The anti-Sam Harris points to a real moral operating system

Google Engineering Director Damon Horowitz tackles the idea of using numbers and science to make ethical decisions and comes up with a delightfully different answer than Sam Harris did in The Moral Landscape. Watching Horowitz’ TED talk, I’m energized and hopeful, which is a far different reaction than the one I had when reading Harris’ book.

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Goodness by any other name

Any search for goodness is probably doomed to wander through the wilds of religion at some point. Variations on political themes will undoubtedly slither through the under brush. Philosophies, moral codes, science and clashing systems of ethics can be expected to pounce more than once on the unsuspecting seeker. All those things have happened to me since I launched this quest on June 1.

Most days this feels like chaos and blood sport. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if there’s something wonderful about the fact that I first conceived of my destination as being the disarmingly vague concept of “goodness.” I could have been decided to search for God, one true morality, or the right kind of code for living.

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Sam Harris & the incredible, shrinking idea

I’m going to do something I rarely do. I’m going to recommend that you NOT buy a book. That’s because there is no there there, no beef on the bun of Sam Harris’ already bestselling The Moral Landscape.

Harris throws 191 pages of text and 84 pages of footnotes and references at a handful of thin ideas. He leaves so many pesky questions unanswered and glosses over so much that you don’t have to read the book to get his point. Watch Harris’ TED talk or read the Q and A or Harris’ defense of his ideas on his website and save the $26.99 for another book.

Here are Harris’ ideas in a nutshell:

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Sam Harris and the truck-sized hole in the book

Flaming arrows are heading Sam Harris’ way because of his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. The problem, says my old blogging friend Josh Rosenau, is the truck-sized hole in the middle of Harris’ argument. Times reviewer Kwame Anthony Appiah adds:

(H)ow do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

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A new Moral Landscape from Sam Harris

Sam Harris’ new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is out today. I’m anxious to read it, but Harris’ tendency to squeeze the complexity out of life may render his musings unpalatable.

Witness these thoughts from a recent Huffington Post commentary:

This rupture in our thinking has different consequences at each end of the political spectrum: Religious conservatives tend to believe that there are right answers to questions of meaning and morality, but only because the God of Abraham deems it so. They concede that ordinary facts can be discovered through rational inquiry, but they think that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind. Scriptural literalism, intolerance of diversity, mistrust of science, disregard for the real causes of human and animal suffering — too often, this is how the division between facts and values expresses itself on the religious right.

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Once again Sam Harris tries to explain his new book

Sam Harris’ pre-release publicity tour for his new book The Moral Landscape continues, as he once again tries to explain his point. This new Q & A on his website provides a good overview. I find his discussion of the term “moral landscape” to be the most heartening because it includes the notion that there is more than one way for humans to be moral. Perhaps the idea of multiple peaks of morality can help leaven the horrors that have often been committed in the name of One True Morality.

(The Moral Landscape) is the phrase I use to describe the space of all possible experience—where the peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys represent the worst possible suffering. We are all someplace on this landscape, faced with the prospect of moving up or down. Given that our experience is fully constrained by the laws of the universe, there must be scientific answers to the question of how best to move upwards, toward greater happiness.

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Sam Harris & the dangerous quest

I’m beginning to understand Sam Harris’ argument. He’s seeking an alternative to religion as the basis for morality, and he’s seeing morality as the core issue of our time. In a presentation and lengthy discussion at the Edge Foundation conference on The New Science of Morality, Harris explained that he wants science to take on the project of moral persuasion.

How can we persuade all of the people who are committed to silly and harmful things in the name of “morality” to change their commitments, to have different goals in life, and to lead better lives? I think that this third project is actually the most important project facing humanity at this point in time. Read More.

Sam Harris, universal morality & progressive anger

Bestselling author Sam Harris has proposed yet another heretical idea: the notion that science can and should answer questions of good and evil, right and wrong. He appears to be arguing that science should shape morality and define goodness and what constitutes a properly lived life. Already his ideas have sparked a huge online debate. Read more.

Today in Goodness

Sam Harris proposed that morality is an undeveloped branch of science and set off a firestorm. Harris writes:

If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments -- or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like "well-being" and "misery" are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them.

Matt Steinglass replies:

I am a big believer in science. That’s why I think it shouldn’t attempt to generate knowledge in fields where it can’t generate knowledge.

Kathleen Parker takes on the Rev. Franklin Graham, the National Day of Prayer and the notion that some prayers are more equal than others. (Graham apparently believes that Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and those who follow any religion except his need not apply because God won't listen to them.) Money quote:

Centuries of blood have been shed for the sake of religious certitude. But transcending the notion that only some prayers are the right ones might get us closer to the enlightenment we purportedly seek.