"The Moral Landscape"

I just finished reading Sam Harris's book "The Moral Landscape - How Science Can Determine Human Values".

The basic idea of the book is that moral values have long been shaped by religion and culture, and science has tended to skip around them. To a large extent out of fear of offending religious views, and lately also out of fear of being politically incorrect by offending differing cultural values. eg "Western Liberal cultural imperialism".

Harris contends that certain things are simply scientifically measurable good and bad things to do for the human condition, and that science shouldn't yield to religion and culture which insists on pushing its ways when they can be shown to be demonstrably incorrect.

An extreme example to demonstrate this idea is described at the beginning of the book - Female Genital Mutilation - which is something even very hardened moral relativists don't try to defend. It's quite possible to take populations which practice it versus those who don't, scientifically measure various indicators of human development, health and well-being, and basically demonstrate that the cultures which practice it are overall worse off for it than those who don't.

The idea is that with more scientific knowledge and further developments in neuroscience, we'll be able to learn in more fine-grained detail than ever what's actually good and bad for the human condition (on both a personal as well as a social well-being level), rather than relying on traditional religion and culture for our values.

My Take?

I agree with essentially everything in the book. And in the end there isn't much of a revolutionary conclusion in terms of where we should go next, per se.

The biggest issue I can see with something like this - at least at the level of personal relationships and micro social politics - is that people simply have different personalities and tastes. One person's independence and happy solitude is another person's loneliness, to use introversion-vs-extroversion as an example. So while it might be easy to eventually work out (down to a neurological level) what increases well-being and happiness in any one person - playing together will always have its challenges, I think. But of course, the more we know the more we can finetune those interactions and mitigate conflicts.

Anyway, a highly recommended read!