Why Kindness?, Continued

I just read a post by some random person I had never heard of arguing that Sam Harris is the "No Labels" of ethical philosophy, because of his claim that all statements of the form "X is morally good" either are or ought to be equivalent to the statement "X will increase the happiness of or decrease the pleasure of one or more sentient beings." (Note that I rephrased that a little bit to fit what I would say, rather than what they quote Sam Harris as saying.) The argument is that both entities, Harris and No Labels, begin with a value statement that they don't feel like defending in an argument but are perfectly happy to just assert are true, and then claim that their conclusions are utterly empirical and non-ideological. (In No Labels' case, the value judgment is that large federal deficits are always bad.) I think this is wrong in the case of Sam Harris; at least, I think it's a disanalogy.
Consider the claim that No Labels makes, in this framework: large federal deficits are always bad. You'll note that this is in many ways an empirical claim itself, unless we wish to make it a tautology using the malleable word "bad" to include large federal deficits by definition. So it is a claim that ought to be debated, using the rules of empirical evidence-based argument. Are large deficits sometimes bad? Yes, in normal economic times they do bad things to investment levels in the country, and over the very long term will tend to make funding a functioning government impossible. But there are very good empirical economic reasons for thinking that in certain circumstances, specifically when short-term interest rates are already at zero but we still need something expansionary to get an economy out of a recession, when those bad effects disappear; when, in fact, large federal deficits become really, really good, and perhaps even pay for themselves over the long term. So No Labels is making a claim which really, really ought to be debatable, but they don't want to do that; instead, they just want to postulate it as the framework of their political ideology, and also claim that no one could possibly dispute it without being some sort of radical partisan, etc. etc.

Consider the claim Sam Harris and/or I would make: the only viable thing to mean when we say something is good is that it contributes in some way to net human (/sentient being) happiness. There might be some room for disagreement about how to balance simultaneous increases in both pleasure and pain, along the utilitarianism spectrum, but basically we should judge actions based on their consequences in terms of overall happiness. Debate this. No, seriously, debate it. What exactly is the counterargument? And now, okay, I'll admit that I don't see that one can make much of an argument in favor of it, but that's just because we're working in a logical framework without any foundations. What do I mean by this? We're trying to discuss how to define good and bad, i.e. what is the best way to define good. But the word best is literally just another form of the word good. So, what is the most good way to define the word good? It's an absurd question, because the thing you're trying to define is also your criterion! Unlike the claim that No Labels are trying to pre-assume, the claim, essentially, that kindness is good is one that cannot be argued for or against using ethical logic. It, or some competing statement of fundamental good, must be the postulate of a system of moral logic. And in choosing between postulates, you really can't go logically wrong.

So why do I choose this one? Well, I know that I don't much like pain, and pleasure tends to be pretty enjoyable. I could decide that things that make me happy are morally good, but that feels less like morality and more like selfishness. But since I assume that other objects that seem to be rather similar to me in certain ways are also sentient beings, who presumably enjoy pleasure and dislike pain (masochists excepted), I don't really see what there is to do, morally speaking, except be kind. A system based not in consequences and happiness but in sin strikes me as either a) not actually a moral system, or at least not a very deep moral system in the sense that it's just about blithely following some authority, or b) a thinly-veiled version of the kindness system anyway, if it could be defended as ultimately leading to more overall happiness than what appears to be kindness. I think the latter is more common: people who believe that X is wrong because god says so probably also believe that doing X will result in a decrease to the overall happiness of the world, even if it really doesn't look like it at the time, either because of some sort of the-gays-caused-9/11-and-Katrina thing or because the people involved will, you know, go to hell, which is an unpleasant place to be. Or at least they'd say that it would. You endure asceticism now in order to enjoy the fruits of heaven later, etc.

Now, of course, under option a) above one has the option of defining the word "good" to mean what the authority figure says is good, but to me this seems like it isn't really a system of morality but rather a system of so much obedience that you don't even allow yourself to ask whether the authority is good or not, based on any evaluative criterion.

So yeah, I can't defend using ironclad logic the proposition that kindness is good. But we need to discuss questions of good, and there is no way to do that without some sort of underlying moral axioms. We don't actually need to discuss questions of deficits with an axiom that says whether deficits are good. In fact, the question of whether deficits are good or bad in a given situation flows empirically from the assumption that kindness is good. And while I can't make a definitive case for kindness, I can do a pretty good job of answering objections to it, and ultimately I doubt that very many people really disagree with the idea that in some sense on some level happiness is good. Perhaps Sam Harris didn't address sufficiently what he was saying in asserting that only this thing that I'm referring to as kindness is a form of valid morality, or maybe on some level it's all just semantics. But in any case, it's just not analogous to the No Labels form of deficit-peacock-ery.