The Moral Landscape

[Justtristo]

I am asking if anybody has read Sam Harris' new book entitled The Moral Landscape. I just wanted to know if you have read it how did you find the book and would you recommend myself reading it.

Cheers

[theVOID]

I haven't read the whole thing, it's rather dry and not really full of ummm, substance... Not an intricate enough train of thought to full an entire book. It also seems that 'human flourishing', what Harris claims is the standard by which we should evaluate moral claims, has intrinsic value, that being he can't show that human flourishing has any relational value to any reasons for action that actually exist. Simply saying we "must" define morality as the wellbeing of conscious creatures and good and bad should be relative to maximizing wellbeing doesn't provide reasons for action why we should.

He also makes some dubious claims like: "questions about values – about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc." The problem with this is my value that weed be legal is not a concern related to my wellbeing, rather this value, like any other, is a relationship between a set of desires and an object or state of affairs.

For example, To say that "I value weed being legal" is to say I desire a state of affairs in which the statement "Weed is legal" is true and to say "I value weed it's self" is to say I value it for it's ability to bring about a state of affairs in which my desires to be stoned is true (instrumental value). This way of assessing value works for all values that can exist, because there are no values that are not relationships between desires and objects or states of affairs, aside from 'attribute' values like "The diamond has an attribute of being made from carbon". So Harris can't account for all values that exist, only the ones related specifically to 'wellbeing' and if he can't do that he can't possibly accurately describe the relationships between all our desires, because any time our values are affected by others then morality becomes involved, for example I consider my being threatened with condemnation for smoking a substance that has no negative impact on anyone else's values (thwarts no desires) to be immoral, so questions about the legality of weed are not concerned with wellbeing but are concerned with morality.

With those points in mind, what the theory basically amounts to is "If you like the wellbeing of all sentient beings then this is how we can scientifically find out what actions best meet this ends". It cannot make statements about other values though, and morality is about much more than wellbeing.

I would recommend you check it out none the less, it's interesting but dry and seems flawed, I intend to finish it.