http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the- ... challenge1

I wondered if you'd be interested in trying to win £22,000, as even though we've never discussed it, I thought there might be a chance that you would disagree with the premise of this book seeing as it being about science being used to determine human values. Perhaps you'd agree with it, but either way I thought you may be interested in it. You have 1 more month to enter an essay/and read the book. I am certainly going to read the published essays.

I would be tempted if I had time. I get the general idea of what he's trying to do. Taking a concept that is not a propositional object of science and making it into one. By that I mean that there are claims which science can meaningfully make "this atom weighs more than that atom", and there are some which can never in principle be scientific "this atom is more dignified than that atom".

For Dawkins that maneuver was logically impossible because God can only be an object of scientific investigation if he agrees to join in. But Galileo took heavenly bodies that were considered outside science and brought them into the fold, so this sort of revolution is not impossible. In Galileo's case he was able to observe the heavenly bodies and demonstrate a crucial aspect of the Aristotelian substance theory was untrue. As it was that latter theory that was preventing science from taking astronomy away from philosophy, he eventually won the argument.

Unfortunately, even without reading his book, I can see from his responses to criticism that he is in trouble. He seems not to understand that the is/ought problem can be ignored quite safely elsewhere, but for his project to do so is viciously circular.

Medicine, which is not concerned with discovering the meaning of "ought", can sidestep the fact that it is impossible to derive an ought from an is except with the assumption of another ought because medicine does not need to meditate on the meaning of ought in order to do its job. But when you are trying to discover all the things that ought, and arrange them in order of importance, you can't just assume the first one like that, you have to ground it on an is, and nothing else, or it isn't scientific. So by escaping Blackford's criticism, it appears that he throws himself rather clumsily into Nagel's trap.

If he can't find a better way out of the is/ought problem, then he leaves himself in the unfortunate situation of needing to establish that this science ought to be studied, and not needing to at the same time. If the science will itself bring untold misery to all, then never studying it in the first place is the scientifically correct thing to do. But this science doesn't need a reason to be studied, it is assumed to be correct from the beginning because it is just is - with no ought attached. So it is paradoxically both right and wrong to pursue the study.

His identification of morality with the resulting brain states of people presupposes that what makes an action right or wrong is the consequences of that action, not the rules that it was based on (which are right or wrong irrespective of consequence). But his is/ought escape (admittedly, as described outside the text in question) is rule based and ignores consequences. When messing around with ethics, such confusion is invariably easy to exploit.

While I haven't the time to read it now, I will see if I can get round to it later in the year. In the meantime, I hope Mary Midgley pitches in, this sort of thing is right up her street, and hers would undoubtedly be a more interesting response than mine anyway.

There was something about how Harris explained the "worst possible state" when he was talking that just screamed in my head "no that doesn't make sense" but I've note been able to pinpoint it, it's not his logic that does it for me, it's just something fundamentally with trying to define something in the physical world that only exists in the mental world. I think I will have to read the book (I've only heard him talk about it). He is, for me, the weakest of the "four horsemen of new atheism", the others being Hitchens (not Peter) Dawkins and Dennett, but I wonder if it's because I need to give him more time, ultimately it's no shame to be the weakest of that lot (you may not agree of course).

I have just listened to Mary Midgely rant for ten minutes with the most blatant straw man argument I've heard against The Selfish Gene, but I will give her the benefit of the doubt that it may have been an isolated case. To be honest I think you could do a better job though.

Sometimes she feels a bit too strongly about a subject and she does lose it a bit. It's a disorienting world for her though. Remember, most 93 year old philosophers are busy assassinating the reputations of their dead enemies, she still feeds on the living.