Just wanted to comment here to proudly share that I've been sober for 1,679 days.

The title is perfect because I feel like I’m missing 30 years of context for this conversation.

This is professional yapping

the flaw with this line of reasoning is that morality is almost never an individual construct. It's a collective one. We don't follow moral rules solely to benefit our own personal pleasure, but in order to participate in a collective where we gain benefits from that participation. You don't need a moral framework to live as an individual. You only need one in order to live in a community as part of a collective.

Judaism: Murder is necessary. Islamism: Murder is necessary. Christianity: Murder is always bad. Sam Harris: Murder is probably not ok in our current 21st century moral landscape. Jordan Peterson: What do you mean by "murder" ?

Im just sitting here smoking a bong pretending like I have the slightest clue wtf they are talking about. Anybody else? lol

11:50 This is literally the crux of the disagreement. "Objectively better, *IF* better means navigating away from the worst possible misery for everyone [...]." Alex' point seems to be that the universe itself has no prescription to do what increases wellbeing. Sam's point seems to be that, if we agree that wellbeing is better than suffering and use that as a foundation for ethics, "right" behaviour is rather determined. The fundamental question is whether one accepts that suffering should be avoided and wellbeing enhanced.

Excellent Alex, love it.. Definitely showing the value of definition or should i say honesty of definition..👍✌️

Hearing Alex say "Minecraft" is something I never knew I wanted.

I’ve taken that special Music pill before … and I’ll probably take it a few more times to come

Can’t you just say humans are essentially pack animals, we’ve evolved to be social and have empathy because we need to work together to survive. We also have a hierarchy. I think that is sufficient in explaining “morality”, it’s ingrained into us already.

This was a great rip! Really enjoyed it and following the joust is always instructional on some level, even if only to make one reflect on the matter of communication itself. Specifically I felt Alex was somewhat attached to the comfortable feel for him in the term "preference" (now that's a preference!) I felt it bogged things down a bit unnecessarily, and as a thinker he could have used the opportunity to re-asses how universally this term is appropriate. I would have been interested in where things could have moved on to. But no matter, I can find more content with Sam around to see what else he's got to say about this. Good Show.

Perhaps it's me but I heard him talk but i did not hear him say any thing .

What Sam is missing is that what people agree to as being "moral" depends on the people involved. Even if being smashed in the face with a rock is universally DISLIKED, it doesn't make doing it morally wrong in an absolute sense.

I think the literal fact that morality is also expressed as "judgement" that judgement is only about taste, the judgement is not built on anything that isn't a person taste interaction.

Alex nailed it, there are objectively better and worse ways to achieve my subjective preferences. Sam disagrees and then explains in a way that demonstrates that he actually agrees.

Sam finally respecting the coaster is the best in this.

If you limit your preferences to your own perspective, you will result in different value judgements than if you consider the preferences of the entire system. That doesn't mean that because you get two conflicting answers that the value judgement isn't real.

I'm a big Sam Harris fan, but I'm in Alex's camp here. No matter how you dress up a "should" or "ought", it remains firmly in the realm of subjective judgement. And "Subjective" doesn't mean "less worth standing up for" than "Objective". It merely means we are continually required to reargue and justify our claims regarding it to others in our society. We can put to bed questions such as what 1 + 1 is equal to, but we really have to continue negotiating questions like, "How much of our GDP should we spend on housing and feeding the poor?"

Thanks for making this section more easily replayable until I wrap my head around the implications of what this all means.

I think the line "That does nothing deflationary for me" sums up my growing stance on this. morality is at its core subjective but so what? does that make it worse that something objective? That would require a subjective evaluation. many of the things we value most in life, indeed the vary act of valuing things is subjective. The short hands of "good" and "Evil" denote from a perspective what we believe to be beneficial of harmful to overall well being. Emotivism appears to be 90% correct in its observation of the state of things but goes to far in apparently discarding the value of value judgements and the short hands used by a moral system to denote those judgements.

A straightforward basis by which to parse this entire conversation is to notice that it's trying to get at the difference between DESCRIPTION and PRESCRIPTION. Everything else follows from this. Also notice that, except for this distinction, Alex and Sam are talking about the same phenomena and the same concerns. So is it a fundamental distinction, or something derivative or arbitrary? Well, I think it could hardly be more fundamental. It's the distinction between how things are and how things might be conceived. It's the distinction between (empirical) science and (conceptual) mathematics. It's the distinction between territory and map. It does not, however, provide a distinction between what is moral and what is not moral. Morality remains poorly grounded whether you attempt either a descriptive or prescriptive basis for it. Alex might say that it's sufficient to describe how preferences associate with possible choices. That's fine, but we aren't passive observers. Nothing happens until some choice is exercised, and that choice is ours to make. Sam might say that given these preferences, certain choices should be prescribed. That's fine, but we aren't emotionless robots seeking to optimize a set of parameters. If we can't sooner or later feel the preference, we have no warrant to follow the prescription.

@Rachel Oats Happy Autism Awareness Month, congratulations on being one of us autists! I appreciate you identifying as autistic because your skillset & talents make for excellent representation by providing yourself as a living counterexample that refutes several harmful autism stereotypes that persist here in the United States, because our culture is 15 years or so behind England in terms of progress of public awareness, lessened stigma, & tolerance of people with autism. We adults who have autism here in the United States suffer greatly from a wide variety of abuses, disrespect, misunderstandings, ostracism, social isolation, & chronic unemployment. From my own perspective, even though my own experience of decades-long poverty due to corporate stigma against hiring autistic employees has robbed me of many forms of agency enjoyed by most adults, and the passive violence of social isolation has taken 15 years off my life expectancy, for me the very most intolerable consequence of living my first 42 years as a person with undiagnosed AuDHD living amid America's cultural stigma of all difference, especially disability, most of all autism was constantly recurring experience of indignity of suffering humiliation of being treated inferior & having my voice & my wishes ignored by those people whose position in beaueacracies provided them an opportunity to enjoy the power that indulging in the infantilization of someone who is at their mercy offered them. I have observed that America's false-meritocratic culture that judges human worth by their wealth exacerbates infantilization of the large swaths of society who already suffer from the bigotries of Christianity, such as misogyny, racism, & anti-intellectualism, that run rampant throughout Anglophone society.

i’m happy to see that i have some sort of understanding of this after watching debate and philosophy videos for like 6 months

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things." Romans 1:22-23

There's no fruitful discussion before the morality as its subject is properly defined and understood. Things can be good or bad depending on the assigned terminal goal. Only conscious entities can have a goal, thus the existence of goals and morality depends on the existence of conscious entities.

This conversation goes over my head.

Individual potential for boo and yay can both be multiplied exponentially through community/relationship. Morality is therefore (at least) an aggregate of our shared biology and emergent potentiality. Whether you call it subject or objective morality simply follows from whether you think it's helpful/meaningful to cordon off humanity from the universe.

But then again, what is freedom? And if freedom is what we strive for on an individual level what would that freedom look like? When 'my freedom is not the same as your freedom'... Because subjective experiences of the physical world is guided by totally different parameters in my case than the guy or girl next to me...?

Wow, reading the comments and seeing how many people are missing that living according to one's preferences IMPLIES the inclusion in those preferences to not be ill-treated by the group for one's said preferences trangressing predominate desires of individuals that have found, in the device of alliance, means to deliver said ill treatment. The group has predictable minimal standards (look at different cultures across time and space and see what moral attributes are common to them all) that are in-turn based on the subjective preferences of individual, predominate, human nature. This is why Alex's perspective is not an open door to chaos.

Alex strikes me as one of those guys that many of us have met, who are so incredibly brilliant that they trip themselves up on rather simple matters. I appreciate coming across this content to remind me of what i left, yet this is a much more elegantly articulated form of the materialist paradigm i ever debated for. This allows me to better consider why i reject this position so fervently now. Edit: i find you to be the most consistent and ingenious materialist! I arrived at similar yet more elementary deductions during my undergrad, which made me miserble and unbearble to be around 🤣 i ultimately felt that meaning must exist, and yes that was my emotion😁; yet i have developed faith that emotion was leading me to something deeply True. I wish you well and shall pray for you!

I read up on A.J. Ayers a while back in my study on ethics in college. So forgive me if I'm inaccurate in my assessments anywhere. The main issue I have with non-cognitivists such as Alex's Ethical Emotivism stance is that there are, in fact, truth-apt claims in moral positions. For example, what emotional states you and your parents regularly express in your formative years during adolescence will shape what genes are expressed later on as you grow up. This is a known in the study of epigenetics. These emotional habits you have later on in life lead you in life. They can lead you into a more trouble adulthood (childhood deviance leading to criminal behaviors later on) or more harmonious lifestyles (becoming a caring nurse/doctor that genuinely listens to their patients needs). This realm of ethical study is known as evolutionary ethics and it made me doubt much of the non-cognitivists positions and claims about ethics overall. But I diverge away from Harris also. I'm not sure where to place Harris' ethical position just yet. Maybe a universal prescriptivist? that argues for objective morality. But that position also suffers a number of ethical dilemmas that a KZfaq comment could hardly cover. I would rather steel man Harris and get a more proper scope of his ethical position before saying anything against it.

Love this use of words :)

Time to take up horseback riding if you haven’t already yet Alex; there’s two apocalyptic horses vacant. You should of course the one that pisses off Peter Hitchens the most.

📍9:51 2📍 6:38

It may be only me, but I thought that these two fed off .. .. if I may use that phrase.. .. they fed off each other and the result ‘for me’ was a sumptuous increase in value - in my mind... both of them are now loved that much more by myself..

What Harris misses, starting around the 10:30 mark, is that Adam and Eve will have conflicts of interest. Generally speaking, in between "the worst possible misery for everyone" and "maximal bliss for everyone", there is the possibility of bliss for me and misery for you. Whether that feels good to me depends on how much I value my own wellbeing over yours as an ultimate concern. In turn, the value system that maximizes my utility function depends on that. That makes the preference among value systems subjective, and, indeed *very* subjective.

As much as I like alax some talks he has with guests goes right over my head

There is conscience and there is what is reasonably right and wrong. These are the two tools that helps to get rather close to what is objectively right and wrong. What is a roadblock here is humans subjectivity so that needs to be objectivised for best results. Lots of psychology and introspection will be helpful here.

I believe we can get a clue about moral objectivity from analyzing data from all cultures. A Universal People dbase exists and it is useful to see what moral and ethical constructs are widespread or universal.

I still haven’t heard Sam answer the obvious challenge: Why is human well-being objectively good???

It sounds to me like he just doesn't get what most people mean when they say "objective morality" or is actively trying to redefine it.

That was fun!

A while ago I thought: every act is selfish because even the “selfless” acts we do are in anticipation of the guilt we’d feel if we didn’t act selflessly. The selfless act is delayed gratification in pursuit of long term gratification for us or our genes. A smarter person than me pointed out that while that is a perfectly valid definition of the word selfish, it serves no practical use in reality. We would simply have to redefine the word selfless as a consequence. While I agree you can hold the framework Alex does and it could be perfectly logical, I would like to see some practical use for defining the word preference in this way. Otherwise we may have a hard time making progress in the reduction of suffering

Hi Alex :)

This is the most difficult to follow exchange I’ve heard in some time. I can’t make heads or tails of what’s being said by either at almost any point in the conversation.

I wonder if Alex thinks "sacrificial love", whereby one gets fewer "yums" but does something for the sake of another's "yums", is in itself explainable by yums. Perhaps Alex would say there may be fewer yums but there could be at least one great big yum (in the mind) regarding sacrificial love (putting others' needs ahead of oneself). But does that really explain sacrificial love, since the best sacrificial love is getting no yums at all. I think Alex really has no explanation for sacrificial love - laying down one's life for others. Does Alex really think war vets defended our freedom by seeking the next set of yums?

"Boo Murder!" Presumably, finding others who agree with Boo-Murder demonstrates its utility. My concern is that emotivism leads to mob rule, the mimetic contagion as described by Rene Girard. Scapegoating is critical to the success of mob rule and I would argue it inevitable to the evangelization of an emotivist expression.

One thing I haven't heard mentioned is how Harris's idea of the moral landscape seems really naively utilitarian: Like it seems like he would have to say that you ought always to pick options like wireheading or the experience machine, because he can't seem to justify not always picking the option which is "higher" on the moral landscape based on a simplistic utilitarian calculation.

Sam Harris is speaking gibberish.

This comment is meant as a comment and a question, not a judgement, even saying that first feels difficult. I have been look at the experience of psychopaths, Ive been wondering how this discussion of morality etc has an overlap with an exploration of psychopathology so called?

The objectives of psychopaths are way different than the objectives of normal people.

Mirrors pointing to mirrors with no hierarchy.

Sam's views of morality are quite muddled, which is a bit ironic since he considers morality objective

IMO there are two interpretations of the word "objective" which cause much of disagreements in discussions about morality. The hard interpretation says that objective means independent from any observer. A statement can be objectively true or false even when no one is observing or verifying it. For example, the existence of the sun is objectively true even if there's no conscious entity to observe it. The soft interpretation says that objective means independent from whoever makes the observation/evaluation. It implicitly assumes that there's always conscious entities to make the observation. By definition, morality exists to distinguish between good and bad things. This distinction requires a goal as the evaluation criteria, or something to compare against. In turn, it requires a conscious entity to pursue the goal. Those who said that there's objective morality must have used the soft interpretation, because otherwise, they are making an oxymoronic statement. On the other hand, hard interpretation leads to the conclusion that there's no objective morality.

Achieving as much wellbeing as possible is as objective as you can get. Almost everyone agrees with getting more wellbeing, just like we all subjectively experience gravity but agree that it exists in an objective way. We can kind of objectively say that more wellbeing is morally better.

It’s an objective fact that we DO value certain things, by our nature. It’s not that we *should* (an ought) but we DO. There are better and worse ways to realize them. The ways to realize them, made a study, would be the study of morality. I swear I don’t see how people don’t see this. And, of course, we have to start with moving away from the things we don’t like, and moving toward things we do. Like medicine is a science. But, who is to say that health is better than sickness, or life better than death? We could easily find a place to stand, philosophically, that questions these values. But, we STILL have a science of medicine. This would be a similar assumption in a science of morality. Healthy > sickness + means = medicine Well being > suffering + means = morality. It is pretty simple. I don’t see the reason for all the confusion.

Sam does himself a disservice. He uses the word objective in a way that even he doesn't mean it. The "separate peaks" of his moral landscape show this. Each peak is its own subjective value system within his proposed landscape, and he concedes this. And this is more or less the singular point of contention to his proposal.

I would subjectively prefer the debate about why subjectivity is objectively negligible at explaining the physical universe. Human experience is so insignificant as to make this perspective completely dispensable without losing anything important.

Can you make a video about the Frege Geach problem?

You're really milking this one interview lmfao

Hello friends, I understand Sam very well. We getting collectively hung up on the objectivity feels to me much like the hyperskeptic "but how do you know anything is real?" type of people. If we fight Sam's "objective" reasoning, we'll have to grand that absolutely nothing is objective, not the existence of matter, the past, of other minds, nothing. We could do that, but holy shit, that just kills the game on the spot. So if we had to pressume ANY objective realities, I think Sam is doing a good job

As a theist and a Christian, I believe that morality requires agential (i.e. non-deterministic) discrimination between what we consider right and wrong. So I think the notion of materialist determinism denies us "choice" in any meaningful sense of the word. My question is, how can moral categories even be applicable if all of our thoughts, "choices", and actions can only unfold deterministically?

My take away is that it's good to try to see the good in other cultures ect, and when they can enhance my life and overall wellbeing.

I'm very confused at this point. Can somebody please unravel the mystery of emotivism to me, cause I seem to be unshaken in any tangible way?

Alex you come across as quite closed minded in this exchange. You often cut off your interlocutor the moment they bring a slightly different angle to the topic, which I observe is your preferred mechanism for clarifying you both understand the foundation of what was meant previously, but it also shows you don't trust your interlocutor to navigate the complexities of your train of thought. When discussing these topics with a knowledgeable person, or a person with a lot of empathy (who repeatedly shows that they understand what you mean and that they will ask you to clarify if they're unsure), it would be nice to see you ease off the pressure and try harder to engage in a genuine exchange, to show you are willing to accept new information and perhaps even accept slightly different ways to arrive at a conclusion you previously did not see the value in. Love the content!

I have been following this discussion since Sam’s book came out. I especially appreciate the series of discussions between Alex and Rationality Rules’ channels, and for a brief moment, I nearly sided with Alex. But I think this conversation sees Alex and Sam fill in the picture between their positions enough to see that they’re more or less on the same page, albeit from very different pathways. I’m happy to hear feedback to my claim here. I do think Sam’s position deserved more questions because on the surface it seemed to be breaking some rules, but if we admit the possibility of a material world presenting facts about what is better for human existence even on the most essential levels, we can say that science helps us find moral objectivity. I do grant Alex justifiably takes this position to task, as we all should, but once we find ourselves on that desert island with one other human being, we quickly strip the cultural and social compexity of modern life to see there are objectively good and bad things on the menu for two stranded humans beings.

I've already had this conversation in my head. I dont need to see two people talk about something I can discuss with myself. But i watched it anyway. 🤷‍♂️

Listening to atheist is a fucking headache. When I listen to pastors for our Christian faiths, our imams or our Muslim brothers, and even Buddhist Bhodivistas and Hindu Adiyogis, it’s always a breath of fresh air. So much knowledge and wisdom simply explained in lessons, our chores and devotions, our priorities and our unity, we work in tandem for common goals, very natural and spiritual connection stays alive and worked on. When athiest talk, it’s always a probing, dissecting, splicing and over simplifying shit, it takes you hrs, to weeks to years to dance around a simple notion when it comes to them, when we hear our mentors in our faiths, it’s simple yet gravitates towards prudence, always on progress, always on results of fruition. I love my Bible, my Christian fellowship and my churches I go to, comfort in this world of peril, strife and sorrow. Most athiest I talk to are on a string line of meds, always figgity, always know it alls, always on the brink of suicide, yet all the brethren’s of faiths I talk to are always calm and collective, ensuring and comforting. I don’t even bother with the naysayers anymore. I just turn to the people of obedience and steadfast faith. Stay up brethren’s of faith. You couldn’t pay me to debate an atheist or sit through their bullshit, you’ll be sent to a realm of chaos and uncontrollable bullshit. Stick to practicing the Bible, the Quran, the Mahabharata, the Gita, the dhammapada and other holy books. Build stronger fellowships, and attend to your churches, mosques, temple gatherings and live.

William Lane Craig destroyed Harris’s moral position years ago in their debate.

Why does every conversation that anyone has with Sam Harris feel like Sam is having a different conversation than the host?

I will prefix this by saying I have not yet seen the longer form discussion yet. Alex’s description of this relativist agent trying to maximize local rewards and that their policy generation is somehow special is missing that there are policies that maximizes expected rewards even if it does not optimize to his optimal policy for his current trajectory. There are actions that for a population raise the total expected reward of most people which one could argue is “good” relative to actions that aren’t (albeit a utilitarian argument). Just because not all good moral argument do not raise all rewards does not mean that this is not a good policy in general. Indeed, it may be hard or impossible to scope all actions that may raise all trajectory rewards (especially in an optimal way) in a world of stochastic scenarios but that does not mean good judgments cannot be claimed.

Why doesn't Sam talk about how zionism is morrally bankrupt

There's no such thing as objective morality. Even when morality is universal, it's still subjective. When something is a banality, like "you won't throw acid on the pretty girl", easly shared by everybody, it's still subjective by its own nature. Sam Harris needs to buy a dictionary.

Interesting exchange. I actually found the last little by by Sam very interesting. I'm not sure this is what he was trying to say but it almost seemed along the lines of since their are objective laws of nature there is objective morality. In this case morality being maximizing well being, or pleasure (from Alex's terminology moreso). I've never heard it argued that way and it makes me a little more interesting in the idea that there might be "objective morality. Essentially since the systems that determine all the outcomes (laws of nature, physics, matter, etc etc) are in fact objective so all of the outcomes that translate to "better" outcomes would also be at least somewhat objective due to that. I guess two ways to say it is looking at murder. A) Murder isn't objectively bad, but I view it as subjectively bad since ultimately isn't productive and/or I have a distaste of it etc or another way to see it might be B) Murder is bad because the objective systems we live in, life and death, hurt and pain, joy and suffering, entropy, etc... all ensures that murder is ultimately and objectively bad. Maybe the B perspective points to the idea that thinking things are good or bad or whatever is subjectivity might be surface level only, deeper beneath that their might be objective systems in our lives and universe that essentially ensure that we will subjectively dislike murder etc. Of course murder is an easy one to proclaim such things for, a lot of other things become far more gray of course. Though maybe there's still an underlying "moral" system that is ultimately a product of the laws of the universe (not some intelligence of course). Though even if all those assumptions hold true that list of things is probably small since sure something like murder might be something most people could agree is objectively worse than say not murder, but most things aren't so easy to proclaim something like that about. Say freedoms for example. Determining what freedoms are moral or aren't is very tricky. The freedom to not be imprisoned for example, the freedom of movement. Though if you commit a crime severe enough then it might be better for the whole that you be imprisoned, or even for yourself. Of course one might say murder is ok in certain cases, say to end a homicidal maniac, to deal with dangers or threats. Though if my emotivism style "Boo" to certain kinds of murder is essentially hinged upon objective systems our universe and reality are based on does even that Boo or Hurrah statement become objective? Though not universally objective for everyone, but our individual sources of it stemming from something objective. This is where objective vs universal might be important to distinguish. Maybe our multiple moral systems are in fact objective if not universal. An interesting thought exercise though.

I like Alex's "music preference pill" hypothetical, though I'd be interested to hear Sam's position on a pill that opened you up to positive preference towards war, or murder, or violence in general i.e for those growing up in violent or wartorn conditions

Weirdly I can’t understand not understanding Sam Harris’ view of morality

I'm an atheist, and I admit I have no objective morals. But neither do theists, even if they think they do.

There are at minimum 2 basic concerns to morality that they only briefly touched on in this discussion. 1. At rock bottom, It's a collection of conditional statements, combining preference with objective facts. If one cares about X, then Y is the action that gets you there. And Z are the consequences. 2. It's in the context of other people. Whether the results of your imperatives derived from #1 align with others matters. One may have personal dilemmas when one is the sole inhabitant of an island. But not moral ones. Moral dilemmas only enter the picture once you have two sentient entities that are involved in the results of such action. Moral conflicts and divergent solutions arise due to the interaction of multiple prescriptions of the conditional statements and the impact it has on other people. I'm surprised Sam doesn't reiterate this as he's done before in other discussions. It quickly dispels much of the confusion Alex has. His example about taking a pill that would give him appreciation for music has no moral context, it's purely a personal choice. One must insert it in a moral context, another person that is impacted by that choice, in order to turn it into a potentially moral one. His father believes it will distract him from some other endeavour or it will cost his father money for him to explore it. Now we have a stage on which to discuss a "moral" choice.

I invite all to read "The Objective Morality of Transcendent Experience". The most updated version is on the No Termination without Representation blog.

Listening to Sam talk about how to ground yourself morally is like hearing an overweight alcoholic doctor tell you to stop smoking.

Sam Harris, in a Bart Simpsons fashion, should write 50 times on a board: "Even if we agree on an opinion, that doesn't make that opinion objective"-

In my opinion, what is missing in the desert Island is value in anything other than yourself. What I mean with this is: if we only drive ourselves by our own feelings and experience we prefer over others experiences, there is no actual sense of morality because you would just do whatever you like the most, and even doing something you don't like would be not wrong because you might just be experimenting to discover anything new you didn't know you like... The concept of good and wrong comes when you have to consider how you actions will affect something of value other than yourself. In this case, murder is not something one disapproves by itself as an experience, but as an outrage against something of value. For example, if we don't value a fly's life, there's no moral debate about killing it if my experience is improved by removing the fly from the picture... the "booo" about murder comes from thinking about murdering a person of something of value other than ourselves. Now where comes the idea of "something of value other than ourselves"? I think here is pure evolution, where the only system of value that works in a community is a system where my values don't contradict the values of others, therefore, things like "I like how it feels murdering someone else" can't prevail in time, since it would crush against another person's system of values, which would include himself by just survival instinct. Therefore, we would evolve in a way our system of value contemplates others, the same way it contemplates ourselves, and we should add things we need to survive too, so killing a pig to eat, would be consider good, but killing a pig for fun would be consider bad, because I'm damaging something I would might need in the future... Killing a fly won't make a difference in my life experience, so we didn't evolve into care about a fly's life. I also think the process of considering things of value from other things we already considered valuable, is an evolution of our reasoning, in which we could understand the world into more complex experiences or activities which might benefit the things we value even if its not obvious in first hand... like eating healthy because we value being healthy in the future.

The problem with the thought experiment involving taking a pill to gain a love of music is that it lends itself to infinite regression or recursion. Taking such a pill would entail a desire to have a desire for music. But what if you didn't have a desire for a desire for music? Does having a desire for a desire even make sense? And even if so, can we not take it even further, with questions about having a desire for a desire for a desire for music? And so on. To me, this suggests that a first-order desire for something is the only level of order that makes sense. I know that there's the complicated phenomenon of addiction, where a person desires a substance in one sense, while recognizing that the substance is harmful. In that case, though, I consider it a case of competing desires, in which case it's a matter of which desire is stronger, not a "nested" system of desires. And perhaps we can rethink the "music pill" thought experiment along those lines, too, where a desire to fit into wider society's love of music overtakes the personal aversion or apathy or music prior to taking the pill.

I disagree with Sam's argument that conciousness is the only evidence for conciousness in the universe

Ethical Morals are by definition subjective and relative. They are subjective because they are a social agreements over to what degree social behaviors are good versus bad. They are relative because simplistic ethical moral values do NOT fit all relative situations. The relative specifics can change the ethical moral agreement. This not only applies between two or more human individuals but within a singular human, because the human mind is a swarm intelligence, which means within the swarm intelligent community of a singular human mind there is debate, disagreement, and hopefully agreement upon to what degree social behaviors are good versus bad. Because ethical moral values are subjective and relative, we often get ethical moral values which are enforced by our social leadership which we individual humans disagree with.

Sam seems to be saying "Bad things are bad, and good things are good." Alex seems to be saying "Bad things are bad because I personally don't like them, and good things are good because I personally like them." In my view, the disconnect seems to be that Sam is making the leap to say that what is bad is objectively bad. Alex seems to be saying that that view is subjective, even if it can be proven that bad things have objectively bad outcomes.

It seems there is an underlying assumption that may not be entirely accurate. While individuals may express a desire for the utmost pleasure, their actions are often heavily influenced by their existing beliefs and preconceived notions. They do not seek ultimate pleasure; rather, they seek to derive pleasure from the things they perceive as desirable.

To me it all comes down to accepting that the very term "Morality" is a constructed space in itself, in which you can place truths. Like if I say: Spiderman is objectively speaking a superhero. The same with morality. That word is a construct. It is an idea. It is not a thing, and it for sure has no existence without sentience. And so in that framework, I agree with Sam: If morality has ANY validity as an idea, it must be to seek out the peaks of sentient wellbeing. And so, while we may no be able to postulate what peaks are the highest, or what routes are the optimal, we can FOR sure, AND objectively say something about two situations within this construct. We can measure them up against each other in terms of this axis we call well being. Is it tricky? Sure. But it is not subjective, unless you pick very similar elevations in this landscape.

I think consciousness isn't as subjective as everyone thinks. I keep amazing myself with how well a reference point works in discussions of every kind, including this one. That reference point being the natural world. Take the color blue, I can know that many of my fellow humans can precieve that color through a myriad of ways, scientific and not. Though the perception of the color is subjective, the color objectively exists. The color blue exists in nature, so do we, and evolution allowed our consciousnesses to detect its prescence. Likewise, genetics has clearly shown us that our DNA is extremely similar from individual to individual, across races, which means the conservation of genes responisble for my ability to see blue is in you and billions of other humans I share the planet with. And what's fascinating is our understanding of deficiencies in seeing color whereby those incapable of seeing blue can now ware glasses specially constucted so that one with color blindness can see blue. None of this is possible without the acknowledgement of an objective reality. Thus, statements of health, wealth and prosperity are not as subjective as I might think. Which means guiding principles of morals and ethics do impact objective truths about reality which means the impacts have a range or spectrum dependant on a multitude of natural varibles that truley exist and find varying degrees of overlap with everyone's ability to experience the same.

Maybe I'm not grasping what you're saying fully, but I believe there are moral values that are intersubjectively shared and are not merely expressions of individual emotions. Those values are honorifically objective as they are established by the moral assumptions shared by human communities. In other words, there is a basis for morality that transcends individual emotions. In fact, these values can be defended rationally and are susceptible to change and debate within a community, implying that they have coherence and persistence (coercivity) that go beyond instant emotional reactions. Any modification in moral values must endure the scrutiny of contrasting viewpoints and must evolve from the pre-existing moral framework, eventually becoming part of the community’s customs. I'm thus suggesting that morality possesses an objective aspect that is anchored in tradition, rationality, and communal consensus, and is accessible through reasoned moral discourse. Thus, even an atheist can advocate for an objective moral framework with honorific values, independent of the universe's lack of moral directives. So even if a psychopath feels approval towards the idea of killing someone, that would still be objectively wrong, and the intrinsic worth of an innocent human life retains its objectivity (being an atheist isn't being a nihilist). So maybe, ultimately, or in practice, the absence of divine or cosmic mandates is irrelevant to the establishment of moral truths.

When man's life is the set as the standard, morality becomes objective because what is required for man's life is dictated by reality and not subjective whims. So good and evil can be boiled down to a simple question, "Is this good for my life, bringing me closer to my values, or does this harm my life and compromise my values? The end goal being my own happiness." So morality comes down to a fundamental alternative for living beings with free will (humans), and that is life or death. Are your choices leading you towards pleasure and long-term happiness (life)? Or pain/misery and death? These choices aren't always obvious and will depend on one being explicit with oneself what their values or goals actually are, and why. This is done through introspection (looking inward). A value is something one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are essentially pro-life and are necessary for any living organism's survival. Now, with human beings, there are subjectively chosen values based on an individual's preferences. We're all different and will have different chosen values and things we want out of life. An example of this is I've decided i want to be a good doctor. The principles I embrace to become a good doctor will be dictated by reality. I can not just chew 100 pieces of bubblegum a day for 1 year and expect to gain the knowledge and experience I need to be a good doctor. In this way, achieving my value is not subjective. It's instead objective. As human beings, our metaphysics and epistemology is intertwined because the nature of our survival relies on our ability to reason. That's our unique ability to observe reality with our senses and integrate that with our minds in a process called concept formation. Concepts are what we use to package up perceptual observations into knowledge to be drawn upon again as we need them. They're like mental concretes that store information. Symbols and language are examples of these concepts.

I’m 100% on board with Sam’s view that there are objective answers to how to maximize human health and pleasure, and that we can approach these answers using empirical science. If this were not a philosophical dialogue concerned with pedantry, then we could all stop there and continue to research how to approach this utopia. The issue I have is that Sam has chosen to go one step further in the context of this topic in claiming that we can provide objective answers about moral truth from this. I’m not sure how we’re able to derive that it is objectively morally preferable to strive towards human wellbeing as opposed to suffering without first subjectively assuming that human wellbeing is morally good. And if we want to assume that that is objectively good, then what could be the metaethical source of that premise?

I've long thought that morality can be gotten by 1) accepting the obligation to the survival of our species and 2) noting that we are, by nature, social creatures. These two things imply that to survive, treatment of others must by such that cooperation is ensured, that is to say, based on a socially acceptable morality. As for the people who can't agree to the obligation of our survival, I'm frankly not interested in what they have to say.

All action introduces duality in the human experience. If you walk forward, you forgo walking backwards. Walking to the left implies you forgo walking to the right. Everything you do is "right" and "wrong" for someone. If you choose to help your grandmother on your Saturday off it implies you are not helping your father. We have to ask, right and wrong for who??? The question of objective morality is answered when we realize what we are. Alex and Sam (two apertures of the universal process) are discussing this concept of "Objective Morality" on a podcast. The universe is experiencing itself through Alex and Sam and every other being in existence all of which having their own subjective experiences at varying heights of consciousness simultaneously. So from Alex's perspective the argument appears one way and in the eyes of Sam the argument appears another...but truth of the matter is the universe is taking the side of Alex and Sam at the same time! What is true and what is false is enveloped within truth. It has always been this way and always will. One could say that everything as it is, just the way that it is, is existentially right. Our codes of ethics are placeholders for "right conduct" at certain levels of consciousness. When we speak about objective morality, no matter what view you take on it, the one Self is providing the light of consciousness from both sides. At the level of the Self it is obvious that "what is right and what is wrong" are inseparable dualities on the level of the mind and the same thing at the level of truth. Know yourself and objective morality will take care of itself.

Maximizing one's well being is not a pursuit that can be justified through reason or science. It's a core value derived purely through the arbitrary decision to make it one. "That's not deflationary for me" just means that Dr. Harris here is not troubled by making an incorrect claim.

A very simple boil down. Acts that get us closer to traveling to the stars and spread amongst the galaxy (morally good). Acts that work against that, (morally bad).

No one believes there is no should or shouldn't. Anyone who walks down the street, gets attacked by a stranger who punches them in the face and breaks their legs will think their attacker shouldn't have done it.

What's interesting is that where the emotivism becomes more of an ought and right and wrong is where the notion of free will comes in and whether a person decides to care more about what gives oneself more yums now at the expense of a shorter life or a shorter life for someone else, or whether you maximise another person's yums at your own expense or whether you just forego more intense yums now for better yums later, a lot of these things are not obvious and as the Christian would say require one to walk a life of faith in the path they've chosen. And you have to genuinely choose what you're going to try or not try. The problem is, there is no pill which will guarantee you increase of yums. Rather everything is a choice whether to keep the yums you have now and forego many other potentialities, or whether you have faith that in trying new things and with slight pain and trust in people you have good reason to trust, but is still scary, you might discover a more transcendent yums better than anything before. So in this landscape you have to choose. And conscience or gut feeling seems to be something extremely subconscious and complex and easily overridden by our immediate will. So what will you listen to? The idea in Christianity is that these phenomena are real, that they are deeply connected to God and that when we trust in them that we make our connection to the more reliable path a lot stronger.

Values are just preferences. Thus, they are subjective, or at best inter-subjective. To the lion, eating the lamb is 'good'. To the lamb, being eaten by the lion is 'bad'.