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As I read The Moral Landscape I wondered if Sam Harris would be good to have as a neighbor. He is a strong believer in objective morality. Many Christians believe that atheists are all terrible people with no morals. Sam Harris shows that this stereotype is false (though he would go a step further and say it is most Christians who have poor morals). As a moral guy who cares about issues in the world, Sam Harris would be a good neighbor. The problem is, I am a Christian. For that reason, I fear
I thought I would have few problems with this book. There’s little to no reason where I’d be annoyed by a book where I agree with the fundamental, underlying principles of the work. I fully believe that it’s possible to scientifically determine moral values. And look! It’s a book about scientifically determining moral values. We should get along famously.Except that’s not what ended up happening.Instead I found myself getting progressively more and more annoyed by the general tone of the entire
Presumably the last Sam Harris book I will ever readWhat's wrong? Harris is a Platonic idealist in drag. He also engages in scientism. And, his Islamophobia seems to largely come straight from the neoconservative playbook.Read on for the details!Sam Harris tries to draw a hard-and-fast dichotomy between science-based morals and ethics and religious-based morals and ethics in this book.However, this is the real world, not a Platonic idea (Harris comes off as quasi-Platonic in more than one way in...
Given that nearly everyone who reads this book will disagree vehemently with its conclusions, and given that the subject matter is almost entirely theoretical, Moral Landscape needed to have been more thoroughly researched and more scholarly in its presentation in order to achieve Harris' goals. I'd originally given the book five stars because, in my opinion, Harris' central points are intriguing and probably correct, but on further reflection I've had to scale my enthusiasm back.Those who disag...
Ironically, Harris's latest can best be described as a sermon that will appeal only to the choir. Its angry tirades will only convince those who haven't already committed themselves to every jot and tittle of his world view that Harris has spent his entire conscious life seeking to justify his own visceral hatred anything and anybody religious--without realizing that his efforts to do so have only led him to invent his own peculiar religion. (I think calling Harris's uncompromising "New Atheism"...
This is my first Sam Harris book, and I'm glad I finally started reading him. I have been familiar with his public appearances, debates and ideas for some time now, but I had not yet found the books of his that I was interested in. Most of the public work that I was aware of was his fight against religion, along side Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and so on. Even though he is one of the New Scientists, I've always felt something is special about him, because he seems to consistently be the youngest
The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris Sam Harris is fast becoming one of my favorite authors and that is with just three books under his belt. In the Moral Landscape, Sam Harris makes a much needed statement for our time: Morality should be put under the scrutiny of science. Sam Harris a neuroscientist himself, states "that once we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." I couldn't agree more. This book is
Why am I sitting here reviewing another Sam Harris book? People keep telling me that I have to have to have to read them, and they seem to generally be what's called in military jargon "target-rich environments."Harris sets out to hunt two of his bugbears: Moral relativism and fundamentalist forms of religion, the former being equated with the political left and the latter with the right. These seem to be the only moral-political systems that exist in his world beside the one he goes on to promo...
While I agree with him almost entirely, I'm a bit put off by the repetition or what I see as repetition, anyway. Since I agree, I don't need all of minor details hashed out so thoroughly. The problem is that moral relativism & the subject - the basics of moral behavior - are both so slippery & ill defined so he comes at them from quite a few angles with specific examples.He defines moral relativism in its worst form - those who believe anything dictated by the local culture, mores, & religion ar...
Overreaches the boundaries of scientific inquiry and is ignorant of philosophy and history,
Oh my, where to start...Okay, so I guess it would be helpful to disclose that I am a long-time fan of Sam Harris. Not only do I agree with most of his ideas, but I find him to be both an articulate and entertaining writer, always a plus. The Moral Landscape is no exception.The motivation for this book seems to be the commonly held belief that religion, if it does nothing else, serves as the source for our morality. It is one of the most common arguments Harris encounters in his campaign for reas...
Terrific. The main concept is that although moral questions are often very difficult to answer, and there are usually many satisfactory answers to each one, we can use the principles of science to eliminate the obviously bad answers to those questions.
I totally agree with Sam Harris' thesis: rational scientific process and rigor can be applied to the tricky business of moral questions and helping decide what humanity "should" value. The tough part is precisely framing the moral question and carefully defining our intentions and values around it. I unfortunately feel that Harris misses the mark in defining these groundwork issues, however, and gets mired in broad discussions regarding morality, values and the obfuscation of religion in trying
This book starts out rather slow, with a heavy dose of philosophy. It does pick up after the first couple of chapters, as the book shows how the mind treats facts and values in a similar manner. The author shows that the goal of morality should be to maximize the "well-being" of as many individuals as possible, in the present life (not the after-life, which is not verified by objective evidence). While it is not always obvious what constitutes "well-being" (it can be a very gray area), it is cle...
Sam Harris starts off his book stating that he has the modest mission to convince the reader that neither divine command theory nor positivistic emotivist theory is a sufficient account of morality. But then he goes somewhat further: His actual mission, as he lays it out, is to show how maximizing human wellbeing--defined as a subjective neurological state of wellbeing--can form the basis for moral reasoning, and that scientific inquiry into neurology and effects of different acts can form the b...
Harris's ideology is incomplete - he admits this much himself. But this book provides the groundwork for a (slightly) new way of conceiving of "morality." The general idea is not new, but his thesis is unique in that it identifies psychology and neuroscience as the tools by which to determine how our actions affect conscious beings. And I think that Harris is thinking in the right direction; though we can derive no moral absolutes, we can identify the "morality" of actions on a spectrum or "land...
“The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.” ― Sam Harris, The Moral LandscapeI've avoided Sam Harris probably from a bit of prejudice. Although I've always enjoyed Christopher Hitchens, I've thought others of the New Atheists a bit shrill. I just assumed Sam Harris was going to be more hammer and less scalp...
I've had a good go at reading this without any knee-jerk reactions, but generally I find Harris' views instinctively abhorrent -- despite his championing of reason and science, I don't think he avoids knee-jerk reactions more than anyone else. Particularly when it comes to religion.The basis thesis that there are optimal states of well-being for humans, I accept. That science will be able to improve our understanding of that, I don't doubt. That Sam Harris could be the person that executes this
Agreed wholeheartedly with practically everything in the book, except for a couple of things:1.Harris repeatedly laments the frequency with which he encounters well-educated, scientifically-minded, secular moral relativists, who defend the practice of repugnant rituals, such as genital mutilation. I imagine that the reason behind their inability to see eye to eye is not due to a fundamental disagreement on morality and the existence of a range of states of being that, for all practical intents a...
I thought that this book was a brilliant follow up to End of Faith. I've always thought that End of Faith was somewhat of a misnamed book and that with a slightly different focus could have been truly masterful. What I really appreciated about that book was the nuanced exploration of the nature of belief, belief formation, and the role belief plays in behavior and how all of this relates to and affects our states of consciousness. This book was a continuation of that theme in the moral sphere. A...