Hi everyone!

In this blog post, I’ll articulate why I believe Sam Harris’ strongest argument dealing with the is-ought problem ultimately fails.

One of the reasons I think Sam Harris is so popular is specifically because of how strong his arguments tend to be and how clear his thinking is. That being said, as correct as I think that he is when it comes to the inevitable divisiveness and existential dangers that come with organized religion, I think his arguments on moral philosophy tend to be a bit weaker, despite how strong they may seem prima facie.

The reason I believe that the argument that I am about to spell out is his strongest is because this one took me the longest to figure out what was wrong with it. Anyway, the argument goes something like this:

“There is nothing but facts in the universe, so if we were to ground morality in anything, what else could we ground it in other than facts, if facts is everything that we have?” [1] [2]

It’s difficult to think of what’s wrong with this view at first glance. In fact, in a solo podcast episode on morality and rationality, Sean Carroll – who famously debated Harris on moral philosophy – [3] expresses sympathy for this argument in a not-so-subtle nod to Harris, saying the following:

“Now, you may have heard on certain corners of the internet, that we should be able to derive moral rules from the universe. The idea of deriving ought from is. What you ought to do from what is actually happening out there in the world. And I’m also sympathetic to this in some sense, right? I mean my best glib argument that you should be able to derive ought from is, “Is is all that is.” I just said that I just believe a universe exists, right? That’s what is real, and there’s nothing extra that is real other than the universe. So, if we’re going to talk about oughts, about moral rules, where else would they come from, but from the universe, but from what actually is.” [4] [5]

Admittedly, it is a strong argument, and I’m not sure that it would be possible for me to make it any stronger than Harris ever did (or than Carroll did here). That being said, I had a bit of a “Eureka!” moment the other day while watching Harris’ second public conversation with Russell Brand, in which they discussed Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pharmaceutical industry. [6]

Brand and Harris have major disagreements on all of these issues, but how does each one articulate their disagreement exactly? Do they do it by only using facts? How would it be possible for two people to disagree if they are both being strictly factual? Is one set of facts more “factual” than the other? There really does seem to be something “extra” to the conversation that is not merely “facts,” doesn’t it? What is that “something”?

I think that of all the people that have had conversations/debates with Harris, the person that was best able to precisely articulate the core of this idea was none other than Jordan Peterson, who had (to my count) seven public conversations with Harris. It was actually during their third live event that this happened, and I suspect that this degree of clarity was reached by this person at that event because of the time that had elapsed between the second live event and this one (over a month), time which Peterson presumably spent ruminating continually over their previous four public conversations.

In any case, see below for a partial transcript.

SH: For me, it’s just facts all the way down. You’re describing more facts.

JP: Okay, great. Glad to hear it man. Why do you need a brain, then?

SH: Well, a brain is yet another part of reality. What I mean by a fact is anything that is–

JP: But what does it do? If the facts are just there, what does the brain do? It has to do something, ‘cause otherwise you don’t need it.

SH: Well sure, it does… a lot. [7]

That last bit of questioning by Peterson was so good, I want to repeat it:

JP: But what does it do? If the facts are just there, what does the brain do?

Now as much as I enjoy a good joke from Sam Harris, this last bit seemed counterproductively evasive to me. In fact, it struck me as what Ravi Zacharias called a “partial truth” in his book Jesus Among Secular Gods: The Countercultural Claims of Christ. [8]

“In which battle did Napoleon die? His last one. Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? At the bottom. What do you have if you have three oranges in one hand, and five in the other? Big hands. Partial truths can be as uninformative and misleading as lies, and because we like thinking we are in the know and we hate feeling ignorant, presenting partial truths as the whole truth is very much in our human nature.”

Of course, a brain does do a lot, but this wasn’t what Peterson was inquiring about. Peterson was specifically asking about the brain’s relationship to facts, since Harris seemed to be implying that facts can simply be accessed directly. Of course, even if there was such a thing as “facts” out there in the world, that information still has to be filtered through our nervous system and, ultimately, to our brains. This is a point that Peterson repeatedly made throughout his conversations with Harris, a point which never seemed to stick. And herein lies the fatal flaw in Harris’ strongest argument, perhaps best articulated by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

Is it surprising that the person who pressed Harris the hardest on this point publicly is someone that was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche? Probably not. I do think Nietzsche is right and, going back to Russell Brand’s conversation with Harris, each one really was sharing not simply “the facts,” but the facts as they understood them. We really can’t access the facts in the raw, so to speak. We have to interpret them. Which is what the brain does, by the way. The brain interprets the world. And that’s a fact.

One must wonder if Harris’ evasiveness was conscious or not…