The Moral Landscape

This is only the fourth book I have read this year; way off last years pace. I purchased the Rosetta Stone Five Level French course and have become somewhat obsessive about it: generally spend 4 to 6 hours a day on it. Anyway, here are my notes on my latest worthwhile reading book.

Sam Harris, “The Moral Landscape” (How Science Can Determine Human Values), Free Press, 2010, 279 Pages

Harris makes the observation that most people—from religious fundamentalists to nonbelieving scientists—agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. It is this prevailing belief that science has nothing to say on the subject of morality that has become the most prevalent justification for religions: someone has to provide a moral context for life. However, Harris demonstrates that we already 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 that can be deduced by a study of the human brain. He concludes that the only intelligible basis for morality and values is a concern for the well-being of others as well as ourselves.
My notes:

Pg. 2: The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to question of human values. Of course, we will have to confront some ancient disagreements about the status of moral truth: people who draw their worldview from religion generally believe that moral truth exists, but only because God has woven it into the very fabric of reality; while those who lack such faith tend to think that notions of “good” and “evil” must be the products of evolutionary pressure and cultural invention. This books purpose is to persuade that both sides in this debate are wrong. The goal of this book is to begin a conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science.

Pg. 3: See Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14 for justification of beating children. The God of Abraham never told us to treat children with kindness, but He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7).

Pg. 13: While the possibilities of human experience must be realized in the brains that evolution has built for us, our brains were not designed with a view to our ultimate fulfillment. Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons, or of doing much else that is now crucial to our happiness in this century. As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution.

Pg. 25: Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific world view is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and attention—often with tragic results. Is this really a dichotomy abut which science can claim to be neutral?

Pg. 114: Our species diverged from its common ancestor with the chimpanzees only 6.3 million years ago. All human beings currently alive appear to have descended from a single population of hunter-gatherers that lived in Africa around 50,000 BCE. Genetic evidence indicates that a band of perhaps 150 of these people left Africa and gradually populated the rest of the earth. However, they were not alone: Homo neanderthalensis laid claim to Europe and the Middle East, and Homo erectus occupied Asia. Both were species of archaic humans that had developed along separate evolutionary paths after one or more prior migrations out of Africa. Both possessed large brains, fashioned stone tools similar to those of Homo sapiens, and were well armed. And yet over the next twenty thousand years, our ancestors gradually displaced, and may have physically eradicated, al rivals. Given the larger brains and sturdier build of the Neanderthals, it seems reasonable to suppose that only our species had the advantage of fully symbolic, complex speech.
The Neanderthals were impressive creatures. Their average cranial capacity was 1,520 cc, slightly larger than that of their Homo sapien contemporaries. In fact, human cranial capacity has decreased by about 150 cc over the millennia to its current average of 1,340 cc.

Pg. 124: Political conservatism is a fairly well-defined perspective that is characterized by a general discomfort with societal change and a ready acceptance of social inequality. John Jost analyzed data from twelve countries, acquired from 23,000 subjects and found this attitude to be correlated with dogmatism, inflexibility, death anxiety, need for closure, and anticorrelated with openness to experience, cognitive complexity,self-esteem, and social stability. Liberalism also has certain biases. In a recent study of moral reasoning, subjects were asked to judge whether it was morally correct to sacrifice the life of one person to save one hundred, while being given subtle clues as to the races of the people involved. Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals and, therefore, more even-handed. Liberals were very eager to sacrifice a white person to save one hundred nonwhites, but not the other way around—all the while maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking.

Pg. 134: In 2002 the National Research Council dismissed the entire body of research underlying polygraphy as “weak” and “lacking in scientific rigor.”

Pg. 144: The answer to the question “What should I believe, and why should I believe it?” is generally a scientific one. Believe a proposition because it is well supported by theory and evidence; believe it because it has been experimentally verified; believe it because a generation of smart people have tried their best to falsify it and failed; believe it because it is true (or seems so). This is a form of cognition as well as the core of any scientific mission statement. As far as our understanding of the world is concerned—there are no facts without values.
Pg. 149: Only 26 percent of Americans believe in evolution through natural selection. Whatever the evolutionary underpinnings of religion, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that there is a genetic explanation for the fact that the French, Swedes, and Japanese tend not to believe in God while Americans, Saudis, and Somalis do. Clearly, religion is largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality.

Pg. 190: Whether morality becomes a proper branch of science is not really the point of this book. Is economics a true science yet? Judging from recent events, it would not appear so. Perhaps a deep understanding of economics will always elude us. But does anyone doubt that there are better and worse ways to structure an economy? Would any educated person consider it a form of bigotry to criticize another society’s response to a banking crisis? Imagine how terrifying it would be if great numbers of smart people become convinced that all efforts to prevent a global financial catastrophe must be either equally valid or equally nonsensical in principle. And yet this is precisely where we stand on the most important questions in human life: all religions and their interpretations of morality are held to be equally valid.