Atlas of non-landscape artists
Upon my algorithm a video from DigitalGnosis appeared streamingly with the title Sam Harris Still Hasn’t “Solved” Morality w/ @lanceindependent, 2024. It’s a critique video reacting the one by Sam Harris (i.e. streaming in realtime while listening to it) . The pair is quite well-prepared so it is not a “I’m amazed” reaction video. This is the first I’ve seen from either of these philosophy youtubers, and I have never watch Sam Harris’ channel so… anyways here we are.
Sam Harris has gained some brand-recognition with a version of his thesis published as The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values and the two youtuber philosophers in the stream find Harris annoying for a host of reasons. I have difficulty disagreeing with any of those reasons.
Do I think I have solved anything? Like, maybe, say, morality? No. But. Maybe I have dissolved some rash devotion to outcomes from the worlding urge, of which morality and the 'problem of morality' are examples.
When I pick up a book with a title including the word landscape I am suckered in for a good while, or at least a passing skim-through when I should be doing other things. For me the word landscape conjures up all sorts of interesting and complex interactions and their compositional powers over substrate, terrains, umwelten and fitness orthorexics. Not a lot of this in Sam Harris’ work. The book title is a bait and switch, I reckoned.
With The Moral Landscape this dipping-in happened a good half decade after it was published, picked off a library shelf, and well after I had read about the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic among Homo species by various primatologists and paleontologists with anthropological interests (by various writers Boehm, de Waals, et al).
I don’t remember (this is nearly a decade ago) anything in Harris’ book that caught my interest. At all. Except the hook of the word landscape. Disappointment followed. When I looked today in my bibliographic database (Zotero) the book was not in it, which I like to think is thorough.
There was one other youtube video from four years ago: Why Sam Harris Is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape” (in 2020)
Reminds me I should create public Zotero groups for my favourites topics’s bibliographical references on this blog. [Hint to youtubers] I’ll do it as part of the migration from substack to self-hosting.
The point of this post to not to discuss a book I have taken very little from— but to state that I am aware of it, in a way I am not aware of some other book I skimmed a decade ago, and five years after the book was published. The Sam Harris brand is annoying because there are other writers who have influenced me more and I do not even know who they are, I have not even forgotten their names because I have never been allowed to know them.
A new book
In this first video streaming video on Sam Harris, at about an hour in, lanceindependent mentions a book, and a couple of its essays as good.
So I bought the book, and it has arrived before I have finished listening to this stream. It is an ex-library book from San Diego Christian College Library in Santee, California – I prefer books with provenance and second-hand hardcovers are a lucky dip I enjoy.
Now to find the space to read it.
One thing I strongly agree with in the critique video by DigitalGnosis and lanceindependent is that Sam Harris’s ‘boredom’ jibing dismissal is rather rash, and I agree that there are people and resources dealing with this topic, moral philosophy, he could ask intelligent questions of/about. As could I. As should I.
By the same token a lot of philosophy looks like the worst implicate thickets of metaphysics and who has time for all that, I cannot even put time aside to listen to this entire stream, and I want to.
What I recognise in the dismissive jibe in my own not-a-trained-philosopher experience, is not so much boredom but the realisation that so much of that metaphysics (I share the empiricist perspective BTW)(or I think I do) will actively waste my time (deontology for example, or anything that justifies throwing something into the… —gap, or any desperate measures to explain some particular outcome as if it was a prior (art/religion/polities). Of course this just underlines the advice by DigitalGnosis and lanceindependent to seek help.
I would have bought the book anyway.
See follow-ups at A Stich in time.
Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. London: Black Swan, 2012.
Carefree Wandering Why Sam Harris Is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape” (in 2020), 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGt0I5MbQSI.
DigitalGnosis w/ lanceindependent . Sam Harris Still Hasn’t “Solved” Morality w/ [@lanceindependent. @Digital Gnosis] 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWHV-NtPoYA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aTU6Qd4kc
Gray, Kurt James, and Jesse Graham, eds. Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: The Guilford Press, 2018.
Stilgoe, John R. What Is Landscape? Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015.
loofs samorzewski, meika. Why We Should: an introduction by memoir into the implications of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic, or, Anyone for cake? Hobart: meika loofs samorzewski, 2019. [PDF]