on ted http://www.ted.com/search?q=sam+harris&x=0&y=0

Is this guy really being held up by the left as some sort of Big Thinker? You know he advocates torture for terrorists, right? As do I.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Is this guy really being held up by the left as some sort of Big Thinker? You know he advocates torture for terrorists, right? As do I.


You really have a strange worldview. To you, "The Left" is the entire part of the world that discusses things, read books, write articles, critizise religion and dogma, thinks critically, disagrees internally and just plain THINKS, isnt it?( in addition to being all Stalin-supporters, naturally)

Your thoughts mirrors exactly Stephen Colberts rule of thumb: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"

To me, Sam Harris is a thinker, but its not because I'm "on the left" or because he is, its because he fucking thinks. I dont really care if he cheers for Sarah Palin, if his ideas are interesting and good, they are interesting and good. Why the fuck does every thinking person need to conform to your idea of some "leftist agenda"?

The use of torture is to me a question with a weird property: Its difficult to answer in principle, but easier to answer in reality. The ticking bomb example has probably never happened in real life, probably never will. The other thing is that if it ever happens, torture probably wouldn't work: imagine you had like 1 hour till the bomb goes, you got the bad guy, and start torturing, whats to stop him from giving in after 15 minutes, only to give a false address, and have the police waste another 45 minutes?

So basically I disagree with Harris on the torture question, so there you have it, qm: leftists commies disagree! its like Hitler and Stalin all over! (Except Hitler was a rabid right wing loon, but who cares, thats just in liberally biased reality.)

I have the same problem with this video that I had with his TED talk. He still hasn't explained how exactly science is making these value judgments. All science can do is give us, through experimentation, raw data about the world we live in. After that, we need to interpret the data. At the end of the day, then, it is still people that are deciding whether something is morally right or wrong, not "science." The people looking at that data have their own subjective values and that's going to influence how they interpret the data.

Science is about empirically testing out hypotheses. Yet, Harris asked what value does wearing a burka have for human society and doesn't even seem to realize he's already made two value judgments (that wearing a burka has no value and that we shouldn't engage in activities that don't contribute to society) without having undertaking any empirical research to support his claims. If his answer to that is "it's obvious" then he's already defeated his own standpoint because science isn't answering the question of whether burkas are morally right or wrong, his a priori knowledge is. Stewart was right to throw that in his face--that for some people in certain circumstances it indeed might have value and that in fact that value is completely subjective.

(Just to be clear, I don't in any way, shape, or form believe requiring women to wear burkas is good, but I also don't kid myself into thinking that belief is based on any sort of objective empirical evidence).

I think that there are flaws in his argument, but the point that many people do rely on the church for morality unnecessarily is a good, and fairly obvious one. Does he consider himself a positivist?

Listen, I think Harris is a fine thinker. I've enjoyed reading some of his materials.

But he brought absolutely nothing to this interview. When I watched this on tv I was just thinking how disappointed I was with his absolute nothingness he brought to the table.

Very disappointed with this, unfortunately. I was expecting more from him. Perhaps nerves of the big lights and cameras? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Harris hasn't done his homework. He's reading contemporary context into something that he's thousands of years removed from to make an argument.

Look at slavery. In first-century, when the New Testament was written, there was not a great difference between between slaves and the average free person. Slaves were not distinguishable from others by race, speech, or clothing. Slaves earned a wage equal to that of free laborers and could earn enough capital to buy themselves out. Most importantly, very few slaves were slaves for life. Most could reasonably hope to be manumitted within ten or fifteen years.

By contrast, New World slavery was much more systematically brutal. It was "chattel" slavery, in which the whole person was the property of the master. In the older bond-service form of slavery, only slaves' productivity (their time and skills) were owned by the master, and only temporarily. New World slavery, however, was race-based, default mode was for life, and the whole trade was resourced through kidnapping.

Now, I'm not trying to argue that women should have to wear burkas. I think it's despicable. However, he asks the question "is it good for human flourishing for women to wear burkas? Does it make more compassionate men, does it make more confident women, does it improve relationships between the sexes?" I think science would show that it doesn't do those things, but since when is that human flourishing? It can't be shown empirically and it certainly isn't self-evident to all people. Wouldn't the Muslim world say that human flourishing has nothing to with relationships between the sexes, but instead submitting to Allah? That would mean that the things like forcing women to wear the burka and sharia law DO improve human flourishing. It's all in how you define flourishing and progress, something I think Harris just completely didn't do.

Different cultures, political parties, and ideologies all have different ideas of what progress and flourishing are. If society is going in the wrong direction, then the most progressive person is actually the first one to do an about-face, which is why all groups believe themselves to be the most progressive or on the right side of history. The question that should have been tackled is What is human flourishing?

I think you're overstating your case on the slavery thing, Morganth, especially in the Roman Empire of the first century, though you do have a point about the fundamental differences between the old/new slavery, i.e. the systematic destruction of entire nations for slave labor instead of it being just a natural byproduct of war/conquest. It is no accident that slaves were largely visually indistinguishable from the general populace, the Roman Senate knew and feared that if they were easily recognizable then they could easily identify each other and therefore join arms and rebel against their masters (to the ire of the prevailing opinion of the day which spawned numerous proposals of this which failed to pass many times in the Senate).

The majority of slaves in the time were the absolute property of their owners who reserved the right to whip, beat, and kill them with no fear of punishment (again though there were many "charitable" masters but your case is a bit overstated), pending the various forms of either outright or payed, formal or informal manumission if their masters even granted them that (not to mention the carrot-on-a-stick of just the possibility of a freedom which may never come kept slaves in line and obedient, removing the impetus of even trying to improve one's lot in life). This was no guaranteed right by any stretch of imagination. To say that the average slave was no worse off than the average citizen just had me honestly and genuinely scratching my head for a bit.

Your issue with Harris on slavery is a matter of degree not kind.