The Moral Landscape
What is the best “moral” decision that you can make in any given situation? Many aspects of your physical being work in unison to be able to use your cognitive processes to even come to a conscious decision. There have been many instances, especially recently, where scientific research is being conducted wherein people think about not just morality and what it means to them but also what is occurring inside the various regions of the brain. Sam Harris, the author of this book, tries to argue that we as humans should try to use science in a way to help us come to better moral decisions that increase the well-being of all humans. Like the studies I was referring to, Mr. Harris wants those scientific studies to be used in such a way as to try to help us make better, quicker, more efficient, and most importantly, the most beneficial decisions to improve or maintain our well-being. Although I do not agree will all the arguments that Mr. Harris presents, I do believe that reading this book is a worthwhile endeavor. Mr. Harris argues that there are objective moral values that can be and possibly are established into society through science. A relativist, he begins to break down the moral decisions and the bodily functions that occur, for conscious creatures from the molecular level, and introduces the reader to the general research that is being conducted in various cognitive areas.
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- The Old Man and the sea - Hemmingway - so many things, with every reread I find something new.
The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh, useful prayers, concepts for understanding and dealing with life and a moral compass for going through it.
The Way of Zen - Alan Watts, opened my eyes to different forms of religious experience
Also a lot of psychology and philosophy books in undergrad were foundational to my thinking. The Moral Animal, the Moral Landscape, The Blank Slate, The Republic and Plato’s writings on Socrates, Tao te Ching, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Tanakh and parts of the Talmud, but many of these were more academic, still holistically they have shaped my thinking and moral compass.
- There is no reason we cannot treat ethics like we do medicine, where prevailing wisdom is arrived at by a methodical and judicious process that is standardized. Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" is an excellent start for building intuition on how to do this. (https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/)
- But the idea of 'good' is there smuggled in and already present inside that word 'should', it seems to me.
p.s. Defining 'good' has been a problem for philosophy, see e.g. discussion of Moore's naturalistic fallacy[0]---a problem in trying to define good in terms of something else. Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape has been the most useful book for me on understanding ethics and what good means.
[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/naturalistic-fallacy Not sure if that's the best link for the topic, but it's a start.
- I highly recommend Sam Harris's "Free Will" and "The moral landscape"
- Hi, thanks, very interesting.
I think a good litmus test for an argument is whether you approve of things that such a view can be logically extrapolated to imply.
such a view - What 'view' are you taking me to hold? You can with some precision tell what is a 'logical extrapolation' of it or not? I'm not sure what you mean here. (Except I suspect you mean something like Kant's categorical imperative.) Sorry. I'm unable to see what view of mine you've extracted and then extrapolated.
And here you must certainly realize that your argument can be used, and indeed is used, to justify the most heinous of ideologies.
Which argument? Saying you must certainly realize that your argument seems just a condescending bluff. No....well, I'm not sure, I don't know what you are calling 'my argument'. Maybe if you filled in the dots here a bit; I don't know what you mean. (You know nothing about me. I'm a huge fan of Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape. I say that because going by what you're saying about my 'view'/argument, you've put me in the opposite camp to that.)
Ultimately,
It's fascinating what that word's doing. (I'm not sure exactly) Sandwiched as it is between 'moral self assuredness' and 'moral absolute'..
most people look through a revisionist lens of times, both past and present
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
The thing you won't find is slavery persisting in areas where it became uneconomical.
Is that at all surprising?
Well, I don't remember any abolitionists in ancient Greek, Rome etc. It was just the natural order of things, an accepted part of life, necessary to civilization.
- Hi. It's not easy to talk about this stuff! Ok, you've retracted the here you must certainly realize that your argument can be used talk. I was mostly distracted by your loose use of terms, as if they don't have to be used carefully.
For instance do we have a rule that people ought not steal because it's amoral to take that which is the property of another without their agreement, or because if theft was legal then we'd see substantial harm to society? ..That's an instance of my suggestion? Are you asking that or..
your suggestion that that views based more on moral perspective, rather than rational logic, ought be able to, at least in some cases, be used as imperatives in and of themselves. I don't think I suggested that; but that's how it sounds to you, ok. I'm not sure what based more on moral perspective means exactly.
Talking about your first paragraph: Rational logic seems a very strange term to use in this (or any) context. Reason, I guess you mean. Oh, so for you, ethics are based either on reason, or some mystical/religious thing. And I'm in the second camp? Your In my opinion sentence sounds exactly like Mill's On Liberty. You're talking purely about law, where the discussion was about ethics, I thought.
My motivation to write in this thread initially was objecting to the suggestion that it's better to say "I prefer to avoid eating meat" versus "Eating meat is wrong". It sounded like 'tone policing' - it's easy to insist people remain calm when you're fine with the way things are. And that "preferring" in its vague mildness, like preferring one restaurant over another, scarcely captures how I feel about such things. It would sound bizarre to say that you prefer not to be murdered, to be tortured, to be a slave etc. Probably I misunderstood the guy I first responded to, then you misunderstood me etc.
It sounds like we are in agreement, far as I can tell. I don't believe in the kind of 'moral absolute' people get from their holy book/religion. However, plain utilitarianism doesn't fit our moral intuitions either etc etc.. I'm vegan because I don't want to be killed, abused, eaten, and I figure animals don't either. And I can very easily avoid that, so I do. But I don't just prefer that; I think everyone should. It's only from habit/custom that the reality of the situation hasn't dawned on most people yet. Well, the 'consensus' seem to be today, dogs and cats deserve ethical consideration, but not cows, pigs, sheep, fish etc. There's nothing reasonable about that. It's all-too-human to think only white people matter, when you're white, or that only humans matter, when you're human. Like The Moral Landscape says, the origin of most moral/religious/ethical feelings, customs etc is that they produce better outcomes, a better world, for people, than their contrary. And whether they actually do that, can be determined a lot more often than people think; some beliefs, customs can be said to be objectively bad. Thanks.
