Let's take a quick look at the type of facts he's dealing with. This is an excerpt from a review in The Nation of his book, The Moral Landscape:
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Harris is as narrow in his views as the believers he condemns. Consider his assault on “the demon of relativism,” which, he declares, leaves us unprepared to face our ignorant tribal adversaries and robs us of the moral resources needed to prevail in the Armageddon against unreason. This conviction stems from a profound ignorance of philosophy. Harris finds it “interesting” that Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden’s favorite thinker, felt that philosophical pragmatism “would spell the death of American civilization.” Pragmatism causes its devotees “to lose the conviction that you can actually be right—about anything,” Harris announces. One can only imagine the astonishment of pragmatists such as William James, who opposed America’s imperial adventures in Cuba and the Philippines, or John Dewey, a staunch defender of progressive education, if told that their inclination to evaluate ideas with respect to their consequences somehow prevented them from holding convictions. For Harris, pragmatism and relativism undermine the capacity “to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development,” and to acknowledge our moral superiority to most of the rest of the world. By preventing us from passing judgment on others’ beliefs, no matter how irrational, “religious tolerance” has become “one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” Harris treats the recognition of legitimate moral differences as a sign of moral incompetence, and it is this sort of posturing that has cemented the New Atheists’ reputation for bold iconoclasm.
Harris’s argument against relativism is muddled and inconsistent on its own terms, but it is perfectly consistent with the aims of the national security state. It depends on the assumption that Americans (and “the West”) exist on a higher moral plane than just about anyone else. “As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents,” Harris writes in The End of Faith. “We would do well to realize that much of the world has not.” He dismisses equations of state-sponsored violence (which creates collateral damage) and terrorist violence (which deliberately targets civilians): “Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments.” He asks critics of civilian casualties in the Iraq War to imagine if the situation were reversed, and the Iraqi Republican Guard had invaded Washington. Do they think Iraqis would have taken as great care to spare civilians as the Americans did? “We cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.”
One would think that Harris’s intentionalism would have him distinguish between the regrettable accidents of collateral damage and the deliberate cruelty of torture. But after invoking a series of fantastic scenarios ranging from the familiar ticking time bomb to demonic killers preparing to asphyxiate 7-year-old American girls, Harris concludes that the larger intentions animating torture can be as noble as those that cause collateral damage: there is “no ethical difference” between them, he says. Torture, from this bizarrely intentionalist view, is somehow now a form of collateral damage. Both are necessary tactics in a fight to the death against Islamic unreason. “When your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand,” Harris writes. “We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms.” Most treacherous are the qualms of pacifists, whose refusal to fight is really “nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world’s thugs.” (Reading this passage, one can’t help wondering why in 2005 PEN bestowed its Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction upon The End of Faith.) Given the implacable opposition between Islam and Western modernity, “it seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come.” It is the endless war against evil, the wet dream of every armchair combatant from Dick Cheney to Norman Podhoretz.
The only difference is that, unlike those pious gents, Harris dismisses not only Islam but also all the Western monotheisms as “dangerously retrograde” obstacles to the “global civilization” we must create if we are to survive. His critique of religion is a stew of sophomoric simplifications: he reduces all belief to a fundamentalist interpretation of sacred texts, projecting his literalism and simple-mindedness onto believers whose faith may foster an epistemology far more subtle than his positivist convictions. Belief in scriptural inerrancy is Harris’s only criterion for true religious faith. This eliminates a wide range of religious experience, from pain and guilt to the exaltation of communal worship, the ecstasy of mystical union with the cosmos and the ambivalent coexistence of faith and doubt.
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There is a lot more at the link.
= new reply since forum marked as read
