The Moral Landscape

I was quite excited about reading this book. It'd be incredibly interesting to read a compelling or at least clearly articulated explanation of how science can determine human values.

Unfortunately, the main argument Harris makes in this book is a lot weaker. Essentially, it comes down to the following:

1. Take as an axiom that everybody experiencing maximum well-being is morally better than everybody experiencing maximum suffering. (I was hoping this wouldn't be taken as an axiom but would instead be argued for, but OK, I can accept this axiom.)
2. People's well-being is a consequence by physical realities, such as the state of their brains.
3. Science can help us better predict what physical realities our actions will lead to.
4. Ergo, science can theoretically help us determine what constitutes more and less ethical behaviour (the moral landscape).

Which, sure, is convincing enough, but dodges all the actually interesting topics, such as:

- Is all well-being (for example, that of animals) equally important?
- Can the well-being of different people be compared?
- Should we even act morally, and if so, why, and to what extent?
- And most importantly: how do we actually bring this into practice, given that in practice there's a whole lot that science can not (yet?) tell us?

Additionally, the argument outlined above is given in the first part of the book, and I spent the rest of the book hoping he would get to the actually interesting topics. Instead, he spent most of it railing against people who had dared disagree with him in the past, arguing against articles by people I'd never even heard of (and clearly not always painting their arguments in the most charitable light), and explaining how many counter-arguments and what he's saying were actually counter arguments against a stronger point than he was making, and was therefore not applicable.

And finally, he spent a considerable number of pages arguing against religion, which I was personally not that interested in. That one's mostly on me though: I didn't know Sam Harris but was recommended him by someone, and picked this book because it was the only one of his that didn't seem to be about religion. Of course, the fact that every other book did should have been a dead giveaway.

I might be overly harsh, as I was really excited about reading a book arguing not only that moral values were knowable, but also and especially how that was the case. All in all, though, I came away disappointed.

How we can understand morality and values on a spectrum of well-being.

Combining his experience in neuroscience and philosophy, Sam highlights the importance of changing people’s ethical commitments, explaining that "Nearly every other important goal, from combating climate change, to fighting terrorism, to curing cancer, to saving the whales falls within its purview.” This is a rational, scientific framing of actions and mindsets to pave a path for effective altruism in the 21st century.

The book is meant to lay groundwork for further discussion and progress. Sam has said that this was an edit of his dissertation for a PhD in neuroscience at UCLA. The mission here is determining which patterns of thought and behavior we should collectively be aiming towards. Atheism is a central theme: Sam slams religion broadly, the Catholic church and Islam specifically, and an apologetics book brutally, saying "to read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide.” He was more of an edgelord back in 2010, but is essentially trying to disprove the notion that religion offers the best framework for our guiding principles, and instead to show that ethics and moral truths can, and must, stand on their own.