The Moral Landscape, Part 2

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape. I finished it this last weekend, and wanted to post a few thoughts on it.

Sam Harris has a sympathetic audience in myself. I'm a big fan of science, and not a particularly big fan of religion. Throughout most of human history, religion set itself up as the arbiter of morality. Or so it would seem, and so Sam Harris argues. I actually think religion has little effect on actual morality. Our sense of what is right and wrong has changed fairly dramatically over the past thousand years, even as the religions involved have stayed mostly constant. So I think Harris gives religion a little too much credit as a driver of morality.

Science, Harris argues, should be able to answer moral questions. For example, should we administer corporal punishment? Well, the Bible tells us that if we spare the rod we spoil the child, but science tells us beating kids is not actually very good for them. Much of the book is devoted to persuading the reader that there is a right answer, and even if we don't know what it is, that's no reason to think we will never know what it is.

Some of the best parts of the book was where Harris goes on the attack, and criticizes those who attempt to make peace with the religious, and say that religion still has a role in determining morality, and how to live the good life, and that science cannot answer these questions. Or, he argues, the mere fact of fundamental religious disagreements about morality cannot mean the problem is not a factual one. It only means there is disagreement. I agree with all these points, and I love Harris's righteous fury against illogical religious appeasers.

Although Harris does not talk about ancient philosophies like Stoicism, I think his point holds in regards to these as well. Stoicism offers some sage advice about how to live your life. But, does it work? Does it work better than competing philosophies? This would be hard, perhaps impossible, to study. Nevertheless, there is an answer. We should try and find it out.

Philosophically, I think Harris is on solid ground. Practically, I'm a bit unsure about grounding morality completely in science. Morality would be a fairly difficult area to study, and some of the problems seem intractable to me. Worse, science often goes astray, and the media often report results later shown to be unreproducible or plain fraudulent. The public don't seem well equipped to apply the science of morality in any sane way.

The best way, I think, is to keep what we have now, which is surprisingly close to what Harris wants. He doesn't seem to realize it, though. Science does do research that affects our culture's views of morality. And those cultural shifts affect everyone. Yes, maybe it affects the religious people least, but it still affects them. Science is a powerful tool to shape morality, and I think it is already doing so, and will continue to do so. It's taking a while, but slow change is not necessarily a bad thing.