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    The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
    The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
    The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

    Written by Sam Harris

    Narrated by Sam Harris

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    About this audiobook

    New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people—from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists—agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality through science has now become the primary justification for religious faith.

    In this highly controversial book, Sam Harris seeks to link morality to the rest of human knowledge. Defining morality in terms of human and animal well-being, Harris argues that science can do more than tell how we are; it can, in principle, tell us how we ought to be. In his view, moral relativism is simply false—and comes at an increasing cost to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into the sphere of human values can be finally repelled: for just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 5, 2010
    ISBN9781442300156
    Author

    Sam Harris

    Sam Harris is the author of the bestselling books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, and Lying. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing has been published in over fifteen languages. Dr. Harris is cofounder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. Please visit his website at SamHarris.org.

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    Reviews for The Moral Landscape

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    • 4/5
      Harris makes a pretty convincing case for the role of science - and, more broadly, rational thought - in deciding moral questions. If this sounds patently obvious, it's not so to many. There are a few tangents in the book, but they still make for good reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      My brain is creaking under the weight of relevant fact assimilated from The Moral Landscape. This book is a re read, a thing I'm not reticent of admitting. I had forgotten nearly everything of this book. Except if you count for the fact that I emerged wiser from reading it. This statement is supported by the "experiencing self" and "remembering self" duality that is one of the many things explained in The Moral Landscape. Wisdom, indeed, opens up pathways in the brain for ever, even if one does not remember the cleverness and salient logic. I think that Sam Harris exposes his work to attack by denying that he doesn't draw on extreme examples of fundamentalist Christian cruelties. He clearly did. But his major focus were on barriers between Religion and Science. His pieces on Collins, Polkingthorne, C.S Lewis et al are a pleasure to read. The statistics are still impressive as this book is not yet dated. This book earns its positive reviews and it should have been more universally known. To read it is its own reward.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Sam Harris continues to astound and astonish me with his insights! I always learn something new and amazing from reading his books. He also gives me vast new ways of seeing things. Always worth the time and effort to read him!!!
    • 4/5
      I am very unfamiliar to this topic but still I think this book is a good read because it stimulates critical thinking. The thesis Sam Harris proposes is quite straightforward, he basically explores the implications of defining good as anything that contributes to the well-being of a conscious creature and bad as anything that does the opposite. If you grant that then his conclusions seem pretty reasonable, nevertheless there's still one point which I must admit goes beyond my comprehension, I've read in some review of this book that Harris totally ducks the real question, can science tell us what morality is about?In talking with various people, I noticed that their (and mine as well) intuitive notions of good and bad are in line with what Harris is talking about, they may be reduced to concerns about harm. So in this sense the average Joe idea of what morality is about is deciding what good and bad, but it seems that in the very specialized groups this is not so, since many critics of the book say that the book fails to show how science can tell us what morality is about, and it focuses in a sciences of flourishing.All in all, I highly recommend this book, the goals proposed, and the vision of a civilization in which cooperation is a given (due to common shared values) is very tantalizing.
    • 1/5
      This book is a rephrasing of utilitarianism. He doesn't address any of the traditional criticisms of that system. Half-way through he launches a ridiculous attack on free will, he doesn't believe in free-will but apparently he isn't a fatalist. He is popular for being a fanatic.
    • 4/5
      I am sympathetic to Harris' attempt at framing morality on scientific grounds, and so I was biased in his favor prior to reading this book, however, though I enjoyed his thoughts and agree with his efforts, I certainly expected more. My summary of his main thesis, which I agree with, is that morality should be based on maximizing the well-being of conscious agents. He, admittedly, ambiguously defines well-being as those brain-states that are synonymous with flourishing or what the Greeks called Eudaimonia. The details of these brain-states are open questions left to be answered by scientists, but he stresses that even if such questions are not answered in practice does not mean they are unanswerable in theory and thus we can climb our way towards peaks of well-being on a landscape of experience, and morality should guide us towards maximizing those peaks. Many of Harris' critics reiterate David Hume's is/ought distinction as the last word on this issue, and though Harris does attack this line of thinking, I don't think he completely remedies their concerns. The crux of this issue is why we should adhere to the assumption that well-being ought to be maximized. He comes awfully close to a rebuttal many times throughout the book, but never completes the argument. He more than successfully argues why science can and should inform our morality in achieving these states of well-being, but does not address the fundamental issue of why we should do those things in the first place. Yes, our brains evolved to include our innate moral intuitions as a result of surviving in close social contact with others, but unless you make the claim that evolution has a point or direction (which I doubt, but am also sympathetic towards) then what we consider well-being is an arbitrarily evolved brain state of an arbitrarily evolved organism. It matters to us as we sit here today as already evolved primates bumbling about, of course, but if we were to restart the whole process of life, the universe, and everything, why would it be moral to have organisms experiencing well-being at all rather than nothing? Alternatively, what if a certain subset of humans, if able, decided to relocate to another planet and modify their brains so that everyone was a psychopath and masochism and ruthless survival was the cultural norm--what argument is there to stop them from doing that? You might argue that this is an unstable social state and they would quickly go extinct or else revert back to some sort of cooperation and morality similar to our own evolved morals, but that is a much stronger metaphysical claim, that our morality and brain-states are baked into the structure of the universe. Robert Wright takes this perspective in his latest books Nonzero and The Evolution of God, but I somehow doubt Harris agrees with him. If we forgive Sam Harris for failing to deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the is/ought dichotomy, we can still appreciate the book as contributing an important mode of thinking within morality by extrapolating on the concept of a moral landscape, that morality is more of an optimization problem instead of a black and white codification of things one ought to do or not do. This is not necessarily groundbreaking, but it is useful and important.
    • 5/5
      I got a little bogged down in the neuroscience, and in flipping back to the endnotes with my Kindle buttons (which would have been much harder with a real book). But I found the book refreshing and cathartic in many ways. A very productive way to think about moral reasoning in the age of science. The premise of the book (that moral values should be determined based on what increases individual and collective well-being) seems to be repeated a bit too much, in slightly different ways. But the truth of such a statement seems utterly reasonable and useful to me, and I hope it gains ground in our culture.
    • 5/5
      Terrific. The main concept is that although moral questions are often very difficult to answer, and there are usually many satisfactory answers to each one, we can use the principles of science to eliminate the obviously bad answers to those questions.
    • 5/5
      If I’d had this excellent book at age 13, it may have saved me 15 years of confusion and misdirected muddling in magical thinking .
    • 1/5
      The author's attempt to establish a moral system of values using scientific principles.I can agree with the author that there is right and wrong-- it's a sad commentary on society when this is something that has to even be addressed. I can even appreciate the scientific research and the use of that research in helping to anchor a concept of morality and moral living.But, as usual, Harris takes everything beyond its proper bounds. He continues to kick against the goads of the limitations of science relative to other fields; toward the end, he admits that he has entered the realm of philosophy, but still wants to cling to the pretense of science. Of course, in so doing, he distorts the nature of what science is and what science can tell-- a sure sign of overreach. Trying to bring everything down to the level of maximizing well-being sounds great in theory. But who gets to determine well-being? How can science analyze a value that is rooted in such subjectivism? And how can science declare x to be consistent with maximizing well-being, and y is not? Brain scans? What does a brain scan tell you about the actual function? This is not to say that values do not exist, nor that science has nothing to say about them-- but science cannot get one to a full moral system. This book is a wonderful display of scientism and its sophomoric arrogance-- the presumption of what can be understood from nascent forms of scientific inquiry. The conclusions are far from scientific and there will likely be much that will prove embarrassing in the future when things are better understood and seen as more complex than is being admitted now. It is akin to the know-it-all nature of a teenager; hopefully, as with such a teenager, the damage can be minimized until a better idea of perspective can be learned and humility swallowed.And it's difficult to believe much of what Harris has to say about religion. If he spent half the time seeking to understand what he distorts, he might have a different view of things. How is what he does and the way he does it any better than that which he attempts to condemn by strawman arguments?
    • 4/5
      Despite his vague support for environmentalism, and his tendency to commit the fallacy of composition when discussing human well-being or flourishing as the standard of value and arriving at a sort of utilitarian ethics, most of Harris's latest book is extremely good.His basic argument that conservative intrinsicism and liberal subjectivism is a false alternative and that moral realism requires only that values be epistemologically objective, not ontologically objective, and that this criterion can be met, is sound and important. The book is full of clear and insightful examples, often humorous and sometimes horrifying (although he does tend to slip into irrelevant "lifeboat scenarios" on occasion).Unfortunately, he occasionally takes a wrong turn and his ability to reason so clearly and cut through the nonsense permeating both sides of the culture seems to temporarily abandon him, such as the end of the second chapter in which he gives a lot of blatantly self-contradictory behaviorist arguments that free will is an illusion (which clearly undercuts the entire project he's undertaken in the rest of the book). The philosophical implications he draws from the results of neuroscience in chapter three are also badly mixed, in both content and method. But he gets back on track in chapters four and five.Harris basically presents ethics as principles for flourishing life---not dogmatic rules or subjective whims (both of which are arbitrary). So, overall, The Moral Landscape (or at least parts of it) gets my nomination for best half a book of 2010.
    • 5/5
      One of those books that change your life.
    • 4/5
      In a nutshell, Harris argues that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science, and questions about values- about meaning, morality, and life?s larger purpose- are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values therefore translate into facts that can be scientifically understood, and easily quantifiable. Meaning, values, morality must relate to facts about conscious creatures and must relate to the states of the conscious brain. Circumstances in the life of a conscious creature that are conducive to happy and safe life in harmony with others contribute to the increased well-being of that creature, and should be considered morally sound, whereas circumstances that diminish it through cruelty, hatred, terror, etc., should be considered morally wrong. He calls it a science of human flourishing and argues that religion isn?t necessary to know what?s morally sound and what?s not. I found the thesis for this book morally and scientifically satisfying, yet rated it down because Harris kept repeating himself, and also perhaps because I was already familiar with some of the research he quoted.
    • 4/5
      Extremely interesting paremise - neuropsychology and science as a basis for objective morality. Incomplete, but the author admits his ideas are just a beginning.
    • 1/5
      I've had a good go at reading this without any knee-jerk reactions, but generally I find Harris' views instinctively abhorrent -- despite his championing of reason and science, I don't think he avoids knee-jerk reactions more than anyone else. Particularly when it comes to religion.The basis thesis that there are optimal states of well-being for humans, I accept. That science will be able to improve our understanding of that, I don't doubt. That Sam Harris could be the person that executes this moral calculus? That, I can't countenance. It's partly an instinctive dislike -- I haven't enjoyed any of his lectures and talks that I've watched either -- and partly his intolerance of anything he doesn't understand.I mean, he claims to be talking about universal states of well-being, and states that there may be multiple 'peaks' on the 'moral landscape' where the greatest possible well-being can be achieved. In almost the same breath, he dismisses any thought system he can't understand, particularly if it involves religion.Perhaps the fact that I'm a Unitarian Universalist makes this so difficult to swallow. I believe that there are many different paths to follow, whether you're looking for an afterlife, Enlightenment, reincarnation... There are different ways to be good, and it's hard to measure that. For example, we would accept a person who works with abused children in Britain, who kept their good as their first priority, as a good person. We would also accept a person who teaches children who are living in poverty in another country as good. Which is better? Which more worthy? I'm not sure I'm being very coherent about this. I'm sure there's someone waiting to jump on me telling me that Harris is completely coherent, entirely reasonable, etc; most likely some of them will have some sexist comments to make, without being aware of their own hypocrisy. For me, though, I didn't find Harris' argument that coherent. He seemed to argue himself round and round a tiny point without ever looking up to see the wider world and put his work in context -- every statement seemed to be a reiteration of his core thesis, rather than something which expanded it.
    • 3/5
      The Moral Landscape centers on the argument that morality derives from actions which promote well-being, which is itself predictable from the neurological structures and biological processes which form the basis of mind. Harris suggests that right and wrong can be determined by science, in opposition to the long-standing notion expressed by Hume's is-ought problem -- that the empirical can say nothing about the ethical.

      By evaluating trends in psychology and neuro-imaging research, Harris argues that we can indeed say, in principle, which actions are right -- improving well-being -- and which are wrong. Harris's moral landscape is defined by the array of peaks and valleys that respectively maximize or take away from that well-being. There is no need to appeal to the supernatural nor the moral relativism that condones atrocities under the guise of tolerance.

      When I first read this, I thought it was an excellent read if for no other reason than Harris's dismantling of popular conservative thinking and the more irritating trends in liberal thinking. However, thanks to a complete break in my thinking since that time, I've come to believe the approach here is flawed and does not achieve what Harris set out to do in bridging the is-ought gap. I don't want to write the book off entirely, as it is interesting and Harris presents what I believe to be an agreeable moral position (mostly), but I've become far more skeptical of the movement to push science into domains where it is not appropriate.

      Morality is one of those realms, and I cannot say that Harris did what he set out to do in bridging the gap between is and ought. The position here is interesting, but I want to emphasize the need for caution when presenting science as a totalizing account of any non-empirical sphere.
    • 3/5
      I had seen Harris speak on this book before I read it, and honestly, I was disappointed that the book had almost less content in it than his lecture. Harris succeeds at providing a framework by which to navigate the idea that religious people don't have a monopoly on morality and that you can logically set up an objective morality without religion. However, he does not suggest how we might actually implement this morality, i.e. how would we convince people that this is a compelling and reasonable argument. Furthermore, his footnotes' defense of James Watson's racist remarks make it seem like he does not understand the history of racial issues in the Western world. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and although I understand that cultural relativism is a problem, ignoring the history of racism in the Western world is not exactly a solution. Overall, I would say that the book is worth reading, but that it is sorely lacking in terms of suggesting actual action and implementation.
    • 1/5
      Yet another Sam Harris tract, a dull book from a dull mind.

      Harris' technocratic utopianism is just as prescribed and limited as the religious one. You might even make the point that science has enabled us to do horrific things to one another on a scale not imagined by our ancestors, ruled by thier primitive religious ideologies.

      I'll take theology as the basis for moral epistemology over this bloodless rationalist dogma anyday.
    • 5/5
      A noble attempt, but a futile one if trying to convince the opposition, I imagine. Would you like to get a perspective on morality without deferring entirely to philosophy or authority? You might want to read this then.
    • 5/5
      I recommend listening with an open mind and taking seriously what you believe. I did. I’m changed.