[MD] The Moral Landscape

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Mark,

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 7:59 PM, 118 <ununoctiums at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I haven't read Harris' book.  From appearances it seems to be taking a
> view on encapsulating morals into a system which can then be used to justify
> the morality of the system.  As such, a question into the morality of
> creating such a system is appropriate.


I don't think he is after an ethical system. What he is doing is
attacking the dogma that science has nothing to do with morals. Once
we agree that morality is amenable to rational inquiry we drop the
relativistic notion that morality is just whatever a particular
cultural group or religion says it is. A culture can be wrong about
what is moral. If he is sucessful in making this case, perhaps
situations like the following will be more rare for him:

"At the conclusion of my talk [TED], I fell into debate with another
invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well
positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for
our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from
Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree,
another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke.
This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between
criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet
of our conversation, more or less verbatim:

    She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say
that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?


    Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of
increasing or decreasing well-being--and it is obvious that forcing
half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them
if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human
well-being.

    She: But that's only your opinion.

    Me: Okay... Let's make it even simpler. What if we found a culture
that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his
or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture
that was needlessly diminishing human well-being?

    She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

    Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let's
say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In
their scripture, God says, "Every third must walk in darkness."

    She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.