The Moral Landscape
How Science Can Determine Human Values
by Sam Harris
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The Moral Landscape
Many imagine that science cannot pose or answer moral questions. In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris makes a bold claim: The more we understand the human brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values.
Morality, Harris argues, is actually an undeveloped branch of neuroscience. Furthermore, answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape”—a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to states of greater or lesser well-being in conscious creatures like ourselves. Different ways of thinking and behaving—different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.—translate into positions arrayed across this landscape, and they can be analyzed scientifically as better or worse for our ultimate well-being as a species.
Along the way to fleshing out this idea, Harris ferrets out the contradictions and hypocrisies that have accompanied historical attempts to create a “universal” moral system or code. He rejects the idea of a soul by arguing that the idea of self is just a mind-game, examines the possible adaptive advantages of superstition, and shows the propensity for religiosity to be a function of specific brain regions.
Most scientists, he writes, believe that answers to life’s most pressing questions will fall perpetually beyond our reach. Yet science should one day be able to make very precise claims about which of our behaviors are morally good, which are neutral, and which are worth abandoning. Moral truths exist, and it will increasingly be the job of science to discover them; the fact/value divide is unsustainable.
The Moral Landscape is one of the most provocative books to be published this year.
Hardcover : 320 pages
Publisher: Free Press ( October 01, 2010 )
Item #: 13-183702
ISBN: 9781439171219
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 inches
Product Weight: 16.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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