A few of my online critics like to claim that my involvement in apologetics and with the Interpreter Foundation has afforded me a lifestyle of exotic travel and extravagant dining out. And, of course, they’re right: Today is the first of five days devoted to another bout of precisely such fine dining and adventurous sightseeing.
With John Donovan Wilson and Camrey Bagley Fox, as well as James Jordan and Russ Richins and Mark Goodman of Redbrick Filmworks — unfortunately, my wife could not come along — I spent much of the day involved in filming in and around the old Territorial Statehouse in Fillmore, Utah, for our ongoing Becoming Brigham series.
For Peterson Obsession Board investigators who are keeping track of these important things, yes, I ate today. Yet again. Clearly, unlike normal people, my life absolutely revolves around food. I eat every day, even while traveling.
Here are the disturbing details: Before leaving my house in the morning, I enjoyed a glass of chocolate Carnation Breakfast Essentials. For lunch, once we had driven south and after some filming at the Statehouse, I had a mushroom-and-Swiss burger at The Eatery in downtown Fillmore (2020 population roughly 2592), accompanied by onion rings that I happily shared with the others and washed down with a very cold plastic “glass” of ice water. In the evening, after we had completed our day’s shooting, we went to the Iceberg Drive Inn at the southern end of town. I wasn’t overly hungry, but I did have a mini-size chocolate milkshake. We’re spending the night here in Fillmore at the Best Western Paradise Inn.
I will try to keep my monitors at the POB informed as to the specifics of my eating during this Redbrick Filmworks/Interpreter Foundation filming trip. I know that this matters to them.
Our focus for today’s filming was on Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, slavery, and race. We’re in Fillmore because, from 1851 to 1856, Fillmore was at least nominally the capital of Utah Territory –although the territorial legislature met in the town during only one term, in 1855. Among other things, we’re treating the important 1852 “Act in Relation to Service” that was passed by Utah’s terrestrial legislature and signed by the federally appointed territorial governor, Brigham Young. I spoke about the Act at last year’s FAIR conference (see “Brigham Young and Slavery”).
Here are my notes (with a few contributions of my own) from Hyrum Lewis, There Is a God, 110-112:
If morality can’t be deduced or derived from matter and only matter is truly real, can another source for it be identified?
Lewis cites the example of the vocal “New Atheist” Sam Harris and his book The Moral Landscape. In that book, Harris contends that we can get morality from science.
Now, at first glance, such a claim seems pretty obviously silly. Compassion can’t be proven good in a cyclotron or a chemistry lab. Does botany tell us anything about whether slavery is wrong? Can a microscope demonstrate that torturing animals or abusing small children is immoral? Don’t we already know that murder is evil before we enroll in a course on evolutionary biology? Has any scientist ever engaged in laboratory or field research for the sake of constructing (or falsifying) a moral system? (You may recall Sir Karl Popper’s contention that “falsifiability” is a requirement for a scientific theory to be meaningful.)
But Harris’s argument isn’t that obviously ridiculous. In The Moral Landscape, he contends that we can base our morality on science by determining, scientifically, what promotes “well-being” and then deciding, on that basis, what we ought to do. For example, living in community makes us happier than living in isolation, thus contributing to our well-being, so the promotion of community and living in community are moral goods. Donating to charity also enhances human well-being, so it is also demonstrably moral. There is no need to invoke God here, he says. All we need is science.
Where, though, does Harris get his principle that we should pursue happiness, or well-being? Where does that should come from? Isn’t that already a value-laden or moral judgment? And, if it is, was it scientifically derived? Was it deduced from counting lichen spores or finding exoplanets? Is it falsifiable? And why couldn’t someone, instead, declare that we should pursue domination, or power, or pleasure? Or control? Or enlightenment? Or growth or experience or “fulfillment”? Or expanded Lebensraum for the Aryan race? How can one distinguish between those goals “scientifically”? Evolutionarily or biologically, couldn’t someone make the case that the true moral imperative is the maximum spread of his genes? Why not? How does one determine “scientifically” that happiness or well-being is the one proper moral goal? Isn’t that a nonempirical leap of faith?
Lewis cites Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography (161-162) as saying that his work in philosophy “brought moments of delight, but these [were] outweighed by years of effort and depression.” Still, even though his own personal unhappiness was often the result of his effort, he continued, as he saw it, to “pursue truth.”
And can science really determine what brings happiness or well-being? Will expanding the welfare state maximize happiness? Many think so. But many others argue that increased dependence on government welfare will, in the long run, reduce human happiness. Does the prosperity that results from free trade outweigh the jobs that it sometimes destroys? Marital fidelity has been shown to be a contributor to human happiness, but not a few people have found happiness, as they imagine, through promiscuity.
John C. Calhoun evidently contended that African-Americans were happier as slaves than they would have been as free men. Assuming for a moment that he was right, would that have morally justified slavery? Enslaving others may well have increased the happiness of the enslavers. If eliminating a subset of society could make the remainder of the populace happier, would that be morally justifiable? (Imagine that the genocide could be accomplished painlessly, perhaps even without inducing anxiety. Would that make a difference?) Is there a calculus for determining how large a number of people might ethically be eliminated?
If happiness or well-being is the criterion, cases can surely be imagined in which enslaving others or committing murder or genocide would increase well-being or happiness for at least some portion, larger or smaller, of the population. But all normal people know, without needing to research it or think deeply about it, that even painless murder is morally wrong. How do we know this? On the basis of what do we know it?
Posted from Fillmore, Millard County, Utah
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