The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values [Versión Kindle]

Sam Harris seems to have a knack for staying on the cutting edge of the religious debates. His first book, "The End of Faith," ignited the so-called New Atheist movement. Now after several years and after earning a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA Harris returns igniting a new debate, this time about the moral landscape of our world. People have been arguing back and forth whether there was anything new in the so-called New Atheist movement. But if this book counts as part of that movement then Harris does succeed in bringing something new to the table.

Theists like to remind atheists of the old days, the days of Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, the so-called robust atheists of the past who didn't think there could be an objective morality for us all. Now with this book there is truly a new atheism, one that affirms an objective morality based in the sciences. And it will be hotly contested by both sides.

In this book Sam Harris admirably attempts to steer between a moral absolutism that has answers to most moral questions and a relativism that has nothing objective to say about them. For him moral facts exist, but relativism is false. For him the answers to moral questions do not come from religion, which can and does produce more harm than good, but from science, which helps us understand what makes for human flourishing. Science should be able to tell us in principle how we ought to live our lives.

Given that our experience is constrained by the laws of the universe, Harris argues there must be scientific answers to the question of how best to move up to the peaks of this moral landscape, toward greater happiness.

According to Harris there can be no such thing as Muslim algebra or Christian neuroscience so also there can be no religion specific morality.

While there are conflicting moral claims that might never be solved, most moral issues are not like this, he argues. For if we could eliminate "war, nuclear proliferation, malaria, chronic hunger, child abuse," etc. this would provide for human flourishing and be morally good for everyone.

He argues that at bottom moral questions are about neurology, biology, psychology, sociology, and economics.

According to Harris: "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."

I hope his argument succeeds. It should. He argues for it in a masterful way.

First of all, I must say that I am a Sam Harris fan. I enjoyed his previous two books and really like his writing style, which is lucid, lively and engaging. Unfortunately, while the quality of Harris' prose in "The Moral Landscape" remains excellent, the same cannot be said of the quality of his reasoning.

In "The Moral Landscape", Sam Harris posits that there *are* objective moral values and they can be determined by science. Briefly, his argument is that morality should be defined as the well-being of conscious creatures, and since the question of what acts or situations will promote/undermine well-being is an empirical one, it is a question that science can (in principle) answer. This is an audacious thesis, and as reluctant moral skeptic who is constantly on the lookout for a convincing account of moral objectivity, I was excited to see whether Harris could support his claims.

However, I was sorely disappointed. Harris' argumentative technique consists primarily of making bare assertions or rhetorical statements. For example, he says things like "There is little doubt that well-being must include fairness, compassion, etc" or "It seems clear that whether a certain state of pleasure is 'good' has to do with whether it is conducive to well-being". Anyone familiar with argumentative writing would know that when a writer has to resort to bare claims about how "obvious" or "clear" a proposition is, he really doesn't have any support for that proposition at all.

In a similar vein, Harris rejects Hume's venerable is-ought distinction by insisting, "If this notion of 'ought' means anything we can possibly care about, it must translate into a concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious beings." He then summarily dismisses the views of people who disagree by asserting that they must be wrong, lying or not making sense! This is very poor argumentative technique indeed.

Harris is slightly more persuasive when he draws analogies between morality and science or medicine. He points out that science and medicine also rest on certain unsubstantiated premises - for example, science assumes that empirical evidence can be relied upon for determining truth, while medicine presupposes that "health" means a long life free of diseases. Yet nobody would say that science cannot discover objective facts, or that health cannot be studied scientifically. By the same token, the fact that one cannot prove that morality is about the well-being of conscious entities is not fatal to the scientific study of morality.

However, upon closer scrutiny, one will find that Harris has ducked the issue altogether. The issue is not whether morality can be studied scientifically, once we accept the premise that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. Rather, the issue is whether science can determine what morality consists of *in the first place*. In other words, the question is not, "Can science tell us how to achieve X, assuming that X is moral/desirable/valuable?" Instead, the question is, "Can science determine *whether* X is moral/desirable/valuable?" While the subtitle of Harris' book suggests that he is addressing the latter question, his book is in fact concerned with the former.

In conclusion, Harris' book lacks logical rigour and fails to accomplish what it set out to achieve. Nevertheless, it is still a well-written, highly readable book that is informative and interesting, especially when it deals with the neuroscientific aspects of belief, free will and morality. In spite of its significant flaws, I would still recommend it to the average layperson who is interested in this subject area.

Sam Harris has written a simple, yet extraordinarily powerful book about the "science of morality" and it is quite a revelation. He cuts through the cloudy thinking of religion and relativism to get at the heart of the problem: How do we as human beings maximize our well being?

Harris provides no hard and fast answers, he is attempting to lay the foundations here. He is not, like Moses, stumbling off Mt. Sinai with stone tablets emblazoned with the "truth," he is merely sketching out how we might orient ourselves to best tackle the mountain ourselves.

Refreshing and brilliant.