The Moral Landscape
Related
- Sam Harris (2010)
Overview
Subtitled How Science Can Determine Human Values, Harris argues that moral questions have answers in the same sense that questions about health do. If morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, then there are facts about what increases and decreases it, and those facts are in principle discoverable. The "landscape" is a surface of possible ways to live, with peaks of flourishing and valleys of misery; there may be many peaks, but there are also things that are simply wrong, and cultural relativism about them is a failure of nerve. The book takes aim at religious claims to own morality and at the academic consensus that science must stay silent about values.
Notes
I agree with the destination and have reservations about the route. Harris is right that once you accept that morality concerns well-being, an enormous amount becomes an empirical question, and right that "who is to say?" is not an argument. Where I part company is at the first step: he treats the move from "is" to "ought" as obviously fine and his critics as pedants, and I think the critics have a point that he waves away. My own view, that moral rules are heuristics that paid off and that there is no objective morality in the strong sense, gets me to most of the same conclusions without the claim that science has settled the foundations. Still, it is the clearest modern statement that you do not need a god to tell right from wrong, and the first chapter is worth the book.