Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape"

[spoonless]

via crasch,

In this highly anticipated new book, the bestselling author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion’s monopoly on morality and human values.

"In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a “moral landscape.” Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of “morality”; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible." - The Free Press

"I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me." - Richard Dawkins

Very interesting! This caught my eye because of my recent debate with easwaran over whether science might ever be able to bridge the "is-ought" gap and give moral prescriptions:

http://spoonless.livejournal.com/180836.html?thread=1532772#t1532772

As I argue in the thread with easwaran, I do not think science will ever be able to say anything about fundamental values, and I do not believe there are objectively right or wrong answers to questions like "how many kittens lives is one human life worth?" I've never believed that moral "truths" are the same kinds of truths that we talk about when we talk about facts about the world--rather, I think they are facts about our personal desires and whims, which are inherently subjective. But I have great respect for Richard Dawkins, and if he says this book (which just came out a month ago) has completely changed his mind on such an important issue, then I will surely give it a chance--perhaps it can change my mind too. Somehow I doubt it, but nevertheless I look forward to reading it! While I've never agreed with the idea of objective morality, I have always found the possibility positively tantalizing and have often thought "I'd like nothing more than for that to be true--I wish it was, but I know it couldn't possibly be."

Comments

First Mover

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

So there are all lots of possibilities for how many first causes there are. But let's say for the sake of argument again, that it turned out there was only a single first cause, rather than none or many... a single moment in time where everything began, and you could deterministically evolve the universe from that point onward, predicting every future event from that first event.

Even if that is the case, there's absolutely no reason why that first cause would have to be an intelligent being--it could simply be a singularity of spacetime, a big explosion of zero entropy from which everything else came out of, and after which entropy started increasing and things started getting more disorganized.

Indeed, I find that a far more deeply satisfying and elegant explanation for how things began than that there was some anthropomorphic intelligence that waved his hand and said "let there be light". Adding an extra first cause before the real first cause, with the stipulation that the extra first cause be an intelligent creature... is adding an unnecessary and ugly extra feature to an otherwise beautiful theory.

The reason why I initially mentioned the lack of a distinction between inanimate and animate things is because one of the strangest parts of Aristotle's argument to me... is that he would assume that whatever the first cause was, it had to be animate. It could have just as well been inanimate, in fact that would make a great deal more sense.