Summary Of The Moral Landscape By Sam Harris

Answer to Sam Harris's Moral Landscape Challenge

At the start of his website’s FAQ for the Challenge, Sam Harris summarizes what he calls his book’s central argument. That summary is clearly invalid: he slides from the assumption that moral values “depend on” facts having to do with conscious creatures, to the conclusion that morality itself has scientific answers. This is like saying that because land-dwelling animals depend on ground beneath their feet, biology reduces to geology.

As for the implicit argument in The Moral Landscape, as I interpret it, that argument is also flawed. Harris thinks that because morality has to do with the facts of how to make conscious creatures well, and these facts are empirical, there’s a possible science of morality. Putting aside the question of what exactly counts as science, let’s consider whether any kind of reasoning tells us what’s moral. Take, for example, instrumental reason, the efficient tailoring of means to ends. If we want to maximize well-being and we think carefully about how to achieve that goal, we can, of course, help to achieve it. Is that all there is to morality? No, because instrumental reason—as it’s posited in economics, for example—is neutral about the preferences. This kind of rationality takes our goals for granted and evaluates only the means of achieving them. So we can be as rational as we like in this sense and the question will remain whether our goals are morally best.

Russell Blackford makes the same point and Harris replies that a utopia in which well-being is maximized is possible, and so if a bad person’s preferences stand in the way of realizing that perfect society, we might as well change that person’s way of thinking, even by rewiring his brain. Presum...

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...otives intentionally sacrifice their personal well-being, because they care more about others than themselves.

Thus, in so far as the ideal of well-being includes the goal of personal contentment, this ideal is opposed to the moral one of altruism, of maximizing (other) people’s happiness. Which goal is preferable isn’t up to pure reason of any kind. Rather, as with all our core values, we must ultimately take a leap of faith that our personal stamp is worth putting on the world. And in so far as so-called rationalists would presuppose Harris’s utilitarian ideal, they’d clash with pessimists, existentialists, world-weary misanthropes, melancholy artists, esoteric Hindus, Buddhists, and the like. Moreover, in light of how extroverted Western norms have tended to become more global, not reason but force and a crass lowering of standards would likely settle the matter.