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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; 1st 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: #201,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #155 in Sociology & Religion
- #717 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #835 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
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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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I do agree with several points Harris makes, or at least points in the direction of:
The basic facts of human flourishing transcend culture.
Our world faces pressing moral concerns, such as the violent subjugation of women and the sexual exploitation of children, not to mention persistent global poverty and pervasive environmental destruction.
To a great extent, unconscious processes shaped by natural selection underlie human psychology, including our moral tendencies to decry sexual infidelity, punish cheaters, and value cooperation.
"Human beings may be genetically predisposed to superstition: for natural selection should favor rampant belief formation as long as the benefits of the occasional, correct belief are great enough."(and, I would add, the survival and reproductive costs of the much more numerous incorrect beliefs are not too great.)
"[P]eople often acquire their beliefs about the world for reasons that are more emotional and social than strictly cognitive."
"[R]eligion cannot be reduced to a mere concatenation of religious beliefs. Every religion consists of rites, rituals, prayers, social institutions, holidays, etc., and these serve a wide variety of purposes, conscious and otherwise."
"[R]eligion is largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality."
"[R]eligion will have geopolitical consequences for a long time to come."
"The pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm." For example, "a belief in souls leaves people indifferent to the suffering of creatures thought not to possess them." (Note: this has included other human beings at times.)
"[V]ery few scientific truths are self-evident and many are deeply counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist (even, we have begun to see, when one is a scientist)."
"[S]cientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument."
Cooperation is a demonstrably preferable strategy to narrow self-interestedness, where circumstances permit, and creating circumstances that foster cooperation is a good goal.
There is nothing irrational "about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many of the world's religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have." (How to cultivate these states of mind without the benefit of tradition, ritual or community is an important question for atheists and to that end, I have created a blog at wordpress, "The Spiritual Life of An Atheist".)
With all these points of agreement, I still cannot recommend Harris's book. First, his subtitle, "How Science Can Determine Human Values," is a misnomer. Harris provides his operative definition of "science" in his footnotes: "`[S]cience,' broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality." So what Harris means is "reason" and his book is more properly subtitled "How Reason Can Determine Human Values." That being such an unexceptional proposition in legal/moral philosophy, it must not have screen-tested well in Free Press's marketing department.
And Harris is a naïve (if I were to be ungenerous, lazy) philosopher so he does not have much to add to the centuries-old discussion about defining and prioritizing moral values. He states, "My goal is to convince you that human knowledge and human values can no longer be kept apart." Well, that is a pretty modest goal considering that we live in a pluralist, secular democracy in the 21st century that still does have a separation of church and state, despite the ongoing assault from the religious right. Every day we are inundated with news stories about studies of the efficacy or harmfulness of this or that behavior or item which influence attitudes and shape both our personal and policy choices. To suggest that "human knowledge and values" have long been kept apart in the United States is silly, at best.
Harris also fails to meaningfully deal with the inevitable conflicts between individual's interests as well as between values themselves. As a result, a totalizing bent reveals itself in his arguments. He asserts, "[S]cience can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want--and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best possible lives." Scientists are going to tell me what I should want and do to live my life the "best" way possible? What happens if I disagree with this scientific board of moral authority?
For example, Harris talks about variability in the definition of physical health itself. Today, the health norm in the developed world is to live a few decades longer than before. Harris is hopeful that we can extend the average lifespan even further. Personally, I have no interest in living past 100. If it were up to me, all research on further extending the already long average lifespan would stop tomorrow. I do not see aging and death as a disease but a fact of organic existence, and I'm sure I could come up with some coherent and possibly persuasive arguments for why further extension of our lifespans is a very bad societal resource allocation decision. Does Harris claim the authority to tell me that I should want an even longer life expectancy and should live my life toward that goal? Can I claim the authority to ban such research?
With respect to the indisputable diversity of interests and preferences of individuals, Harris has this to say: "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." What does Harris mean if here? That he questions the fact of human diversity is shocking, frankly.
For those of us who do experience deep fulfillment in our lives in a different manner than Harris approves, Harris provides the following limitation: "I'm not suggesting that we will necessarily discover one right answer to every moral question or a single best way human beings live. Some questions may admit of many answers, each more or less equivalent." How generous of Harris to allow that one right answer to every possible moral question and one single best way to live might not necessarily exist. Again, what does Harris mean not necessarily here? That he could entertain such an absolutist possibility shocks once more.
Harris continues: "The world's profusion of foods never tempts us to say that there are no facts to be known about human nutrition or that all culinary styles must be equally healthy in principle." Quite true. But there are many more ways to evaluate food other than nutrition and health---taste and enjoyment come quickly to mind. Are there facts to be established as truths about taste and enjoyment of food? And how is one to weigh interests in/preferences for taste and enjoyment against the values of nutrition and health, from a perspective of moral truth? This example brings to mind Twain's saying, "The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not."
Harris faults "liberal doubt" and criticizes "secular liberals" who tolerate plurality of opinion on matters that Harris deems important: "[N]ot knowing what is right--or that anything can ever be truly right--often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands."
At this point, Harris might dismiss me as one of those "moral relativists" he can't abide. But unlike the female speaker who Harris reports would not condemn the Taliban's practice of forcing women to wear burqas, I have no hesitation in denouncing such a practice. But my ready condemnation rests on a principle Harris barely mentions--individual liberty. No woman anywhere should be forced to wear a burqa. Choosing to wear a burqa is another question altogether. And to be clear, no girl anywhere should undergo female circumcision. In the latter case, since the girl, by definition, cannot consent, such a painful, invasive and injurious procedure simply must not be done. If, on the other hand, a grown woman were to seek out the procedure without pressure from her family or community, that would be her choice. In making this moral pronouncement, I am not suggesting that the United States has some type of moral authority to conduct a war against another nation to stop these practices. But I am absolutely willing to speak out unequivocally against these practices and to financially support peaceful efforts to encourage and persuade those who practice them to end them.
The issue of individual choice becomes ever more pressing with this next example: "The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one's long-term well-being." Yes, that would be my judgment as well. But starting each day with several glazed donuts is (not to put too fine a point on it) stupid, not immoral---unless Mr. Harris would like to revive that old cardinal sin of gluttony. The extramarital affair does rise to the level of morality, but a very personal morality, not a civil morality that society need concern itself with. By using such personal examples, Harris paints himself as a moral busybody---a kind of 21st century throwback to 19th century moral crusaders.
But in Harris's world, I may not qualify as a "genuine moral expert" with the authority to make such judgments. Harris sets up the acceptability (perhaps necessity) of "moral experts": "[T]hose who do not share our scientific goals have no influence on scientific discourse whatsoever; but, for some reason, people who do not share our moral goals render us incapable of even speaking about moral truth." He continues, "How have we convinced ourselves that, on the most important questions in human life, all views must count equally?" Harris again, "I am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive `morality,' but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-being). And only genuine moral experts would have a deep understanding of the causes and conditions of human and animal well-being."
Who is the "our" in "our moral goals" in the first instance? Do I qualify? Do you? What are the minimum qualifications to require a person's opinions to have even some influence on moral discourse? To count equally? To constitute authoritative moral expertise? Harris does not pose, never mind answer, any of these questions. I am a little concerned that Harris himself is angling for the position of Plato's Philosopher King---to lord over all of us morally gold, silver, or bronze people.
Regarding the various moral interests that compete with each other for priority--such as equality v. liberty (to give just one basic, well-known example of competing general principles)--Harris has this brilliant insight: "[I]n 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. Indeed some interests are so compelling that they need no defense at all." Since Harris does not identify these no-defense-necessary-interests, apparently some interests are so compelling they need not even be named. Harris holds these truths to be self-evident: [blank]. Truly, if I had not bought an ebook, in my frustration I would have launched it across the room.
Harris cannot even decide on his actual thesis. As noted above, he claims that science has the authority to tell us what we should want out of life altogether and that "science should increasingly enable us to answer specific moral questions." At a later point, he presents this moral problem: Scientists predict that an unusual disease is about to breakout which may kill up to 600 people. Response Program A will almost certainly result in saving 200 lives, but losing 400. Response Program B has a one-third chance to save all 600 lives, but a two-thirds chance to lose all 600 lives. Which is the morally correct program? Harris does not posit an answer. All he does is tell us that, based on our cognitive bias against uncertainty, a majority of people answer Program A when the problem is presented one way and Program B when the problem is presented another.
Is this "unusual disease outbreak" a moral problem for which there is a provably correct answer? For which Harris believes there may be a provably correct answer in the future? Or is this just a fundamentally painful judgment call with no right or wrong answer, i.e., dilemma? If no right answer is objectively discernible, what is the right process for answering this question? Again, Harris fails to even present, much less address, the most interesting moral questions.
Despite his thesis, for all his scientific knowledge, Harris for the most part does not have "scientific" answers to specific moral questions. He concedes at one point, "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." If science cannot tell us scientifically why we should value health, it cannot tell us scientifically why we should value liberty or equality or well-being overall. Science provides answers after we decide how we should define and prioritize our various values and interests. I do agree that our decisions of where to go values-wise are preferably made through some rational process based on a mostly rational understanding of the human condition and that once we make that decision where to go values-wise, science can tell us a great deal about how to get there.
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
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Along the way he makes a number of interesting points and observations; he's clearly striving to be perfectly rational and unbiased, & comes across (as he does on his fine podcast) as a morally upstanding guy with a sensible approach. I gather most of his writing is attacks on people who aren't even trying to be rational, so I hope he keeps it up and attracts a good readership in general.
I ought also (though you may question from where does this "ought" come ??) to say a little about his moral system. The better world with more and higher peaks on the moral landscape (not nieve, utopian world of perfect morality, just the best we can do) is not uncontroversial. Nothing is said - though I'll concede I didn't force myself to read every page so perhaps I've just missed this - on the clash between intrinsically immoral and consequentially immoral. He comes out on the latter side but I'm not sure if he was trying to leave some scope for both - or if he'd just not thought about it. Or mqaybe he just doesn't think there's any grounds for non-consequentialist ethics.
For the general reader it's alright, could be better structured, I certainly didn't find it arduous reading but not everybody would find it light reading, partly because it is a little frenetic in it's lay-out. Though there's subdivisions and section headings and chapters, just the points are a bit all over the place. It's certainly not some mad steam of consciousness. Just a little fragmentary.
Apologies for any typos & muspellungs, writing this on the Kindle

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