[MD] The Moral Landscape

[Steven Peterson]

Hi All,

I finished reading Harris's The Moral Landscape, and I highly
recommend it to all MOQers. It is clear that Harris's project in his
latest book is the same as Pirsig's in Lila--to demonstrate that
morality is open to rational inquiry and that is it possible to know
truths about morality in the sense that we say we know truths about
science.

Harris in an interview for The Onion's A/V Club
"But this new book did come out of a “eureka” moment—that came out of
my experience since September 11—in criticizing religion publicly and
discovering that more or less everyone agrees on one point. People
agree—whether they’re fundamentalist Christians who think the universe
is 6,000 years old or atheist scientists like myself—everyone seems to
agree that you can’t talk about moral truth in the context of science.
Religious people think you can’t talk about moral truth in the context
of science because the truths have to come from a voice in a whirlwind
that has been codified in our holy books. Secularists and more
educated liberal types, by and large, think that there’s just no such
thing as moral truth; morality is either purely a product of culture,
or we make it up, or it has just been drummed into us by evolution and
there’s nothing about our intuitions of right and wrong and good and
evil that actually connects to reality in any scientific sense.

I really perceive this to be an intellectual emergency, because the
only people who are sure that there are right answers to moral
questions are, for the most part, religious demagogues. I consistently
encounter people in academic settings and scientists and journalists
who feel that you can’t say that anyone is wrong in any deep sense
about morality, or with regard to what they value in life. I think
this doubt about the application of science and reason to questions of
value is really quite dangerous. Essentially what we’re saying is:
When we try to talk honestly and rigorously about the nature of
reality—when we try to get our biases out of the way, when we rely on
careful observation and clear reason—these efforts have absolutely no
application into the most important questions in human life. And
that’s just on its face ridiculous. But I think it’s dangerous because
these decisions get made based on people’s dogmatism and their
reliance on Iron Age philosophy. So now we’re a culture that debates
gay marriage while not really addressing problems like nuclear
proliferation, climate change, the crisis in education, poverty across
the world, etc. "

http://www.avclub.com/articles/sam-harris,46226/

Best,
Steve