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The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values Hardcover – October 5, 2010
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Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Harris delivers a game-changing book about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation.
- Print length291 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFree Press
- Publication dateOctober 5, 2010
- Dimensions6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101439171211
- ISBN-13978-1439171219
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Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. Among his books are The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil's Chaplain.
Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris's previous books that couldn't have been written by any of his fellow "horsemen" of the "new atheism." This book is different, though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can't duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris. --Richard Dawkins
Amazon Exclusive: Q & A – Sam HarrisQ: Are there right and wrong answers to moral questions?
Harris: Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world—and there clearly are—then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.
Q: Are you saying that science can answer such questions?
Harris: Yes, in principle. Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors—ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can act so as to have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.
Q: But can’t moral claims be in conflict? Aren’t there many situations in which one person’s happiness means another’s suffering?
Harris: There as some circumstances like this, and we call these contests ?zero-sum.? Generally speaking, however, the most important moral occasions are not like this. If we could eliminate war, nuclear proliferation, malaria, chronic hunger, child abuse, etc.—these changes would be good, on balance, for everyone. There are surely neurobiological, psychological, and sociological reasons why this is so—which is to say that science could potentially tell us exactly why a phenomenon like child abuse diminishes human well-being.
But we don’t have to wait for science to do this. We already have very good reasons to believe that mistreating children is bad for everyone. I think it is important for us to admit that this is not a claim about our personal preferences, or merely something our culture has conditioned us to believe. It is a claim about the architecture of our minds and the social architecture of our world. Moral truths of this kind must find their place in any scientific understanding of human experience.Q: What if some people simply have different notions about what is truly important in life? How could science tell us that the actions of the Taliban are in fact immoral, when the Taliban think they are behaving morally?
Harris: As I discuss in my book, there may be different ways for people to thrive, but there are clearly many more ways for them not to thrive. The Taliban are a perfect example of a group of people who are struggling to build a society that is obviously less good than many of the other societies on offer. Afghan women have a 12% literacy rate and a life expectancy of 44 years. Afghanistan has nearly the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. It also has one of the highest birthrates. Consequently, it is one of the best places on earth to watch women and infants die. And Afghanistan’s GDP is currently lower than the world’s average was in the year 1820. It is safe to say that the optimal response to this dire situation—that is to say, the most moral response—is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read. This may seem like common sense to us—and it is—but I am saying that it is also, at bottom, a claim about biology, psychology, sociology, and economics. It is not, therefore, unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality. In fact, we must say this, the moment we admit that we know anything at all about human well-being.
Q: But what if the Taliban simply have different goals in life?
Harris: Well, the short answer is—they don’t. They are clearly seeking happiness in this life, and, more importantly, they imagine that they are securing it in a life to come. They believe that they will enjoy an eternity of happiness after death by following the strictest interpretation of Islamic law here on earth. This is also a claim about which science should have an opinion—as it is almost certainly untrue. There is no question, however, that the Taliban are seeking well-being, in some sense—they just have some very strange beliefs about how to attain it.
In my book, I try to spell out why moral disagreements do not put the concept of moral truth in jeopardy. In the moral sphere, as in all others, some people don’t know what they are missing. In fact, I suspect that most of us don’t know what we are missing: It must be possible to change human experience in ways that would uncover levels of human flourishing that most of us cannot imagine. In every area of genuine discovery, there are horizons past which we cannot see.Q: What do you mean when you talk about a moral landscape?
Harris: This is the phrase I use to describe the space of all possible experience—where the peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys represent the worst possible suffering. We are all someplace on this landscape, faced with the prospect of moving up or down. Given that our experience is fully constrained by the laws of the universe, there must be scientific answers to the question of how best to move upwards, toward greater happiness.
This is not to say that there is only one right way for human beings to live. There might be many peaks on this landscape—but there are clearly many ways not to be on a peak.Q: How could science guide us on the moral landscape?
Harris: Insofar as we can understand human wellbeing, we will understand the conditions that best secure it. Some are obvious, of course. Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I’m not sure we do. Are there genes that make certain people more compassionate than others? What social systems and institutions could maximize our sense of connectedness to the rest of humanity? These questions have answers, and only a science of morality could deliver them.
Q: Why is it taboo for a scientist to attempt to answer moral questions?
Harris: I think there are two primary reasons why scientists hesitate to do this. The first, and most defensible, is borne of their appreciation for how difficult it is to understand complex systems. Our investigation of the human mind is in its infancy, even after nearly two centuries of studying the brain. So scientists fear that answers to specific questions about human well-being may be very difficult to come by, and confidence on many points is surely premature. This is true. But, as I argue in my book, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a huge mistake.
The second reason is that many scientists have been misled by a combination of bad philosophy and political correctness. This leads them to feel that the only intellectually defensible position to take when in the presence of moral disagreement is to consider all opinions equally valid or equally nonsensical. On one level, this is an understandable and even noble over-correction for our history of racism, ethnocentrism, and imperialism. But it is an over-correction nonetheless. As I try to show in my book, it is not a sign of intolerance for us to notice that some cultures and sub-cultures do a terrible job of producing human lives worth living.Q: What is the difference between there being no answers in practice and no answers in principle, and why is this distinction important in understanding the relationship between human knowledge and human values?
Harris: There are an infinite number of questions that we will never answer, but which clearly have answers. How many fish are there in the world’s oceans at this moment? We will never know. And yet, we know that this question, along with an infinite number of questions like it, have correct answers. We simply can’t get access to the data in any practical way.
There are many questions about human subjectivity—and about the experience of conscious creatures generally—that have this same structure. Which causes more human suffering, stealing or lying? Questions like this are not at all meaningless, in that they must have answers, but it could be hopeless to try to answer them with any precision. Still, once we admit that any discussion of human values must relate to a larger reality in which actual answers exist, we can then reject many answers as obviously wrong. If, in response to the question about the world’s fish, someone were to say, ?There are exactly a thousand fish in the sea.? We know that this person is not worth listening to. And many people who have strong opinions on moral questions have no more credibility than this. Anyone who thinks that gay marriage is the greatest problem of the 21st century, or that women should be forced to live in burqas, is not worth listening to on the subject of morality.Q: What do you think the role of religion is in determining human morality?
Harris: I think it is generally an unhelpful one. Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but in so far as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious. You do not need to believe that the Bible was dictated by the Creator of the Universe, or that Jesus Christ was his son, to see the wisdom and utility of following the Golden Rule.
The problem with religious morality is that it often causes people to care about the wrong things, leading them to make choices that needlessly perpetuate human suffering. Consider the Catholic Church: This is an institution that excommunicates women who want to become priests, but it does not excommunicate male priests who rape children. The Church is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping genocide. It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. When we realize that morality relates to questions of human and animal well-being, we can see that the Catholic Church is as confused about morality as it is about cosmology. It is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one.Q: So people don’t need religion to live an ethical life?
Harris: No. And a glance at the lives of most atheists, and at the most atheistic societies on earth—Denmark, Sweden, etc.—proves that this is so. Even the faithful can’t really get their deepest moral principles from religion—because books like the Bible and the Qur’an are full of barbaric injunctions that all decent and sane people must now reinterpret or ignore. How is it that most Jews, Christians, and Muslims are opposed to slavery? You don’t get this moral insight from scripture, because the God of Abraham expects us to keep slaves. Consequently, even religious fundamentalists draw many of their moral positions from a wider conversation about human values that is not, in principle, religious. We are the guarantors of the wisdom we find in scripture, such as it is. And we are the ones who must ignore God when he tells us to kill people for working on the Sabbath.
Q: How will admitting that there are right and wrong answers to issues of human and animal flourishing transform the way we think and talk about morality?
Harris: What I’ve tried to do in my book is give a framework in which we can think about human values in universal terms. Currently, the most important questions in human life—questions about what constitutes a good life, which wars we should fight or not fight, which diseases should be cured first, etc.—are thought to lie outside the purview of science, in principle. Therefore, we have divorced the most important questions in human life from the context in which our most rigorous and intellectually honest thinking gets done.
Moral truth entirely depends on actual and potential changes in the well-being of conscious creatures. As such, there are things to be discovered about it through careful observation and honest reasoning. It seems to me that the only way we are going to build a global civilization based on shared values—allowing us to converge on the same political, economic, and environmental goals—is to admit that questions about right and wrong and good and evil have answers, in the same way the questions about human health do.Review
—Ian McEwan
Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris's previous books that couldn't have been written by any of his fellow 'horsemen' of the 'new atheism'. This book is different, though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can't duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris.
--Richard Dawkins
“Reading Sam Harris is like drinking water from a cool stream on a hot day. He has the rare ability to frame arguments that are not only stimulating, they are downright nourishing, even if you don’t always agree with him! In this new book he argues from a philosophical and a neurobiological perspective that science can and should determine morality. His discussions will provoke secular liberals and religious conservatives alike, who jointly argue from different perspectives that there always will be an unbridgeable chasm between merely knowing what is and discerning what should be. As was the case with Harris’ previous books, readers are bound to come away with previously firm convictions about the world challenged, and a vital new awareness about the nature and value of science and reason in our lives.”
—Lawrence M. Krauss, Foundation Professor and Director of the ASU Origins Project at Arizona State University, author of The Physics of Star Trek, and, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science
“A lively, provocative, and timely new look at one of the deepest problems in the world of ideas. Harris makes a powerful case for a morality that is based on human flourishing and thoroughly enmeshed with science and rationality. It is a tremendously appealing vision, and one that no thinking person can afford to ignore.”
--Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate.
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- Publisher : Free Press; First Edition (October 5, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 291 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1439171211
- ISBN-13 : 978-1439171219
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #599,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #479 in Sociology & Religion
- #1,942 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #2,272 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
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About the author

Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz), The Four Horseman (with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens), and Making Sense. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The Annals of Neurology, among others. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.
Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up Course for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.
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The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values. 70
I value the human capacity for induction to create knowledge. As Hume put it there is no causality; only "constant concomitance". There is no absolute fact, only opinion and attitudes and emotions and uncertain knowledge. This is a basic limitation of the scientific method and its greatest strength. And it applies equally to the world of values and morality. As Sam Harris so fluently exposes in this solid book, values cannot be separated from facts, and both are the happy products of science.
As the Greek rhetoricians used to say, " The only measure of mankind is mankind itself." We are the standard for the facts of science and of morality, and so understanding and advancing psychology should be a primary goal of all societies. Harris, instead of asking the Socratic question about what is the good life, asks about human well-being. There is not much difference, but science has given us much more food for thought than Aristotle ever had, and especially in the scientific field of psychology, there is much new understanding that impinges on our insights into the morality of human well-being. Harris provides a thoroughgoing synopsis of this new knowledge and it is the fundament for his thesis that a science of morality is not only possible but urgently needed to improve the general lot of mankind. He makes a convincing case. In fact, as an experimental psychologist, I agree with him completely throughout this book. Never have I read as lucid an account of the many twists and turns in people's rejection of a scientific approach to morality, and while his arguments are not always thoroughly convincing they are clear and analytic and unblurred by dogma. What can one ask more of a scientist? Nowhere does he make his case more clearly than his attack on the fundamentalist and religionist Francis Collins, who has a vision and religious conversion experience when he encounters a mystical frozen waterfall divided into a triune deity. The superstition of religion is a clear antagonist of science, and this conflict cannot be restrained without basic inconsistencies of reasoning.
Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous;455
For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain.1853
The fact that religious belief is both a cultural universal and appears to be tethered to the genome has led scientists like Burton to conclude that there is simply no getting rid of faith-based thinking.2154
Historically, a preoccupation with witchcraft has been a cultural universal. And yet belief in magic is now in disrepute almost everywhere in the developed world.2165
What is surprising, from a scientific point of view, is that 42 percent of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world, and another 21 percent believe that while life may have evolved, its evolution has been guided by the hand of God (only 26 percent believe in evolution through natural selection).2502
I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain--but opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.82
To say that the behavior of Muslim jihadists has nothing to do with their religious beliefs is like saying that honor killings have nothing to do with what their perpetrators believe about women, sexuality, and male honor.2630
If there are objective truths to be known about human well-being--if kindness, for instance, is generally more conducive to happiness than cruelty is--then science should one day be able to make very precise claims about which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and which are worth abandoning. While it is too early180
It is possible to be wrong and to not know it (we call this "ignorance").2961
It is possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of admitting this publicly (we call this "hypocrisy").2961
And it may also be possible to be wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one's commitment to one's erroneous beliefs (we call this "self-deception"). It seems clear that these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion.2962
Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality--in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish--should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering.412
There may be nothing more important than human cooperation. Whenever more pressing concerns seem to arise--like the threat of a deadly pandemic, an asteroid impact, or some other global catastrophe--human cooperation is the only remedy (if a remedy exists). Cooperation is the stuff of which meaningful human lives and viable societies are made. Consequently, few topics will be more relevant to a maturing science of human well-being.920
Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false) and some form of consequentialism (viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures).1036
Tomasello has found that even twelve-month old children will follow a person's gaze, while chimpanzees tend to be interested only in head movements. He suggests that our unique sensitivity to gaze direction facilitated human cooperation and language development.959
It is not by accident that our most widely accepted moral phrase is "do unto others as you would have them do unto you ..." because our most essential intellectual competence is understanding others; whether through communication or modeling others' minds and awareness, later elaborated into the study of psychology. Edit
Moral view A is truer than moral view B, if A entails a more accurate understanding of the connections between human thoughts/intentions/behavior and human well-being.1081
The one crucial exception, however, is that psychopaths are often unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others, And this may be the difference that makes all the difference.1660
Blair points out, parenting strategies that increase empathy tend to successfully mitigate antisocial behavior in healthy children;1668
Territorial violence might have even been necessary for the development of altruism. The economist Samuel Bowles has argued that lethal, "out-group" hostility and "in-group" altruism are two sides of the same coin.1701
Sometimes our knowledge of psychology conflicts with itself, as in our undertstanding of revenge and compassion, and a resolution needs to be worked out:" the tragic experience of his late father-in-law, who had the opportunity to kill the man who murdered his family during the Holocaust but opted instead to turn him over to the police. After spending only a year in jail, the killer was released, and Diamond's father-in-law spent the last sixty years of his life "tormented by regret and guilt." While there is much to be said against the vendetta culture of the New Guinea Highlands, it is clear that the practice of taking vengeance answers to a common psychological need".1860
In fact, mathematical belief (e.g., "2 + 6 + 8 = 16") showed a similar pattern of activity to ethical belief (e.g., "It is good to let your children know that you love them"), and these were perhaps the most dissimilar sets of stimuli used in our experiment. This suggests that the physiology of belief may be the same regardless of a proposition's content. It also suggests that the division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function. 2032
And we can traverse the boundary between facts and values in other ways. As we are about to see, the norms of reasoning seem to apply equally to beliefs about facts and to beliefs about values. In both spheres, evidence of inconsistency and bias is always unflattering. Similarities of this kind suggest that there is a deep analogy, if not identity, between the two domains.2043
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds--and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.3259
Some have called Harris’s book a mere repackaging of consequentialism. While this might be technically true, it's repackaged in a way that eliminates every reasonable concern that one might have with it. It is no small feat to systematically tear down every argument against a long-standing moral system (that always seemed appealing but, before Harris, at least partially problematic). There is a big difference between an answer that nearly works and one that works. Harris's conception of a Moral Landscape works in a way that traditional consequentialism never quite did.
As payment for this great contribution to our collective discourse, Harris has received heaps of scorn from the intellectual community. Of course, he shouldn't be surprised. When Andrew Wiles solved the world's "most difficult math problem" (by proving Fermat's last theorem), mathematicians everywhere leapt at the opportunity to prove him wrong and to protect their own egos (begrudgingly, they could not). The same seems to be happening to Harris. Unfortunately, egos may be even larger in the field of moral philosophy and the stakes far higher. This is a shame; the longer other leaders in the field insist on holding onto their debunked alternative theories, the more time we lose in building a global civilization.
Read carefully every criticism that you encounter regarding Harris's approach. Each either fails to (a) make sense or (b) grasp what Harris actually is saying. The responses have been eye opening and frankly embarrassing for many of his critics. I have lost a great deal of respect for the intellectual community while reading reviews of Harris's book.
While Harris is plenty capable of defending himself, I want to make three points in defense of his theory:
I. Harris is Not a Fascist Mad Scientist
Many commentators seem to believe that Harris is suggesting that science currently has all of the answers. He is not. In fact, he's admitting to quite the opposite. In practice, science currently has few clear answers on how best to promote the subjective well being of humanity. Harris believes that this is a very long-term project unlikely to ever be “completed.” However, we know enough already to answer some easy questions (e.g., don't add cholera to the water supply, don't encourage honor killings, don't throw acid in the face of girls who want to learn to read). Most questions are open to further inquiry and rigorous debate (e.g., what is the optimal balance of individual privacy and collective security?).
Harris undoubtedly believes that we should be careful before condemning practices without knowing a sufficient amount regarding the effects on the well being of the people affected. As with all scientific endeavors, we should move forward slowly and humbly. The process is open to a rigorous, measured, and incremental public debate. There are tough questions to be answered. However, that there are tough questions to answer does not mean we must be paralyzed from acting upon the relatively easy ones.
II. Harris is Not a Cultural Vandal (mostly)
Harris is very willing to condemn cultures that insist on certain harmful practices. For example, Harris, in the book and elsewhere, suggests that everyone should feel free (and perhaps obligated) to condemn female genital mutilation, the suppression of women's rights, "rape culture" on American college campuses, calls to genocide, and honor killings as seen in places like Albania. The specific elements of any culture that have a clear negative impact on the well being of conscious creatures should be condemned. Unless you are still lost in the stupefying woods of postmodern and relativist nonsense, this should be unobjectionable.
However, where is Harris suggesting that every society should look, in every way, like London, Boston, or Palo Alto? Nowhere. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that a diversity of cultures across the world will benefit humanity. But that does not mean that each part of every culture is to be valued equally. It is quite a different thing to suggest that humanity benefits from wonderful culinary, artistic, musical, and architectural cultural diversity, than to suggest humanity benefits from certain cultures being completely mistaken regarding particular practices and their effects on well-being (e.g., genital mutilation in northern Africa or corporal punishment in the deep south). Put simply: we can celebrate the diverse cuisine and condemn the unreasonable abuse.
Note: is it possible that we might actually find that certain cultures have a more "optimal" blend of aesthetic and culinary preferences? Sure, but when science has nothing better to do than to split hairs regarding whether burritos and salsa dancing are “better” than burgers and country music festivals, then we'll know that humanity is in a great place. Further, the answer may well be that they are equal spots on the moral landscape and that the diversity of options throughout the world is "better" than the benefit of promoting one over the other.
III. Stop Focusing on the Terminology
It seems that people cannot get past Harris’s appropriation of traditional “moral terms” for his proposed project of a scientific study of human flourishing. What if Harris instead suggested that we start a new interdisciplinary science on how best to promote “public health,” but he defined public health to include not just physical well being but mental well being as well? Then, Harris enlisted the help of leading economists, political scientists, doctors, public health experts, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, biologists, and artists. He asked them to study scientifically the question of what increases public health from various levels of abstraction, from medicine to nutrition to economic systems.
Would anyone suggest that this undertaking would be a useless endeavor? Of course not. Harris is simply stating that this project would promote the only thing worth considering when discussing what is “better” and what is “worse” (in the only sensible way to use these words). To Harris, what is “better” with respect to human flourishing is “good” and what is “worse” is “bad” (with the proviso that there may be multiple answers to these questions). Morality cannot reasonably mean anything except encouraging better and discouraging worse.
Lose your hang-ups regarding the terminology (that you probably got from religion, bad philosophy, or society generally) and you can see why this approach makes perfect sense. Nothing else does.
Top reviews from other countries
“the Fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. In my experience, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion.”
“Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures - and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”
“Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His evidence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.”
“Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic and environmental goals.”
“I will argue that anyone who would seriously maintain that the opposite is the case - is either misusing words or not taking the time to consider the details.”
“But the mere endurance of a belief system or custom does not suggest that it is adaptive, much less wise. It merely suggests that it hasn’t led directly to a society’s collapse or killed its practitioners outright.”
“Every society that has ever existed has had to channel and subdue certain aspects of human nature - envy, territorial violence, avarice, deceit, laziness, cheating, etc. - through social mechanisms and institutions. It would be a miracle if all societies - irrespective of size, geographical location, their place in history, or the genomes of their members - had done this equally well. And yet the prevailing bias of cultural relativism assumes that such a miracle has occurred not just once, but always.”
"Because there are no easy remedies for social inequality, many scientists and public intellectuals also believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions."
"There are many tools one must get in hand to think scientifically - ideas about cause and effect, respect for evidence and logical coherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty, the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc. - and these must be put to use long before one starts worrying about mathematical models or specific data."
"When we say that we are reasoning or speaking "objectively", we generally mean that we are free of obvious bias, open to counterarguments, cognizant of the relevant facts, and so on. This is to make a claim about how we are thinking. In this sense, there is no impediment to our studying subjective (first person) facts "objectively"."
"I am not denying the necessarily subjective (experiential) component of the facts under discussion. I am certainly not claiming that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings - like the platonic Form of the Good - or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong. I am simply saying that, given that there are facts - real facts - to be known about how conscious creatures can experience the worst possible misery and the greatest possible well-being, it is objectively true to say that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice."
"Now that we have consciousness on the table, my further claim is that the concept of "well-being" captures all that we can intelligibly value. And "morality" - whatever people's associations with this term happen to be - really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures."
"And, as I have said, there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive - many peaks on the moral landscape - so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in this life, such diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science."
"This possibility - the prospect of radically different moral commitments - is at the heart of many people's doubts about moral truth."
"Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science."
Chapter 2
"As we better understand the brain, we will increasingly understand all of the forces - kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence, intuitions of fairness, impulse control, the mitigation of aggression, etc. - that allow friends and strangers to collaborate successfully on the common projects of civilization. Understanding ourselves in this way, and using this knowledge to improve human life, will be among the most important challenges to science in the decades to come."
"Being a fellow Homo sapiens, we must presume that the Dobu islanders had brains sufficiently similar to our own to invite comparison. Is there any doubt that the selfishness and general malevolence of the Dobu would have been expressed at the level of their brains? Only if you think the brain does nothing more than filter oxygen and glucose out of the blood. Once we more fully understand the neurophysiology of states like love, compassion, and trust, it will be possible to spell out the differences between ourselves and people like the Dobu in greater detail. But we need not await any breakthroughs in neuroscience to bring the general principle in view: just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health, it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being."
"However, it is interesting to consider what would happen if we simply ignored this step and merely spoke about "well-being." What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about "right" and "wrong", or "good" and "evil", and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important? And if important, wouldn't it be, by definition, a matter of someone's well-being?"
"Moral judgement is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an emotional nature."
"Moral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if they were... If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and sociology - not normative ethics."
"Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions. We must build our better selves into our laws, tax codes, and institutions."
"this is precisely what is so important about science: it allows us to investigate the world, and our place within it, in ways that get behind first appearances. Why shouldn't we do this with morality and human values generally?"
"Most of us spend some time over the course of our lives deciding how (or weather) to respond to the fact other people on earth needlessly starve to death. Most of us also spend some time deciding which delightful foods we want to consume at home and in our favourite restaurants. Which of these projects absorbs more of your time and material resources on a yearly basis? If you are like most people living in the developed world, such a comparison will not recommend you to sainthood."
"This is one of the paradoxes of human psychology: we often fail to do what we ostensibly want to do and what is most in our self-interest to do. We often fail to do what we most want to do - or, at the very least, we fail to do what, at the end of the day (or year, or lifetime) we will most wish we had done."
"It seems abundantly clear that many people are simply wrong about morality - just as many people are wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding. What scientific purpose is served by averting our eyes from this fact? If morality is a system of thinking about (and maximizing) the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people's moral concerns must be immoral."
"Am I free to feel that "opaque" is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me."
"consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our intentions become competely available to us."
"When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. Many people do not feel the same way about regulating mood with antidepressants"
"We do not feel as free as we think we feel. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion."
Chapter 3
"The greater activity we found in the MPFC for belief compared to disbelief may reflect the greater self-relevance and/or reward value of true statements. When we believe a proposition to be true, it is as though we have taken it in hands as part of our extended self: we are saying, in effect, "This is mine. I can use this. This fits my view of the world." It seems to me that such cognitive acceptance has a distinctly positive emotional valence. We actually like the truth, and we may, in fact, dislike falsehood."
"The point , of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning - norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties."
"As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hew a positive state of mind - to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt, for instance - this is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking" and "self-deception". Such a person will, of necessity, be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out nonepistemic motives in another's view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person's connection to the world as it is."
"a bias is not merely a source of error; it is a reliable pattern of error. Every bias, therefore, reveals something about the structure of the human mind."
"Of course, people do often believe things in part because these beliefs make them feel better. But they do not do this in the full light of consciousness. Self-deception, emotional bias, and muddled thinking are facts of human cognition."
"expectation can be, if not everything, almost everything. Rosenhan concluded his paper with this damning summary: "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals."
"As far as our understanding of the world is concerned - there are no facts without values."
Chapter 4
"This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide.
The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto - in a single brain, in an institution, or in a culture - does not mean that there isn't a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world's "great," and greatly discrepant, religions."
"The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to het them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself - conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc."
"The fact that certain people can reason poorly with a clear conscience - or can do so while saying that they have a clear conscience - proves absolutely nothing about the compatibility of religious and scientific ideas, goals, or ways of thinking.
It is possible to be wrong and not to know it (we call this "ignorance").
It is possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of admitting this publicly (we call this "hypocrisy").
And it may also be possible to be wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one's commitment to one's erroneous beliefs (we call this "self-deception").
It seems clear that these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion."
Chapter 5
"Throughout this book, I have argued that the split between facts and values - and, therefore, between science and morality - is an illusion."
"The claim that science could have something important to say about values (because values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures) is an argument made on first principles. As such, it doesn't rest on any specific empirical results."
"we have all evolved from common ancestors and are, therefore, far more similar than we are different; brains and primary human emotions clearly transcend culture, and they are unquestionably influenced by states of the world (as anyone who has ever stubbed his toe can attest)."
"But does anyone doubt that there are better and worse ways to structure an economy? Would any educated person consider it a form of bigotry to criticize another society's response to a banking crisis? Imagine how terrifying it would be if great numbers of smart people became convinced that all efforts to prevent a global financial catastrophe must be either equally valid or equally nonsensical in principle. And yet this is precisely where we stand on the most important questions in human life."
"Many people also believe that nothing much depends on whether we find a universal foundation for morality. It seems to me, however, that in order to fulfill our deepest interests in this life, both personally and collectively, we must first admit that some interests are more defensible than others."
"If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, than some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlighted than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needles human misery. Whether or not we ever understand meaning, morality, and values in practice, I have attempted to show that there must be something to know about them in principle. And I am convinced that merely admitting this will transform the way we think about human happiness and the public good."
Afterword
"Is it really so difficult to distinguish between a science of morality and the morality of science?
To assert that moral truths exist, and can be scientifically understood, is not to say that all (or any) scientists curently understand these truths or that those who do will necessarily conform to them."
"To summarize my central thesis: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall wiithin the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."
"I'm not simply claiming that morality is "fully determined by an objective realityy, independent of people's actual values and desires". I am claiming that people's actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of this - indeed, we must - in order to talk about what is actually good."


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