zarth

So, I'm reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris. I can't say as agree with his thesis entirely - for my own part, god-based religion is always delusional, but not necessarily always pernicious - but I appreciate the militant note he supplies to the arguments in favor of secular realism, and I appreciate further the wedge he's attempting to drive between liberalism and relativism.

But I just finished the chapter where he basically talks himself into supporting torture, and I'm fucking disturbed. I can understand and to some extent agree with his criticism of pacifism, but it seems to me as if he misses one the points that he himself made earlier when he draws a moral equivalence between torture and collateral damage. He addresses the equivalence of consequences, but totally ignores intentionality.

Now, I don't believe that good (let alone indifferent) intentions excuse evil consequences. The firebombing of Dresden was an atrocity, regardless of its military rationale. But it wasn't a deliberate and proximate act committed with the immediate purpose of generating intolerable suffering in its victims. I don't necessarily know how much of a difference that ought to make - and I think we as humans tend to let ourselves off the moral hook too easily most of the time - but for fuck's sake that's got to make some difference.

No wonder that Right-deviationist fuckwit Dershowitz praised Harris's book. As for myself, I'm feeling a little queasy.

Anyway.

Edit This was a response to Wildswan's comment, below, but I thought the original post (i.e., this) could probably stand some clarification.

I do think, though, that it's both fair and necesary to draw a distinction between pluralism and relativism. Pluralism is a political virtue - it can cause a lot of problems, but when you start monkeying around with someone's right to be wrong it establishes a precedent that leads - usually by a very short path - to tyranny. Conversely, though, if you sacrifice the ability to identify (and, moreover, denounce) wrongheadedness, you lose the very advantage that is supposed to be derived from pluralism to begin with - namely, the ability to freely evaluate the worth of ideas. If all ideas are equal, there can be no such evaluation.

Indeed, Harris himself observes that the distinction between reason and faith is precisely that reasonable beliefs, because they are based on evidence, are answerable to evaluation and therefore can be changed on the basis new evidence.

In the sense that I reject relativism, I would definitely consider myself a secular realist. There is truth and untruth, there are good beliefs and bad ones, and there is a right and a wrong.

Harris's points on torture come in the context of the fallibilty of moral intuitions, particularly where proximity is concerned. I think his reasoning is probably flawed and his conclusions are certainly distressing, but by and large he takes a very liberal stance on most issues.