Review by Choice Review
This book addresses the source of moral values. In historical times, morality in most cultures arose from religious leaders and scriptures. But throughout history many thinkers also argued that one can be moral without subscribing to religious doctrines that goad people to ethical behavior through postmortem threats and rewards. Neuroscientist/writer Harris lends eloquent support to that thesis. A related issue is the relevance of religions in a world where science reigns (or should reign) supreme. The general belief is that science deals only with what "is" and not with what "ought," which is the domain of ethics. Marshaling recent data from anthropology, biology, psychology, neuroscience, and more, Harris argues that science can not only explain why we behave the way we do, but also teach us how to behave. Beyond presenting the progress made by these sciences, Harris makes his customary comments on the Catholic Church, the Qur'an, and the God of Abraham. Since for most Western thinkers, religion means only the Abrahamic ones, there is no reference to Hinduism or Buddhism. The book's central thesis is nothing new in the history of ideas, but it should serve as another powerful weapon in the arsenal of the new atheists in their ongoing crusade against religions. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. V. V. Raman emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SAM HARRIS heads the youth wing of the New Atheists. "The End of Faith," his blistering take-no-prisoners attack on the irrationality of religions, found him many fans and, not surprisingly, a great body of detractors. In "Letter to a Christian Nation," a follow-up prompted by the responses of Christians unhappy with his first book, he set out, he said, "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms," and so acquired, no doubt, more friends and more enemies. Certainly both books have had a wide and animated readership. His new book, "The Moral Landscape," aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific world view he favors has nothing to say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have "nonoverlapping magisteria." The authority of science and the authority of religion cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each are inappropriate for the study of the other's problems. Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls "meaning, morality and life's larger purpose," questions that have no scientific answers. Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, holds the opposite view. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That's because truths about morality and meaning must "relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures," and science alone - especially neuroscience, his field - can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life? Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science - the right values being ones that promote well-being. "Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health," he writes, "it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being." But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn't, then the premise of Harris's all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins. In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what's wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being? It's not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path. That's the case even with something as basic as what's meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an important value. So does it count against your well-being if your happiness is based on an illusion - say, the false belief that your wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come down. But if he thinks that well-being has an objective component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact. Harris was a philosophy major at Stanford, but he is inclined to scant most of what philosophers have had to say about well-being. There is, for example, a movement in contemporary philosophy and economics known as "the capabilities approach," which takes seriously the question of identifying the components of well-being and measuring them. But neither of the two leading exponents of this approach - the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum - gets a mention in the book. The most compelling strand in "The Moral Landscape" is its unspooling diatribe against relativism. Harris insists that there are correct answers to all questions of right and wrong, regardless of anyone's culture or religion. And, though some questions may escape our inquiries, many can be answered by science; none, he appears to think, can be answered without it. You might suppose, reading this book, that this anti-relativism was controversial among philosophers. So it may be worth pointing out that a recent survey of a large proportion of the world's academic philosophers revealed that they are more than twice as likely to favor moral realism - the view that there are moral facts - than to favor moral anti-realism. Two thirds of them, it turns out, are also what we call cognitivists, believing that many (and perhaps all) moral claims are either true or false. And Harris himself concedes that few philosophers "have ever answered to the name of 'moral relativist.'" Given that, he might have spent more time with some of the many arguments against relativism that philosophers have offered. If he had, he might have noticed that you can hold that there are moral truths that can be rationally investigated without holding that the experimental sciences provide the right methods for doing so. STILL, there's plenty of interest in "The Moral Landscape." Harris draws our attention to the fact that "science increasingly allows us to identity aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning." And when he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is interesting and important: about the limits of functional magnetic resonance imaging as a tool for studying brain function; about the current understanding of psychopaths (whose brains display "significantly less activity in regions of the brain that generally respond to emotional stimuli"); about the similarities in the ways in which moral and nonmoral belief seem to be handled in the brain. I found myself wishing for less of the polemic against religion, which recurs often and takes up one entire chapter - he has had two bites of that apple already, and will soon be reduced to gnawing at the core - and I wanted more of the illumination that comes from our increasing understanding of neuroscience. Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it, and a real contribution to the old project of a "naturalized ethics" would have required a fuller engagement with its contradictions and complications. Instead, the landscape that the book calls to mind is that of a city a few days after a snowstorm. A marvelously clear avenue stretches before us, but the looming banks to either side betray how much has been unceremoniously swept aside. Science, Harris notes, can help us identify aspects of our mind that cause us to act irrationally and immorally. Kwame Anthony Appiah is the author of "Experiments in Ethics" and "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 3, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harris argues forcefully for the superiority of science over religion as a means of determining morality and understanding the subtle gradations between permanent truths and culturally and historically determined values. Harris reads his own book, and the passion of his writing does not always come through in his own performance: he reads more than performs, his voice never quite conveying the emotion or certainty that fills nearly every sentence of his book. Still, there is a knowingness in his voice that reminds us that it is the author himself speaking, and readers might appreciate that feeling of intimacy. A Free Press hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Neuroscientist Harris, author of the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning The End of Faith, also available from S. & S. Audio, continues his philosophical dissection of organized religion and his disputation of secularist notions of tolerance for all belief systems as he seeks to ground human morality in scientific study. He presents his analysis of the human brain's response to situations that seem to present moral dilemmas, illustrating that the concepts of morality and evolution are not conflicting and that there are evolutionary as well as neuroscientific explanations for our ethical impulses. Harris himself narrates, in a style that communicates his intellectual depth as well as his obvious emotional connection to his work. For anyone interested in the philosophy of ethics and for those seeking a viewpoint that separates itself from the ostensible opposition of modern conservative and liberal thought.-Christopher Rager, Pasadena, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
