Didn't expect Sam Harris to pack a pistol

As someone who gets annoyed by the popular assumption that having a secular world view means one has to hold generic left-wing views as well, I thoroughly enjoyed Sam Harris's recent piece on the gun control fervor and why he is a gun owner.

As an outspoken atheist author and critic of religion, Harris receives a considerable number of death threats, and some of them need to be taken seriously. That's why he spends an entire day training with a qualified instructor about once a month. This is news to me, but when other critics of radical Islam like Theo van Gogh are murdered in the street it seems like a reasonable precaution.

What is comforting is that Harris makes the same points people like me have been making - mass shootings are rare, assault "weapons" bans are useless symbolism and concealed weapons allow people to fight back. Dysfunctional views tend to be all over the place, but informed views converge.

This is my favorite part, where he makes the same point as the gun is civilization essay.

Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. There have been cases of prison guards (who generally do not carry guns) helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense—and “diffusion of responsibility” has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world?

Harris also says that limiting magazines to 10 rounds causes more frequent reloads and provide a slight help in mass shootings. I don't agree this would change much and he readily admits that this would require multiple people who happen to be in the right place to make a daring attack, but Harris is coming at this from his own perspective and I'm glad to see he really does think for himself.
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Harris vs. Hayek

I'm used to seeing Friedrich Hayek as a foil to John Maynard Keynes these days, but after turning some thoughts in my head lately about science and value judgments, I think he belongs in the arena with Sam Harris.

I have heard Harris argue that science can help us choose what we ought to value, a position dangerously close to saying science can rank any and all values - and Steven Novella has recently stated that Harris indeed holds that view.

I've added emphasis to what Hayek wrote on page 99 of The Road to Serfdom on why specialist intellectuals are making a mistake when they support central planning:

In our predilections and interests we are all in some measure specialists. And we all think that our personal order of values is not merely personal but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one. The lover of the countryside who wants above all that its traditional appearance should be preserved and that the blots already made by industry on its fair face should be removed, no less than the health enthusiast who wants all the picturesque but unsanitary old cottages cleared away, or the motorist who wishes the country cut up by big motor roads, the efficiency fanatic who desires the maximum of specialization and mechanization no less than the idealist who for development of personality wants to preserve as many independent craftsmen as possible, all know that their aim can be fully achieved only by planning – and they all want planning for that reason. But, of course, the adoption of the social planning for which they clamor can only bring out the concealed conflict between their aims.

Hayek's case against the objective truth of values leads me to two conclusions:

First, assuming Novella's summary of Harris's perspective is accurate and he believes that science can determine what values are universally superior, than Harris is committing scientism - using the trappings of science to make claims which are not scientific in nature.

As Hayek said in The Pretense of Knowledge:

There is as much reason to be apprehensive about the long run dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific as there is with regard to the problems I have just discussed. What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

So not only is Harris wrong, but he is playing with fire.

Second, the illusion that values can be objectively quantified and ranked is mandatory for anyone who believes in central planning. An individual who wants to march under a red banner with modern day Marxists must take Harris's side in the issue, for how could a central planner decide which elements of society to prioritize without a concrete, indisputable list of values?
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