Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values? 4-7

Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values?


Partner: Berkeley Arts and Letters

Location: First Congregational Church of Berkeley (2345 Channing Way at Dana, Berkeley) Berkeley, CA

Event Date: 11.10.10

Speakers: Sam Harris

Summary

In this highly anticipated, explosive new book, the 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 The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values to dismantle the most common justification for religious faith -- that a moral system cannot be based on science.

The End of Faith ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In its aftermath, Harris discovered that most people, from secular scientists to religious fundamentalists, agree on one point: Science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Even among religious fundamentalists, the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence that God exists, but that faith in Him provides the only guidance for living a good life. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science has officially had no opinion. Until now.

Morality, Harris argues, is actually an undeveloped branch of neuroscience, and answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a "moral landscape" -- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to human states of greater or lesser wellbeing. Different ways of thinking and behaving -- different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. -- translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels, ranging from biochemistry to economics, but they have their crucial realization as experiences in the human brain.

Bringing a fresh, secular perspective to age-old questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, Harris shows that we know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, cultural relativism is simply false -- and comes at increasing cost to humanity. And just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Sam Harris delivers a game-changing argument about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• moral landscape
• morality
• moral values
• atheism
• religion
• book
• author
• neuroscience
• secular
• humanism
• god
• superstition
• reason
• science
• christianity
• philosophy

[cacherry1]

Understanding the failure of human intuition is key to understanding the failure of religion.

[BeatleEDs]

Ahh, he rambles and rambles without making any significant points.

[pp0u50f3]

"they could probably build me a better remote" hahaha

[sam51092]

@rhyfelur Thank you, that example might be better.

[rhyfelur]

@sam51092 Try looking at it like this: Monte is sitting across the table from you....in front of him (face down) are 2 cards and in front of u is 1 card, there are 2 deuces and 1 king. The odds are 2:3 that the king is in front of him and 1:3 that it is front of u...u both know that at least 1 of his cards must a deuce, that does not change the odds, likewise, him revealing his deuce does not change the odds, so now u both have one card face down but the odds are unchanged.

[sam51092]

I don't think I'll ever get the Monty Hall problem. Why does taking away 998 doors, leaving door #1 and door #556, mean that door #556 wasn't just a random pick, meaning it's still 50/50 chance? Importantly, how do we know that believing door #556 is not a random pick isn't ITSELF a failure of intuition? Say, the same kind of failure that makes superstitious people ascribe purpose to random events like hurricanes and tornadoes?

[DrInfidel]

I agree with what he says, but he kind of deviated from the original lecture topic

[MatthewJohn00003]

aw, where can I get that image (7:22)?

[Nishap739]

It is not possible for me to watch a Sam Harris (or Christopher Hitchens) video without having to go to the dictionary to look up a word they use but I don't know. Tonight's word: bowdlerize, at the 5:35 mark.