Harris Chomsky rift

[Jebus]

Harris made this exchange public as he was curious of who the readers would side with. In my opinion, Harris comes out on top by a mile.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the- ... -discourse

[brimstoneSalad]

From what I have read so far, I do not agree with Sam.

His "perfect weapon" thought experiment is pretty bad, and he seems to miss the point.

Whether or not you admire the man’s politics—or the man—there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person.

Innocent in their respective opinions. And neither would any of the people he mentioned, in their own respective opinions.
They're all just causing damage as a means to an end. Ends of varying degrees of ill conception.

What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.

From what I know of them, no, they would not have used this hypothetical weapon very differently. They would have targeted different people, but not used them very differently.

Hitler, for example, did not originally plan to kill anybody; he just wanted them to "GTFO" and leave the fatherland to the master race. At least, this was reasonable in his mind. The killing pretty much just came in later, as he was losing is marbles yes, but also as he was running out of options to see his dream come true because he didn't have a perfect weapon.

Osama would no longer be a terrorist if he had that weapon; terrorism is what people turn to when they feel they have no other options. He would straight up conquer the world and institute Sharia law in every country by taking out their leadership and anybody who opposed them -- and likely ONLY the people who opposed them. Otherwise he would let the legal system take care of itself (which is a pretty horrendous thing by his interpretation, but nonetheless not so different from what we would do, just very different laws).

Saddam? I really doubt it. His war crimes occurred primarily in the Dujail Massacre (for which he was executed), but it's not clear how much of a part he played in what amounted to a crude witch hunt against terrorists after an attempted assassination. Most of the bad things he did were in a struggle to maintain power and squash resistance, which he would have had no trouble with if he had that weapon.

I'm not saying these were good guys. They had their beliefs, and twisted egos, but ultimately they all probably thought they were doing the right thing.

So, George bush kills innocents on bad information (there are weapons of mass destruction being made here, etc.), Osama Bin Laden kills innocents on bad information (Allah exists, Muhammad was perfect, such and such Hadith are absolute moral authority, etc.)

It's all just bad information.

If we ignore the actual consequences of people's actions, ignore the influence of bad information, and just go with their feels -- asserting that the only wrong action is a wrong intent -- it's very hard to argue for any difference at all.

What matters to others is not the fuzzy feels of good intention these people may or may not have, but the harmful consequences of these actions.

[brimstoneSalad]

I finished reading it. They were talking past each other.
Harris was wrong in his accusations, but he was looking for a conversation on thought experiments, he doesn't care about empirical analysis. Whereas Chomsky doesn't care much for thought experiments, and didn't have the patience to explain how and why Harris was mistaken in those terms (an entirely different issue).
The important point Harris should have acknowledged was that Chomsky obviously has thought about those questions, but just not very much since he doesn't seem to consider them very important or doesn't consider them easily answerable.
I think they're both focusing on the wrong questions here, though (Chomsky's suggestion that not-caring may be worse than malicious intent is suspect, but it's not very relevant).

In all of these examples, we're dealing with people of questionable intent (claimed to be good in both cases, and in no case really knowable), but almost certainly acting on very bad information. We can't dissect their brains to prove intent, but we can give them the benefit of the doubt and examine the information they're going on.

The important question is whose information is worse, and what the degree of negligence is in repeatedly relying on that same standard of information.
In determining the reliability of America's standards for evidence, it's the track record you really have to look at.
Chomsky seems to do that (perhaps unknowingly?), but I don't think Harris can see the forest through the trees on this one. If you get stuck on one case and insist on calling it bad luck through some kind of unfalsifiable assertion of good intentions, but refuse to step back and question whether the dice are weighted (not necessarily deliberately), you're not going to be able to understand the situation.

[knot]

It was frustrating to read.. they just seemed to talk past each other. As always, Chomsky is extremely antagonistic towards someone who doesn't agree with him. I think Harris did a poor job getting the discussion on track, and I don't get why he even posted this email exchange in the first place. Seemed a bit sleazy to me at first, considering he probably knew he would publish the exchange from the beginning and Chomsky didn't. Harris did post a postscript here tries to explain things more clearly, though.

The response to my exchange with Chomsky has been extraordinarily heated. Many people appear confused both about its contents and about my motives for publishing it.

It would not be productive—or, I think, fair to Chomsky—for me to argue my case in great detail after the fact. But I would like to close the door on a few common misconceptions:

1. I did not publish this exchange because I believe that I “won” a debate with Chomsky. On the contrary, I spent the entire time struggling to begin a conversation that never got started. I remain confused about Chomsky’s position on several important issues and would sincerely have liked to discuss them.

2. It is now clear to me that I did (in a very narrow way) misrepresent Chomsky in The End of Faith. Obviously, he had asked himself “very basic questions” about what the U.S. government intended when it bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant. Rereading that text, along with the relevant section of his book 9/11, I can see that my point was not that he literally hadn’t asked these questions but that the answers he arrived at are, in my opinion, scandalously wrong. Perhaps Chomsky didn’t literally “ignore the role of human intentions,” but he effectively ignored it, because he did not appear to give intentions any ethical weight. I now see that to the extent that he does weigh intentions, he may do so differently than I would (for instance, he says that Clinton’s bombing al-Shifa without thinking about the consequences is “arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human”). This would have been interesting terrain to explore. I consider his related claims that virtually everyone professes benign intentions, and that such professions are generally meaningless, to be false. Professions aside, there can be vast ethical differences between sincerely held beliefs about what is “good,” and these differences are often very easy to discern. To pretend otherwise is to risk destroying everything we are right to care about.

In any case, I can now see that I was using rather rhetorical language in my book and that Chomsky was entitled to reject my characterization of him on literal (if pedantic) grounds. He had asked the questions I said he hadn’t; I just didn’t like the answers. Conceding this doesn’t render the views he expressed in 9/11 easier to digest. But given the umbrage that Chomsky took over the offending phrases, it would have been helpful if I had admitted that they were sloppily written and, in a narrow sense, untrue. Nevertheless, all our real work would still have lain ahead of us.

3. Chomsky’s charge that I misrepresented him on the topic of “moral equivalence” is far less credible. Judging from what he wrote in 9/11 (as well as in our exchange) he may view the bombing of al-Shifa to be ethically worse than the attack on the Twin Towers.

4. Because my aim was to have a productive dialogue, I ignored most of Chomsky’s initial accusations in the hopes of establishing some basic principles and a spirit of mutual goodwill. He viewed this as evasive—or as conceding points that I would not, in fact, have conceded. This contributed greatly to the sense that we were talking past each other. I agree with readers who feel that I might have done more to get the conversation on track. Still, I was quite bewildered by the level of hostility I met in Chomsky, and I did the best I could at the time.

5. Certain readers saw my focus on Chomsky’s tone as an abject attempt to dodge hard questions. I can only reiterate that it wasn’t. I had ready answers to most of the points Chomsky raised, and where I didn’t I was genuinely interested in discovering what I thought in conversation with him. For instance, his observation that my view of intentions requires that I count certain sincerely motivated horrors as “ethical” (albeit within the context of a mistaken worldview) is something I discussed in the very excerpt from The End of Faith provided (see footnote 47). Whether such a charitable view can reasonably be applied to Hitler and Japan during WWII (I think not) is something that I would have been happy to discuss, had we ever got there.

What would the reaction have been if al-Qaeda had blown up half the pharmaceuticals in the U.S.? I’m sure it would have been considered a terrorist atrocity, and rightly so. Where is my published attack on the religious motivations of George Bush? It’s in my book The End of Faith and in many subsequent articles. I wasn’t dodging these questions. I just viewed them as distractions from the necessary work of our first agreeing about basic ethical principles. Nothing I said or didn’t say should have been construed as an unwillingness to criticize the U.S. government or to discuss any of its specific actions that may, in fact, constitute atrocities. As to whether we can trust Chomsky’s account of the al-Shifa bombing, I have my doubts.

In each of my emails I was merely attempting to begin an exchange that would be worth reading—having considered the preceding volleys both unproductive and unpublishable. In the end, I decided to publish the whole mess to demonstrate how difficult it can be to have a conversation on these important topics, in the hopes that some good might come of showing what that effort looks like on the page. I’m not sure I made the right decision, but I am certain that what I published bears little resemblance to any debate that Chomsky and I would have had if we had formally engaged each other in print. Needless to say, I agree that a person’s tone, however contemptuous, isn’t relevant to the substance of a debate. Had this been a debate, I’d have been happy to have Chomsky at his angriest.

Finally, I can only say that I was greatly disappointed by my encounter with Chomsky. I had truly hoped to have a productive conversation with him. —SH

[brimstoneSalad]

Fairly decent follow up. Thanks for posting!

2. It is now clear to me that I did (in a very narrow way) misrepresent Chomsky in The End of Faith. Obviously, he had asked himself “very basic questions” about what the U.S. government intended when it bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant.

That's what Chomsky needed to hear.

the answers he arrived at are, in my opinion, scandalously wrong.

That's fine. And to some extent I agree. But Harris kind of misses the point here that Chomsky didn't seem to want to definitively answer these questions because he didn't consider them either morally clear or very important.
If you are critiquing his answers, then you're critiquing to a large extent something he didn't really say, as far as I can see.

but he effectively ignored it, because he did not appear to give intentions any ethical weight.

Deciding through careful consideration that intentions are unfalsifiable and for various reasons may be of questionable or unclear moral weight is not the same as ignoring them.
Indeed, he took some time discussing them, and his answer (seemingly) was that he considered it largely subjective.

for instance, he says that Clinton’s bombing al-Shifa without thinking about the consequences is “arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human”

Yes, arguably, maybe, could be considered, perhaps, might, not certainly.

This would have been interesting terrain to explore. I consider his related claims that virtually everyone professes benign intentions, and that such professions are generally meaningless, to be false.

This might have been interesting to explore if Harris had admitted his misrepresentation of Chomsky from the start when asked to do so.
I can't fault Chomsky much for not wanting to engage with somebody who won't admit such an obvious instance of misrepresenting him.
I'll do the same thing. And that's pretty much with regard to any so incredibly obvious and uncontroversial fact.
It somebody won't admit those kinds of things, the likelihood that they'll be reasonable in the rest of the discussion is vanishingly small.

As it turns out, Chomsky was incorrect about his assumptions of Harris' intentions and general character, but I don't fault him that. He isn't familiar with Harris, and generally speaking, if something quacks like a duck...

Professions aside, there can be vast ethical differences between sincerely held beliefs about what is “good,” and these differences are often very easy to discern. To pretend otherwise is to risk destroying everything we are right to care about.

This is a MUCH more important point.

3. Chomsky’s charge that I misrepresented him on the topic of “moral equivalence” is far less credible. Judging from what he wrote in 9/11 (as well as in our exchange) he may view the bombing of al-Shifa to be ethically worse than the attack on the Twin Towers.

Harris still doesn't get it. I saw nowhere that Chomsky asserted this. He pondered it as a possible view in terms of the ethical relevance of motivation, but it seemed more rhetorical, and to point out what he believed to be the subjectivity of such claims.

Saying 'I don't know' is not the same as equivocation.

This is another point where Harris probably owed Chomsky an apology, even if on semantic grounds (but this is the famed linguist we're talking about, right?).

4. Because my aim was to have a productive dialogue, I ignored most of Chomsky’s initial accusations in the hopes of establishing some basic principles and a spirit of mutual goodwill.

Now that is Ironic.

The only thing that could have established good will is addressing those accusations (particularly the false ones which Chomsky took offense to), and apologizing for them. Avoiding that just made things much worse.

For instance, his observation that my view of intentions requires that I count certain sincerely motivated horrors as “ethical” (albeit within the context of a mistaken worldview) is something I discussed in the very excerpt from The End of Faith provided (see footnote 47).

With a very poorly construed thought experiment -- this perfect weapon -- yes. Chomsky was not impressed, and I'm not surprised.
I covered why this thought experiment is so poor (and speculative) in an earlier post in this thread.

Needless to say, I agree that a person’s tone, however contemptuous, isn’t relevant to the substance of a debate. Had this been a debate, I’d have been happy to have Chomsky at his angriest.

And yet Harris called off the exchange for precisely that reason, it would seem.

I would bet that if Harris e-mailed Chomsky again and started with an unreserved apology, a much more fruitful discussion could take place.
I don't know Chomsky, and I'm not particularly familiar with his work, but I think I can understand his feelings on this matter (despite disagreeing with him on many points in practice).

[brimstoneSalad]

Cenk's take, on TYT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkBRVRBhSso

[EquALLity]

^The religion of Islam and the culture of the Islamic world are uniquely grotesque. I like the general message of Pat's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxlO7DLC6p8