancer, for instance, the best way to treat your body would probably not be 5 burgers and 40 cigarettes a day.


The same could be said, as Harris puts it, the best advice to a country with high infant and mother mortality, is not to burn down schools designed to teach small girls to read.


This is clearly not "just" a real world descision anymore than our basic concepts of health at an individual level

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

The same could be said, as Harris puts it, the best advice to a country with high infant and mother mortality, is not to burn down schools designed to teach small girls to read.

This is clearly not "just" a real world descision anymore than our basic concepts of health at an individual level


If the goal is to engineer happiness for people, then you may spend time and effort on R&D in pharmaceuticals, biochemistry, neurology (Harris' background), etc. If the goal is to achieve happiness by changing the world around us, then you may spend time finding ways to improve education in poorer countries.

There's a stark difference in which one of these you invest in; whether you find one is more achievable than the other or not.

Granted, a "perfect happiness pill" may not ever be achievable; but we already know there is some degree of success with existing medication for a range of disorders such as anxiety and depression.

In health we look at the effects of medication (anti depressant helps this; anti-biotic helps that); but we also look at the effects of behaviour (eating too much does this, not exercising enough does that). The practice of one does not exclude the other; and I can concede that you could apply the same to morality.

I'm just not confident that there is as good of a correlation between moral decisions and happiness as there is between practice and health. Therefore you can't use happiness to measure the success of moral decisions in the same way that you can use health to measure the success of medical practices.