The Moral Landscape

I've just finished reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I had been hoping to read it much earlier, like in 2010 when it was published, and when I was actively involved in the Jblogosphere discussing critical topics including the legitimacy of objective morality. But real life has a way of interrupting these extracurricular activities.

Since my last post, I've gotten married, I now have a year and a half year old son and have been working hard in my surgical residency - which I am just now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Suffice it to say that my recent life has seriously curtailed my elective reading.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I liked the book for the most part. Besides for one odd chapter where he seem to tangentially go off on Francis Collins, Sam Harris does a good job defending the concept of a secular objective basis for morality. He does this by identifying the common values of humanity being human flourishing and wellbeing and that there are acts and social policies, etc, that objectively either progress or regress on those goals. Morality is then that which moves us towards greater human wellbeing; immorality that which moves us further from it.

Here's Harris giving the general argument in a TED talk:

It also helps that before my hiatus I had made some very similar arguments on my own. Much of my discussions were found on the now defunct blog of XGH, but as I wrote in the comments of this blogger post from 2009:

"Morals are made in response to human nature and the human condition - objective facts. People may disagree on methods and mechanisms but the goals are always to do what is in the best interests of man. And unless you believe all interests are equally rational and valid, i.e. to eat an apple is as valid a choice as is swallowing a gallon on bleach, then you must recognize a hierarchy of objectively correct decisions: that some acts, some moral codes, make more sense than others. The value of human life makes sense whereas it's non-value is self-defeating.

With that recognition and the assumed goal that rules be made to lead to the best interests of man then it becomes potentially able to be studied scientifically - objectively. Does a given moral in a given society lead to the wellbeing of man in that society? By the mere process of evolution of human civilization, we have already learned how a great deal of once-idealized moral behavior is in fact counterproductive."


Of course different people can converge on similar ideas, but it makes you wonder if Harris was a Jblog fan himself...