Sam Harris' New Book: "The Moral Landscape" (page 2)

PSacramento

Indeed Vamp, indeed.

One can have the wrong intent and bring about good consequences ( a self serving act of charity) and one can have the best intention and bring about a horrific situation (the spliting of the atom that allowed for the creation of the atomic bomb).

But I don't think that the road to hell canbe paved with good intentions, regardless of our belief in Hell, it doesn't seem like a palce for people with good intentions that went ary.

VampireDCLXV

But I don't think that the road to hell canbe paved with good intentions, regardless of our belief in Hell, it doesn't seem like a palce for people with good intentions that went ary.

I don't think the saying refers to the actions of any one individual going awry leading them to "hell", but the collective actions of humanity as a whole. JMHO.

V665

Dogpatch

excellent.

Randy

leavingwt

Jerry Coyne has almost finished Harris' new book, and he offers some comments. . .

I’m about three-quarters of the way through Harris’s book, and his point is this: if you think about it, you’ll realize that moral judgments should always be about people’s well-being—that no other criterion makes sense. (His argument is not that our past and current moral judgments always come down to well being, for he sees some modern “morality” as mistaken.) Nor does Harris overlook the problems with this view: the difficulty of evaluating and trading off different types of well being (e.g., mental versus physical), the problem of judging societal versus individual well being, and the dilemma of making moral judgments in those many cases where it’s simply impossible to assess well being. While recognizing these problems, Harris doesn’t offer explicit solutions, and for this (and other things) he was criticized by Appiah in The New York Times. I’m not sure, though, that Harris sees his brief as having to resolve these problems.

Harris also suggests that neurophysiology and brain studies can help us determine what “well being” is on a neuronal level, how people make moral judgments, and whether those judgments arise in the part of the brain that also assesses empirical “truth.” And, of course, he suggests that science—broadly construed as “empirical study”—can help figure out what promotes or does not promote well being. This latter claim seems uncontroversial: if we object to abortion because we think that fetuses of a certain age are aware of their surroundings, then science can conceivably provide helpful information. To this extent, Horgan’s assertion that scientists “should not claim that their investigations of what is yield special insights into what should be” is wrong. Even if you don’t buy Harris’s argument, science does yield insights that can inform judgments about what should be.

I’ll post a review of Sam’s book when I’m done, but I do recommend that you read it. We have too blithely dismissed the derivation of “ought” from “is”. And if our thoughtful moral judgments really do come down to assessing “well-being,” then Sam may be right. Right now I’m thinking hard about morality, trying to determine whether what seems obviously moral nevertheless could sometimes reduce well-being. Given the fuzziness of the concept of “well-being”, and the often near-impossibility of measuring it, I may not come up with an answer.