[MD] The Moral Landscape

[John Carl]

Hey Steve.

It's very cool to read about good books and I'm grateful you've shared your
latest experience of a good one.

Something you said tho, gave me pause:

 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.
>

There really seemed to me to be a somewhat different point to Phaedrus'
quest, anti-thetical to the way you state it, he wasn't he striving to free
morality (the good) from rational, scientific scrutiny?  I'd been
contemplating it a bit the night before, that the noble way is to use truth
to support the good.  Is demonstrating that morality open to rational
enquiry, the same thing as defining it?  Encapsulating it in one's
intellectual system?


> 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. "
>
>
OK, I see then that my concern is not valid.  He is raising consciousness
and debate on areas of key interest to the MoQ and debates that go on here
all the time.  Maybe I'll have to make room in my amazon queue/wish list.
He sounds very interesting.  Describing our times in terms of "intellectual
emergency" hits the nail right on the head.



John