The Moral Landscape
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7)." --The Moral Landscape (2010) by Sam Harris, see honour thy father and thy mother and child discipline "My spoken and written collisions with Richard Shweder, Scott Atran, Mel Konner and other anthropologists..." --The Moral Landscape (2010) by Sam Harris, p.205/6 "Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy ... [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ ‘noncognitivism,’ ‘antirealism,’ ‘emotivism,’ etc. directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe." --The Moral Landscape (2010) by Sam Harris, p. 197 "Of late, the philosophers William Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have each built similar cases..."--The Moral Landscape "Increasingly, secular democracies are left supine before the unreasoning zeal of old-time religion. The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt accounts for the decade that has been lost in the United States to a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research; it explains the years of political distraction we have suffered, and will continue to suffer, over issues like abortion and gay marriage; it lies at the bottom of current efforts to pass anti-blasphemy laws at the United Nations (which would make it illegal for the citizens of member states to criticize religion); it has hobbled the West in its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe into a new Caliphate. [Eurabia, While Europe Slept, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe] Knowing what the Creator of the Universe believes about right and wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at almost any cost; not knowing what is right—or that anything can ever be truly right—often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands." --The Moral Landscape (2010) by Sam Harris, p.5 |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is a 2010 book by Sam Harris, in which the author promotes a science of morality and argues that many thinkers have long confused the relationship between morality, facts, and science. He aims to carve a third path between secularists who say morality is subjective (e.g. moral relativists), and religionists who say that morality is given by God and scripture. Harris contends that the only moral framework worth talking about is one where "morally good" things pertain to increases in the "well-being of conscious creatures". He then argues that, problems with philosophy of science and reason in general notwithstanding, 'moral questions' will have objectively right and wrong answers which are grounded in empirical facts about what causes people to flourish.
Challenging the traditional philosophical notion that humans can never get an 'ought' from an 'is' (the so-called Hume's law), Harris argues that moral questions are best pursued using not just philosophy, but the methods of science. Thus, "science can determine human values" translates to "science can tell us which values lead to human flourishing". It is in this sense that Harris advocates that scientists begin conversations about a normative science of "morality".
See also
