How Is “Convert, You Sinner!” Loving?

I disagree. Harm can be measured in damage and dollars, so it is very real and factual. I don't expect a religious person to understand my view, but I will try to explain. You cannot steal from someone, damage private property or assault someone without cause and claim you were doing good, it is not possible. It is common sense really. Harm = wrong. Giving food to someone who is hungry = good. Most people do not need your help, so not doing harm is the best thing you can do for them.

Emotional harm is hard to measure, but is indeed quite real and can be equally damaging. It also takes longer to heal in many cases. The best way to avoid causing emotional harm in your daily life is to just mind your own business. Don't give an opinion unless asked for one. I know it is easier said than done, but it is the right thing to do.

The only reason someone would want to complicate the issue is to try to justify doing bad in the name of good. It is factually wrong.

Lets keep the conversation to real life please, Oz is not real or relevant.

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“I don’t expect a religious person to understand…”
Actually, religious people understand you on this; it’s postmodern moral relativists you need to worry about. I believe in moral absolutes (though I admit that circumstance is certainly necessary to consider in formulation of the specifics–that there aren’t really any universals, per se, except to love), as should seem clear from the fact that I referred to a belief that there is one ideal way in life.

“Oz is not real or relevant.”
I’m getting the vibe that you’re not much into metaphor, but that’s what it was. I was saying how sometimes, what looks like a bad thing to us, like Dorothy getting hit over the head, can make someone else simply ecstatic, give them a realization of something that, for them at least, was a very good thing in fact.

You find damage and dollars objective? What is a dollar, objectively speaking? (It’s not even some fixed amount of gold or a slip of paper, in the modern economy.) Then, relating it to a measure of damage, means giving it value. Why is money valued? Might not the same quantity of money mean more for some people than for others? From my experience in the world, I would judge that it does, and the Official Christian Position agrees—cf. Mark 12:41-44.
It’s actually a good thing that different people value different things somewhat differently. These differences make it possible for *everyone* to feel they’re getting more than their fair share of common resources! (However, the optimization necessary to achieve this is quite problematic: Pareto optimality would be unsustainable under conditions of imperfect information and free choice.)

Now, you think stealing from the mint is wrong because there is an economically measurable net-loss. So how is it any different really from theft of our common natural inheritance? (I mean natural inheritance in the sense that Thomas Paine used it.) So I guess homesteading is wrong; inheriting money from one’s parents is wrong; wealthy parents paying for their kids to go to the best schools–or even getting to go to school at all–is wrong; using up the earth’s limited oil (or any byproducts thereof) is wrong; etc. It’s not just unfair bias, it’s theft: from others’ opportunities, or from that which was formerly reserved unto future generations, until you decided to steal it away from them.

Thanks for the link! Very interesting video. And I agree with the majority of what Sam Harris is saying here.

As I said, I’m not denying objective moral truth; I was simply saying that an individual’s judgments on it may well be mistaken, and it seems Mr. Harris would agree. Furthermore, you seem to see crystal-clearly what Sam Harris suggests requires years of careful scientific scrutiny.

People tend to make their personal decisions in the interests of their own overall, long-term well-being (or, if sufficiently empathetic, that of those closest to them), but they make their prescriptive moral judgments based on the well-being of society as a whole, just as morality is defined by Mr. Harris. This creates conflicts in personal ethics (from blatent hypocrisy at its worst, through self-deception regarding society’s best interests, to a failure to really think through such matters at all, or even more extreme, the rejection of the institution of society altogether).

Sam Harris mentioned the distinction between individual well-being and collective well-being but never directly addressed the matter of conflicts between the two, It appears from his definition of morality though that would defer invariably to the communal interest. Sounds OK, until you realize how attempts to acheive this optimization affect the individual. I will leave someone feeling wronged all the time and all feeling wronged some time. So why the society over the individual? And how are you goint to get individuals to cooperate with that? It’s the same ideal that communism starts off with, and it invariably backfires. It’s possible that one might be starting down a slippery slope when asking, as Sam Harris does, “How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count?” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of free-for-all market economies either, but with this sort of thinking, it seems that not only abortions but, after birth even, infanticide, could be okay, and where do we stop? with “inconvenience” to society sent to Gulags? As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the Kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.”

There are a substancial number of people who’d have problems with this ethic, based on “truths about how human communities flourish”. For example: neo-cons. A lot of people solve the is-ought problem by saying what ought to be is what works for me, not society (especially if that would require giving of myself for somebody else’s benefit). Why does society matter? What’s the point in it beyond serving the individual? Either way, there’s still a hole in the is-ought problem. It is why. Of Randian objectivism we may ask: Why should I–or you as the case may be–”flourish” in whatever sense we define it? And of Harris’s ideology: Why should the community “flourish” in whatever sense we define that? Why should we care, about either of them? What makes them “right”? And then, which is *more* right? (I don’t have much of problem here really, since Jesus already gave us the solution almost 2000 years ago.) What is it to flourish anyway? What I consider optimal society, might not be what you do. Perhaps you would think it a society that’s growing, numerically, while perhaps someone else would think the world crowded enough already. But why should we flourish? Some would rather we suffer! (e.g. )

Of course, the fact that, in most cases, almost everyone can agree regarding these sorts of issues is further proof of my point that human minds and metal states are really quite similar in fact! Indeed it is this fact that Mr. Harris suggests using to formulate general rules about social behavior to apply to the problem of community optimization. The same things that cause you pain, suffering, harm, detriment, generally cause it for me. But you can’t measure such detriment in monetary value or any other sort of value, because sometimes, some people WANT to give their money to someone, and other times they don’t, and that is a subjective judgment.

Anyway, Sam Harris appears to agree that it’s not so black and white as you say. He says there can be multiple peeks with different optimal solutions along a continuum of possibilities. Speaking of which, he neglected to address the conflicts that arise from different people trying to climb up different peaks, which came to mind since I coincidentally had happened to see yesterday at Huffington Post an interview by Steven Colbert with the author of “God Is Not One”, who said basically, the way he sees it, different religions are charting paths up different mountans, and these differences are critical to understanding the cultural dynamic and conflict in the world today.

Sam Harris is proposing morality as the means of optimization according to the social welfare function–which it is–it truly is–but he neglects the little matter of there not being any “objective” ideal for the social welfare function. Some are better than others, but Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (a brilliant work of logical reasoning, if you ask me) basically means that the only “fair” social order is a dictatorship. That result doesn’t bother me; my goal is to ensure that it is a dictator of the Holy Spirit! I’ve got no problem with having despot in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus. So is that “good”? Well, it’s surely either bad or good–net-harmful or net-beneficial. (God, how I hate using such criteria, because, deny it as you might, it gets so subjective and subject to manipulation in the worst sort of ways–just go watch some college debate teams, training our next generation of politicians, lobbyists, junk-marketers, and trial lawyers to lock up the innocent and get the guilty of scot-free–thanks to brilliant manipulative skills that we consider it a virtue to instill in our youth, while failing to educate them up to par on the international arena in so many other ways. Surely that’s not net-harmful overall though, right? Well, at least I’m sure somebody out there could convince the majority of the US population that this is the case.) So how can we know? How do you measure the benefit of seeking first the Kingdom? And in the ways should we seek it? Caring only about the net result, shouldn’t we be as Machiavellian as necessary? Yet that undermines the very nature of the Way to the Kingdom!

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