This is a political book, like his previous books, and all people of religious belief are its target. While Harris does not here describe how he might go about disposing of such inferior belief systems; he has already discussed that in The End of Faith: controlling religion may necessitate killing , torture , , nuclear first strike , dictatorship , , and a world government The general thesis of this book — that science and morality are inseparable — need not be antithetical to religious ethics.
Catholic natural law draws moral norms from human nature; that is the principle of the endeavor. Harris seems to have no knowledge of this, and it deflates his thesis completely. He may now be on the leading edge of a new wave focused on naturalizing ethics in the attempt to pull the discipline away from religion, thus rendering religion not only theoretically moribund, but also devoid of practical relevance. This two- pronged attack on both the theoretical and practical aspects of religion should be of keen interest to those involved in the science and religion dialogue, since it attempts to destroy this field of study.
Unfortunately, academia is not really his target audience, the larger reading public is, and on this level it may accomplish its work of further marginalizing religion from public life. A critique of moral optimism of Sam Harris. Polemical comments, Studia Religiologica, 47 4 , pp. And how do I feel about the man?
Here begins project 2: Are there right and wrong answers to the question of how to maximize well-being? How would my life have been affected if I had killed my wife in response to this episode? We do not need a completed neuroscience to know that my happiness, as well as that of many other people, would have been profoundly diminished. And what about the collective well-being of people in an honor society that might support such behavior?
It seems to me that members of these societies are obviously worse off. If I am wrong about this, however, and there are ways to organize an honor culture that allow for precisely the same level of human flourishing enjoyed elsewhere—then so be it. This would represent another peak on the moral landscape. Again, the existence of multiple peaks would not render the truths of morality merely subjective. The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people will have flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have flawed conceptions of physics.
These people are, by all appearances, simply wrong about physics. What will it mean for us to acquire a deep, consistent, and fully scientific understanding of the human mind?
While many of the details remain unclear, the challenge is for us to begin speaking sensibly about right and wrong, and good and evil, given what we already know about our world. Such a conversation seems bound to shape our morality and public policy in the years to come.
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.
Open a newspaper, today or any day for the rest of your life, and you will witness failures of human cooperation, great and small, announced from every corner of the world. The results of these failures are no less tragic for being utterly commonplace: deception, theft, violence, and their associated miseries arise in a continuous flux of misspent human energy.
When one considers the proportion of our limited time and resources that must be squandered merely to guard against theft and violence to say nothing of addressing their effects , the problem of human cooperation seems almost the only problem worth thinking about.
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. 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.
Many people imagine that the theory of evolution entails selfishness as a biological imperative. This popular misconception has been very harmful to the reputation of science.
In truth, human cooperation and its attendant moral emotions are fully compatible with biological evolution. This phenomenon, known as kin selection, was not given a formal analysis until the s in the work of William Hamilton, 3 but it was at least implicit in the understanding of earlier biologists. Legend has it that J. As first suggested by Darwin, and recently elaborated by the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, sexual selection may have further encouraged the development of moral behavior.
In fact, the well- being of others, especially those closest to us, is one of our primary and, indeed, most selfish interests.
While much remains to be understood about the biology of our moral impulses, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and sexual selection explain how we have evolved to be, not merely atomized selves in thrall to our self-interest, but social selves disposed to serve a common interest with others.
The psychologist Michael Tomasello suggests the following adaptive logic: If I am, in effect, advertising the direction of my eyes, I must be in a social environment full of others who are not often inclined to take advantage of this to my detriment—by, say, beating me to the food or escaping aggression before me.
Indeed, I must be in a cooperative social environment in which others following the direction of my eyes somehow benefits me. He suggests that our unique sensitivity to gaze direction facilitated human cooperation and language development.
While each of us is selfish, we are not merely so. Our own happiness requires that we extend the circle of our self-interest to others—to family, friends, and even to perfect strangers whose pleasures and pains matter to us.
While few thinkers have placed greater focus on the role that competing self-interests play in society, even Adam Smith recognized that each of us cares deeply about the happiness of others. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment.
He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance.
If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.
To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it.
But what makes this difference? The truth about us is plain to see: most of us are powerfully absorbed by selfish desires almost every moment of our lives; our attention to our own pains and pleasures could scarcely be more acute; only the most piercing cries of anonymous suffering capture our interest, and then fleetingly. And yet, when we consciously reflect on what we should do, an angel of beneficence and impartiality seems to spread its wings within us: we genuinely want fair and just societies; we want others to have their hopes realized; we want to leave the world better than we found it.
Questions of human well-being run deeper than any explicit code of morality. Morality—in terms of consciously held precepts, social contracts, notions of justice, etc.
To simplify matters enormously: 1. Genetic changes in the brain gave rise to social emotions, moral intuitions, and language … 2. Which became the basis for cultural norms, laws, and social institutions whose purpose has been to render this growing system of cooperation durable in the face of countervailing forces.
Some version of this progression has occurred in our case, and each step represents an undeniable enhancement of our personal and collective well-being. To be sure, catastrophic regressions are always possible. We could, either by design or negligence, employ the hard-won fruits of civilization, and the emotional and social leverage wrought of millennia of biological and cultural evolution, to immiserate ourselves more fully than unaided Nature ever could.
Imagine a global North Korea, where the better part of a starving humanity serve as slaves to a lunatic with bouffant hair: this might be worse than a world filled merely with warring australopithecines. Just what our intuitions suggest: more painful, less satisfying, more conducive to terror and despair, and so on.
While it may never be feasible to compare such counterfactual states of the world, this does not mean that there are no experiential truths to be compared. Once again, there is a difference between answers in practice and answers in principle. The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.
Consider the following account of the Dobu islanders from Ruth Benedict: Life in Dobu fosters extreme forms of animosity and malignancy which most societies have minimized by their institutions.
Dobuan institutions, on the other hand, exalt them to the highest degree. All existence appears to him as a cutthroat struggle in which deadly antagonists are pitted against one another in contest for each one of the goods of life. Suspicion and cruelty are his trusted weapons in the strife and he gives no mercy, as he asks none.
While innumerable things would have been worthy of their attention—the Dobu were, after all, extremely poor and mightily ignorant—their main preoccupation seems to have been malicious sorcery. Needless to say, those who received no such inheritance were believed to be at a terrible disadvantage.
Spells could be purchased, however, and the economic life of the Dobu was almost entirely devoted to trade in these fantastical commodities. Certain members of the tribe were understood to have a monopoly over both the causes and cures for specific illnesses. Such people were greatly feared and ceaselessly propitiated.
In fact, the conscious application of magic was believed necessary for the most mundane tasks. To make matters worse, the Dobu imagined that good fortune conformed to a rigid law of thermodynamics: if one man succeeded in growing more yams than his neighbor, his surplus crop must have been pilfered through sorcery.
Therefore, if a man fell seriously ill or died, his misfortune was immediately blamed on his wife, and vice versa. The picture is of a society completely in thrall to antisocial delusions. Did the Dobu love their friends and family as much as we love ours?
I think it is clear, however, that the question is well posed and easily answered. 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.
I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves.
If there are facts to be known about the well-being of such creatures—and there are—then there must be right and wrong answers to moral questions. Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism viz.
While moral realism and consequentialism have both come under pressure in philosophical circles, they have the virtue of corresponding to many of our intuitions about how the world works. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc.
Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make tacit claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures whether actual or potential. I am unaware of any interesting exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious in some sense and cognizant of human behavior.
It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values. Consider the thinking of a Muslim suicide bomber who decides to obliterate himself along with a crowd of infidels: this would appear to be a perfect repudiation of the consequentialist attitude.
And yet, when we look at the rationale for seeking martyrdom within Islam, we see that the consequences of such actions, both real and imagined, are entirely the point. Aspiring martyrs expect to please God and experience an eternity of happiness after death. The martyr is also the greatest of altruists: for not only does he secure a place for himself in Paradise, he wins admittance for seventy of his closest relatives as well.
Of course, it seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.
The fact that would-be martyrs are almost surely wrong about the consequences of their behavior is precisely what renders it such an astounding and immoral misuse of human life. Because most religions conceive of morality as a matter of being obedient to the word of God generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward , their precepts often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in this world.
Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm.
Clearly, there are mental states and capacities that contribute to our general well- being happiness, compassion, kindness, etc.
Where a person finds himself on this continuum of possible states will be determined by many factors—genetic, environmental, social, cognitive, political, economic, etc. Our growing understanding of the brain, therefore, will have increasing relevance for any claims we make about how thoughts and actions affect the welfare of human beings. Notice that I do not mention morality in the preceding paragraph, and perhaps I need not. I began this book by arguing that, despite a century of timidity on the part of scientists and philosophers, morality can be linked directly to facts about the happiness and suffering of conscious creatures.
Would we lose anything important? The philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene has done some of the most influential neuroimaging research on morality. Does forcing women and girls to wear burqas make a net positive contribution to human well-being? Does it produce happier boys and girls? Does it produce more compassionate men or more contented women? Does it make for better relationships between men and women, between boys and their mothers, or between girls and their fathers?
And yet, as we have seen, most scientists have been trained to think that such judgments are mere expressions of cultural bias—and, thus, unscientific in principle. Very few of us seem willing to admit that such simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the scope of our scientific worldview. Greene articulates the prevailing skepticism quite well: Moral judgment is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an emotional nature.
Our capacity for moral judgment is a complex evolutionary adaptation to an intensely social life. As a result, we are naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism. The psychological tendencies that encourage this false belief serve an important biological purpose, and that explains why we should find moral realism so attractive even though it is false.
Moral realism is, once again, a mistake we were born to make. Taking humanity as a whole, I am quite certain that there is a greater consensus that cruelty is wrong a common moral precept than the passage of time varies with velocity special relativity or that humans and lobsters share a common ancestor evolution. Does the general ignorance about the special theory of relativity or the pervasive disinclination of Americans to accept the scientific consensus on evolution put our scientific worldview, even slightly, in question?
These tensions lead him to the following conclusion: [M]oral 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.
For instance, it is just as true to say that our logical, mathematical, and physical intuitions have not been designed by natural selection to track the Truth. We need not look far in science to find ideas and opinions that defy easy synthesis.
There are many scientific frameworks and levels of description that resist integration and which divide our discourse into areas of specialization, even pitting Nobel laureates in the same discipline against one another. Does this mean that we can never hope to understand what is really going on in the world? It means the conversation must continue. So what? This is precisely the lack of closure we face in all areas of human knowledge. Full consensus as a scientific goal only exists in the limit, at a hypothetical end of inquiry.
Why not tolerate the same open-endedness in our thinking about human well-being? Again, this does not mean that all opinions about morality are justified. To the contrary—the moment we accept that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human well-being, we must admit that many people are simply wrong about morality.
When confronted with such an exotic point of view, a moral realist would like to say we are witnessing more than a mere difference of opinion: we are in the presence of moral error.
Moral Paradox One of the problems with consequentialism in practice is that we cannot always determine whether the effects of an action will be bad or good.
In fact, it can be surprisingly difficult to decide this even in retrospect. At first glance, it surely seems bad, but it might have also put us on a path toward greater nuclear safety, thereby saving many lives. Or it might have caused us to grow dependent on more polluting technologies, contributing to higher rates of cancer and to global climate change.
Or it might have produced a multitude of effects, some mutually reinforcing, and some mutually canceling. If we cannot determine the net result of even such a well-analyzed event, how can we judge the likely consequences of the countless decisions we must make throughout our lives?
One difficulty we face in determining the moral valence of an event is that it often seems impossible to determine whose well-being should most concern us. People have competing interests, mutually incompatible notions of happiness, and there are many well-known paradoxes that leap into our path the moment we begin thinking about the welfare of whole populations.
As we are about to see, population ethics is a notorious engine of paradox, and no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a way of assessing collective well-being that conserves all of our intuitions. What are our moral responsibilities in times of war, when diseases spread, when millions suffer famine, or when global resources are scarce? These are moments in which we have to assess changes in collective welfare in ways that purport to be rational and ethical.
Just how motivated should we be to act when , people die in an earthquake on the island of Haiti? Whether we know it or not, intuitions about the welfare of whole populations determine our thinking on these matters. Except, that is, when we simply ignore population ethics—as, it seems, we are psychologically disposed to do. The work of the psychologist Paul Slovic and colleagues has uncovered some rather startling limitations on our capacity for moral reasoning when thinking about large groups of people—or, indeed, about groups larger than one.
And if we think that losing many lives might have some additional negative consequences like the collapse of civilization , the curve of our concern should grow steeper still. But this is not how we characteristically respond to the suffering of other human beings. When presented with two needy cases, their compassion wanes.
And this diabolical trend continues: the greater the need, the less people are emotionally affected and the less they are inclined to give. Of course, charities have long understood that putting a face on the data will connect their constituents to the reality of human suffering and increase donations.
Slovic has shown that setting the story of a single needy person in the context of wider human need reliably diminishes altruism. The fact that people seem to be reliably less concerned when faced with an increase in human suffering represents an obvious violation of moral norms. The important point, however, is that we immediately recognize how indefensible this allocation of emotional and material resources is once it is brought to our attention. What makes these experimental findings so striking is that they are patently inconsistent: if you care about what happens to one little girl, and you care about what happens to her brother, you must, at the very least, care as much about their combined fate.
Your concern should be in some sense cumulative. This explains why results of this kind can only be obtained between subjects where one group is asked to donate to help one child and another group is asked to support two ; we can be sure that if we presented both questions to each participant in the study, the effect would disappear unless subjects could be prevented from noticing when they were violating the norms of moral reasoning.
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. Knowing that we are generally incapable of valuing two children more than either child alone, we must build a structure that reflects and enforces our deeper understanding of human well-being.
This is where a science of morality could be indispensable to us: the more we understand the causes and constituents of human fulfillment, and the more we know about the experiences of our fellow human beings, the more we will be able to make intelligent decisions about which social policies to adopt.
For instance, there are an estimated 90, people living on the streets of Los Angeles. Why are they homeless? How many of these people are mentally ill?
How many are addicted to drugs or alcohol? How many have simply fallen through the cracks in our economy? Such questions have answers.
And each of these problems admits of a range of responses, as well as false solutions and neglect. Are there policies we could adopt that would make it easy for every person in the United States to help alleviate the problem of homelessness in their own communities?
Is there some brilliant idea that no one has thought of that would make people want to alleviate the problem of homelessness more than they want to watch television or play video games? Like you are, right now. When thinking about maximizing the well-being of a population, are we thinking in terms of total or average well-being? The philosopher Derek Parfit has shown that both bases of calculation lead to troubling paradoxes. Privileging average welfare would also lead us to prefer a world in which billions live under the misery of constant torture to a world in which only one person is tortured ever- so-slightly more.
It could also render the morality of an action dependent upon the experience of unaffected people. As Parfit points out, if we care about the average over time, we might deem it morally wrong to have a child today whose life, while eminently worth living, would not compare favorably to the lives of the ancient Egyptians. Parfit has even devised scenarios in which everyone alive could have a lower quality of life than they otherwise would and yet the average quality of life will have increased.
And yet, at the extremes, we can see that human welfare must aggregate in some way: it really is better for all of us to be deeply fulfilled than it is for everyone to live in absolute agony. Placing only consequences in our moral balance also leads to indelicate questions. For instance, do we have a moral obligation to come to the aid of wealthy, healthy, and intelligent hostages before poor, sickly, and slow-witted ones?
After all, the former are more likely to make a positive contribution to society upon their release. Wrestling with such questions has convinced many people that morality does not obey the simple laws of arithmetic. This is a frequent source of confusion: consequentialism is less a method of answering moral questions than it is a claim about the status of moral truth. Our assessment of consequences in the moral domain must proceed as it does in all others: under the shadow of uncertainty, guided by theory, data, and honest conversation.
The fact that it may often be difficult, or even impossible, to know what the consequences of our thoughts and actions will be does not mean that there is some other basis for human values that is worth worrying about. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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