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# The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

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The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

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### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    How Psychology Provides a Useful if Largely Unexplored New World of  Values that are also Facts.
  

*by J***A on Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2013*

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam HarrisThe 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. 70I 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;455For 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.1853The 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.2154Historically, a preoccupation with witchcraft has been a cultural universal. And yet belief in magic is now in disrepute almost everywhere in the developed world.2165What 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.82To 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.2630If 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 early180It is possible to be wrong and to not know it (we call this "ignorance").2961It 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").2961And 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.2962Similarly, 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.412There 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.920Students 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).1036Tomasello 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.959It 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. EditMoral 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.1081The 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.1660Blair points out, parenting strategies that increase empathy tend to successfully mitigate antisocial behavior in healthy children;1668Territorial 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.1701Sometimes 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".1860In 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. 2032And 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.2043Morality 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

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    A Model Book for the Scientific Frontier of Morality
  

*by P***M on Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2013*

The notion that morals cannot be determined by facts, proposed centuries ago by philosophical luminaries such as David Hume and E. G. Moore, is greatly challenged in Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape. Harris believes that what constitutes something being ethically "good" or "bad" can be shown through a harmonious combination of scientific evidence and simple rationality. His book thus follows a rhetoric of defining common psychological phenomena such as "belief" and "well-being" coupled with many examples of how subjective perception of these phenomena leads to objectively immoral decisions. Being a neuroscientist and well-known critic of religion, Harris speaks of morality as a frontier of science not up for religious or philosophical debate. He provides such great insight into the field of ethics that makes it a mandatory read for any current or aspiring scientist. However, the average reader is warned: Harris frequently slams religion and if you already have an unfavorable opinion on science, you will probably find this book difficult to agree with.With growing knowledge of the genetic and molecular basis of human behavior, Harris believes that by studying the states of the brain in relation to events in the world, a universal moral compass can be created to follow by all. Differences in gene expression among human beings highly accounts for the differences in our moral intuition and social perception - or at least our natural inclinations of these. However, just as the expression of certain genes can create biological predispositions unwanted by many individuals (tendency for psychopathy, fatal disease, etc.), Harris posits that it is likewise possible to have an undesirable, harmful moral intuition. Thus, morality cannot be treated as a purely subjective topic - there must be undeniable truths in morality.Harris effectively expresses "truths" and not "truth," specifically, because of what he calls the moral landscape, or the area in which there are multiple high and low points of viewing morality so that a great life can be fulfilled. What every individual wants to achieve in life and what kind of impact they want to leave is undeniably subjective; however, there will always be a right and wrong way to achieve their goal. He demonstrates rational differences between opinions of morality through many examples of torture, rape and suffering, often all in the name of religion. The zealots responsible believe these actions are for the well-being of mankind and produce the greatest happiness possible as promised by their religion; however, Harris cautions blind following of moral reasoning. Poor men and women who are castrated, exiled, who view their children being raped and murdered against their own will surely do not live with the same prosperity and happiness as lives that ensure longevity, wealth and intrinsic personal satisfaction. A sense of morality that leads to the former scenario cannot be the right choice or happier life - it just goes against everyway we think rationally.Perhaps Harris' largest flaw is his advocation of such rationality. Myself an aspiring neuroscientist in college, I've learned that science just should not be based off of the major differences in intrinsic reasoning found among everyone - science is meant to be a focused, honest approach to the mysteries of life. Human rationality itself is a much debated topic. Throwing that uncertainty into the supposed truth of science is very contradictory. However, Harris points out that it is nigh impossible to neglect all reason and rationality in science. His reasoning for that comes through the "moral landscape": since subjective rationality can reflect individuals' personalities, we should acknowledge it to understand the unique ways individuals can achieve a moral life. If an individual cannot listen to their own feelings at least to some degree, then how can they have an honest, happy life?Despite it being the biggest flaw in The Moral Landscape to me, I find he handles it quite well because he makes his arguments very agreeable. When he discusses "being right or wrong," he asks if we should be morally able to synthesize and publish a recipe for smallpox to the public. Due to the fact there will always be extremists who want human society to fall, I agree and feel most would agree that that would be immoral to do because many innocent individuals would die from a few individuals' management of a lethal disease. It's just irony that Harris uses rationality to suggest the usefulness of rationality. Future scientific research could show the use of rationality to be absolutely inappropriate in our search for truth, so Harris' opinion can only be tested with time.However, despite the potential flaw, Harris's really convinces you with his greatest point: what constitutes an individual's well-being and happiness can be proven through neuroscience, as we can see the molecular differences in brain states between unhappy people and happy people. For example, with use of fMRI, we can correlate happiness and quality of life with blood-flow in the brain (in his studies, mainly the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe are relevant). If certain reactions to stimuli depicting an event deemed to reduce an individual's quality of life cause higher brain activity associated with lower happiness, then we become closer to finding the truths of morality. It is easier to detect unhappiness, Harris suggests, than happiness, as the moral landscape has peaks in which every individual has his/her own pinnacle of maximizing moral decisions with subjective well-being. This is because every individual is still slightly unique in what makes them happy. Thus, he argues that morality should be a followed set of answers rather than a personal open-ended question, as we can find how the correct moral sense leads to what human beings intrinsically deem as "the best possible lives."Along with gene expression and activity in certain brain regions, The Moral Landscape enlightens you on how even evolution plays in determining moral values. Harris posits that we are not evolutionarily adapted for our society - we are not selected to become better government officials or shopkeepers. Thus, as we describe and define moral values with science, he suggests that we must recognize that morality will be impartial to personal thought. For example, Harris describes how individuals who see the life of one disadvantaged individual relevant to charitable organizations are much more likely to donate than if they saw how their donation is necessary for the world at whole. This, he suggests, may represent our selected behavior to care for only a few individuals; while we were not selected to care for the entire world, there is no argument against the entire world needing some form of care. Thus, according to Harris, we must disregard our predisposed beliefs and come to moral conclusions with science.In all, it is a truly inspirational read - a read that has changed my life and has helped me ground the way I think. The text is engaging and very enjoyable - Harris' memorable analogies are not only mind-stimulating but merit his book a delightful re-read. I will always keep this book in mind as I come across moral warfare in the realm of scientific research.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Very good for what it purports to do
  

*by A***L on Reviewed in Canada on July 27, 2021*

Let me start off by writing that this book is 10 years old. The direction the author takes is subjective yet the methodology, the matrix that brings it about is universal. What I mean is "The Moral Landcape" is a universally potent concept as he introduces it to the reader. "How science can determine human values" would be Harris' contention.He does a pretty good job at it too. As someone living in the west, I wholeheartedly agree with his choosing suffering as a scale on which to base the quality of human existence. And yes, science can and, once agreed upon, should weigh in and quantify acceptable and unacceptable degrees of existence brought about by certain types of behaviours.The single limit, not flaw, of his argument is his failiure to recognize that western civilization is the civilization of the person according to Henri de la Bastide. As such, individual pain and the drive to limit it to the point of warranting the pursuit of personal happiness is only broadly desirable in the west. Other civilizations verily deem religion to be the proper organisational metric of the moral landscape. I do not mean to say I respect their culture or wish to bring it about. I am simply saying that science can't really determine the optimal human existence. It can only determine human values in accordance to arbitrary wholly irrational customs.

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