A review of The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (2010).
This provocative book written by neuroscientist, philosopher and public intellectual Sam Harris makes the ambitious argument that Science can (and should) be used as a tool to determine human values. It’s a controversial thesis, one that has unsurprisingly stepped on quite a few intellectual toes since the books publication!
Harris’ claim that scientific enquiry can discover objective moral truths is grounded in a position of ‘consequentialist morality’ (meaning the consequences of moral ideas to human well-being is viewed as the only measure for whether something is good or bad). This type of calculation-based morality is familiar to most people in the form of ‘Utilitarianism’, a narrower (and somewhat nastier) version of consequentialism.
Continue reading “The Science of Morality”