It’s not as difficult to tell right from wrong as people think, Sam Harris says. The issue is whether those who are wrong will ever admit it. An interview with the author.
What do you mean by Moral Landscape?
The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms. The moment we realize that the only things we can intelligibly value are actual and potential changes in the experience of conscious beings, we can think about a landscape of such changes – where the peaks correspond to the greatest possible well-being and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering. Given that consciousness and its contents must depend upon the laws of nature, there are clearly right and wrong answers to how to move across this landscape.
Your project seems to be to collapse the old distinction between facts and values. How?
My argument for why all values relate to the experience of sentient beings is pretty simple. Imagine a state of the universe in which every creature suffers as much as it can for as long as possible – with nothing good coming of it. I call this “the worst possible misery for everyone.” It seems rather obvious that if words like “bad” or “evil” mean anything at all, they apply to this situation. If someone says the worst possible misery for everyone isn’t really “bad,” or there’s something that might be worse, I don’t know what he’s talking about – and I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about, either. There’s a continuum here: We have the worst possible misery for everyone on one end, and then we have all other possible states that offer something better. Given that experience depends on the laws of nature in some way, there must be right and wrong ways to move across this continuum toward states of greater well-being. The totality of all these possible experiences is what I call “the moral landscape.” There may be many peaks on it – which is to say that there might be many ways for us to thrive – but there are clearly many ways not to be on a peak.
How does science help us to do that?
The moment we admit that questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, are actually questions about human and animal well-being, we see that science can, in principle, answer such questions. Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy. The relevant details of genetics, neurobiology, psychology, sociology, economics etc. are fantastically complicated, but these are domains of facts, and they fall squarely within the purview of science.
We should reserve the notion of “morality” for the ways in which we can affect one another’s experience for better or worse. Some people use the term “morality” differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful. We define terms like “medicine,” “causation,” “law” and “theory” very much to the detriment of homeopathy, astrology, voodoo, Christian Science and other branches of human ignorance, and there is no question that we enjoy the same freedom when speaking about concepts like “right” and “wrong,” and “good” and “evil.” Once we acknowledge that “morality” relates to questions of human and animal well-being, then there is no reason to doubt that a prescriptive (rather than merely descriptive) science of morality is possible. After all, there are principles of biology, psychology, sociology and economics that will allow us to flourish in this world, and it is clearly possible for us not to flourish due to ignorance of these principles.
