Making Sense - Sam Harris - #364 — Facts & Values

In 2011, I published my third book, The Moral Landscape, which was an edited version of my doctoral dissertation, in which I argued that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values, and that much of importance depends upon our admitting this and trying to work out how we can all make moral progress together. The book was widely criticized, both for things I said in it and for other things I hadn't said. Here is my argument that morality is subjective, but only in one sense: it rests on the reality of consciousness, and the experiences of conscious beings. And as I've argued elsewhere, meditation is a crucial tool for doing this. It is simply a fact that human beings can become much better observers of their direct experience, and becoming better at this actually makes a wider range of experience possible. And that is a point to which I'll return to which will help us all understand the point of view that science is not committed to epistemological objectivity, but is committed to a more objective conception of the nature of knowledge. And that we can be better at making sense of the world and better at reasoning about it, and so can we all be better human beings. If I told you that I had an extremely important scientific theory that was self-contradictory and needlessly complex, and could not account for past data and make no predictions whatsoever, you would understand that I must be joking or otherwise nonsense. It just presupposes their validity. And if you suspect that I have just called facts, then you would agree that their validity is not to be right, would you would be right? And you would just call them facts . by virtue of the traditional distinction between facts and their validity a point of which is a matter of fact? it just presuppose their validity, right? And so on and so on. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of the podcast and so that we don't run ads, and thus, therefore, by the podcast is made possible, because it's made possible by the support by our listeners, and by our subscribers, by our support of our subscribers. . We do not run ads. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here we re making possible entirely by becoming a member of our podcast, we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

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00:00:45.380 In 2011, I published my third book, The Moral Landscape, which was an edited version of my

00:00:52.020 doctoral dissertation, in which I argued that there are right and wrong answers to questions

00:00:57.220 of human values, and that much of importance depends upon our admitting this and trying to

00:01:01.640 work out how we can all make moral progress together. The book was widely criticized, both

00:01:07.600 for things I said in it and for things I hadn't said. I did say a few things which needlessly

00:01:12.020 provoked academic philosophers and graduate students. I wrote at one point, by way of explaining

00:01:17.480 why I was dispensing with some of the terminology one might expect to encounter in any discussion

00:01:21.600 of moral truth, that every mention of terms like meta-ethics, deontology, non-cognitivism,

00:01:28.580 anti-realism, and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. That's still

00:01:34.280 true, of course, but it pissed off a lot of academics. Worse, many people couldn't get past the book's

00:01:40.960 subtitle, How Science Can Determine Human Values, because they have a far narrower conception of science

00:01:47.080 than I do. Many people, including many scientists, seem pretty confused about the boundaries between

00:01:53.080 science and other modes of thought, as I'll discuss here. Consider the concept of objectivity,

00:01:59.940 which most people assume is central to science. It is central, but only in one sense of the term.

00:02:06.880 As the philosopher John Searle once pointed out, we should distinguish between epistemological and

00:02:12.060 ontological senses of objectivity. Of course, terms like epistemological and ontological also

00:02:18.660 increase the amount of boredom in the universe, but I'm afraid they're indispensable. Epistemology

00:02:23.940 relates to the foundation of knowledge. How do we know what is true? In what sense can a statement

00:02:30.480 be true? Ontology relates to questions about what exists. For instance, is there only one type of stuff

00:02:37.920 in the universe? Are there only physical things? Or are there really existent things which are not

00:02:43.540 physical? For instance, do numbers exist beyond their physical representations? And if so, how?

00:02:50.300 Science is fully committed to epistemological objectivity, that is, to analyzing evidence and

00:02:56.460 argument without subjective bias. But it is in no sense committed to ontological objectivity.

00:03:03.080 It isn't limited to studying objects, that is, purely physical things and processes. We can study

00:03:10.220 human subjectivity, the mind as experienced from the first-person point of view, objectively,

00:03:16.760 that is, without bias and other sources of cognitive error. And as I've argued elsewhere,

00:03:23.020 meditation is a crucial tool for doing this. It is simply a fact that human beings can become much

00:03:28.960 better observers of their direct experience. And becoming better at this actually makes a wider range

00:03:34.780 of experience possible. Morality is subjective in the ontological sense, right? It's not found out

00:03:42.860 there among the atoms. It rests on the reality of consciousness and the experiences of conscious

00:03:49.080 beings. To say that morality is subjective is not to say that it isn't real. We can make truth claims

00:03:56.860 about it. That is, we can be epistemologically objective about it. I hope that distinction is

00:04:03.480 clear. To say that science is committed to epistemic objectivity is to say that science depends on certain

00:04:10.420 epistemic values, values like coherence and simplicity and elegance and predictive power. If I told you that

00:04:19.000 I had an extremely important scientific theory that was self-contradictory and needlessly complex

00:04:25.120 and could not account for past data and could make no predictions whatsoever, you would understand

00:04:31.140 that I must be joking or otherwise speaking nonsense. We cannot separate statements of scientific fact

00:04:37.440 from the underlying epistemic values of science. These values are axiomatic, which is to say that science

00:04:44.120 does not discover them or even attempt to justify them. It just presupposes their validity.

00:04:49.700 If you suspect that I have just called the traditional distinction between facts and values

00:04:55.280 into question, you would be right. And this is a point to which I will return.

00:05:00.620 For those unfamiliar with the moral landscape, here is my argument in brief.

00:05:05.860 Morality and values depend upon the existence of conscious minds, and specifically on the fact that such minds

00:05:12.020 can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

00:05:16.120 Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of nature,

00:05:23.200 whatever those turn out to be. Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality

00:05:29.020 and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures

00:05:35.600 will be right to a greater or lesser degree, and some will be wrong with respect to what they deem

00:05:40.940 important in life. Many people worry that any aspect of human subjectivity or culture could fit

00:05:48.200 in the space I just provided. After all, a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream is a natural

00:05:53.780 phenomenon, as is a preference for the comic Bill Burr over Bob Hope. Are we to imagine that there are

00:05:59.980 universal truths about ice cream and comedy that admit of scientific analysis? Well, in a certain sense,

00:06:06.960 yes, science could, in principle, account for why some of us prefer chocolate to vanilla,

00:06:12.600 or why no one's favorite flavor of ice cream is aluminum. Comedy must also be susceptible to this

00:06:17.980 kind of study. There will be a fair amount of cultural and generational variation in what counts as funny,

00:06:23.540 but there are basic principles of comedy, like the violation of expectations, the breaking of taboos,

00:06:29.460 etc., that could be universal. Amusement to the point of laughter is a specific state of the human

00:06:35.720 nervous system that can be scientifically studied. Why do some people laugh more readily than others?

00:06:41.280 What exactly happens when we, quote, get a joke? These are ultimately questions about the human mind

00:06:46.940 and brain. There will be scientific facts to be known here, and any differences in taste among human

00:06:52.860 beings must be attributable to other facts that fall within the purview of science. If we were ever to

00:06:58.880 arrive at a complete understanding of the human mind, we would understand human preferences of all

00:07:04.040 kinds, and we might even be able to change them. However, epistemic and ethical values appear to reach

00:07:10.300 deeper than mere matters of taste, beyond how people happen to think and behave, to questions of how they

00:07:15.820 should think and behave. And it is this notion of should that introduces a fair amount of confusion

00:07:21.700 into any conversation about moral truth. I should note in passing, however, that I don't think the

00:07:27.580 distinction between ethics and something like taste is as clear or as categorical as we might think. For

00:07:34.520 instance, if a preference for chocolate ice cream allowed for the most rewarding experience a human being

00:07:39.460 could have, while a preference for vanilla did not, we would deem it morally important to help people overcome

00:07:45.820 any defect in their sense of taste that caused them to prefer vanilla. In the same way that we currently treat

00:07:51.660 people for curable forms of blindness, it seems to me that the boundary between mere aesthetics and moral

00:07:57.360 imperative, the difference between not liking Matisse and not liking the golden rule, is more a matter of

00:08:03.160 there being higher stakes and consequences that reach into the lives of other people than of there being

00:08:08.280 distinct classes of facts regarding the nature of human experience. There's much more to be said on this

00:08:13.600 point, of course, but I'll pass it by for the time being. In my view, morality must be viewed in the context of our

00:08:20.100 growing scientific understanding of the mind. If there are truths to be known about the mind, there will be truths to be

00:08:26.300 known about how minds flourish. That is, about well-being altogether. Consequently, there will be truths to be known about

00:08:33.120 right and wrong and good and evil. Many critics of the moral landscape claim that my reliance on the concept of well-being

00:08:39.880 was arbitrary and philosophically indefensible. Who's to say that well-being is important at all, or that other

00:08:46.820 things aren't far more important? How, for instance, could you convince someone who does not value

00:08:52.580 well-being that he should value it? And even if one could justify well-being as the true foundation of

00:08:58.980 morality, many have argued that one would need a metric by which it could be measured, else there could be no such

00:09:04.840 thing as moral truth in the scientific sense. There's an unnecessarily restrictive notion of science

00:09:10.720 underlying this last claim, as though scientific truths only exist if we can have immediate and

00:09:16.260 uncontroversial access to them in the lab. A certain physicist, who will remain nameless here, was in the

00:09:21.920 habit of saying things like, I don't know what a unit of well-being is, as though he were regretfully

00:09:27.760 delivering the killing blow to my thesis. I would venture that he doesn't know what a unit of sadness is

00:09:33.300 either, and units of joy and disgust and boredom and irony and envy and schadenfreude or any other

00:09:39.820 mental state worth studying won't be forthcoming. If half of what many scientists say about the limits

00:09:45.660 of science were true, the sciences of mind are not merely doomed. There would be no facts for them to

00:09:51.740 understand in the first place. Consider the possibility of a much, much saner world than the

00:09:57.800 one we currently live in. Imagine that due to remarkable breakthroughs in technology and economics

00:10:03.740 and psychological science and political skill, we created a genuine utopia on earth. Needless to say,

00:10:11.140 this wouldn't be boring, because we will have wisely avoided all the boring utopias. Rather, we will have

00:10:17.120 created a global civilization of astonishing creativity and security and happiness. However, let's imagine that

00:10:25.460 some people weren't ready for this earthly paradise once it arrived. Some were psychopaths, who, despite

00:10:30.980 enjoying the general change and quality of life, were nevertheless eager to break into their neighbors' 0.98

00:10:35.860 homes and torture them just for kicks. A few had preferences that were incompatible with the

00:10:41.160 flourishing of whole societies. Try as he might, Kim Jong-un just couldn't shake the feeling that his

00:10:47.400 cognac didn't taste as sweet without millions of people starving beyond his palace gates. Given our advances in

00:10:54.260 science, however, we are now able to alter preferences of this kind. In fact, we can painlessly deliver a

00:11:00.500 firmware update to everyone. Imagine that we do that, and now the entirety of the species is fit to live in a global

00:11:07.080 civilization that is as safe and as fun and as interesting and as creative and as filled with love as it can be.

00:11:16.260 It seems to me that this scenario cuts through the worry that the concept of well-being might leave out something

00:11:22.460 that is worth caring about. For if you care about something that is not compatible with a peak of human

00:11:27.580 flourishing, given the requisite changes in your brain, you would recognize that you were wrong to

00:11:32.520 care about this thing in the first place. Wrong in what sense? Wrong in the sense that you didn't know

00:11:37.740 what you were missing. This is the core of my argument. I'm claiming that there must be frontiers of

00:11:43.220 human well-being that await our discovery. And certain interests and preferences surely blind us to them. In this sense,

00:11:51.060 epistemic and ethical values are fully entangled. There are horizons to well-being past which we cannot see. There are

00:11:58.240 possible experiences of beauty and creativity and compassion that we will never discover. I think these are objective

00:12:05.220 statements about the frontiers of subjective experience. However, it is true that our general approach to morality does not require

00:12:13.560 that we maximize global well-being. There is this tension, for instance, between what may be good for us and what may be good for

00:12:21.720 society. And much of ordinary morality is a matter of our grappling with this tension. We're selfish to one degree or another, and we lack

00:12:30.980 complete information about the consequences of our actions. And even where we have sufficient information, our interests

00:12:37.320 and preferences often lead us to ignore it. But our failures to be motivated to seek higher goods, or to motivate

00:12:44.420 others to seek them, do not suggest that no higher goods exist. In what sense can an action be morally good? And what does it

00:12:55.020 mean to make a good action better? For instance, it seems good to me to buy my daughter a birthday

00:13:00.800 present, all things considered, because it will make both of us happy. Few people would fault me for

00:13:06.340 spending some of my time and money in this way. But what about all the little girls in the world who 0.99

00:13:11.560 suffer terribly at this moment for want of resources? Here is where an ethicist like Peter Singer will

00:13:17.620 pounce, arguing that there actually is something morally questionable, possibly even reprehensible, about my

00:13:24.020 buying my daughter a birthday present, given my knowledge of how much good my time and money could do

00:13:29.220 elsewhere. What should I do? Singer's argument makes me uncomfortable, but only for a moment, because

00:13:36.160 it's simply a fact about me that the suffering of other little girls is often out of sight and out of

00:13:41.520 mind, and my daughter's birthday is no easier to ignore than an asteroid impact. Can I muster a

00:13:48.220 philosophical defense of my narrow focus? Perhaps. It might be that Singer's argument leaves out some

00:13:54.340 important details. For instance, what would happen if everyone in the developed world ceased to shop for

00:13:59.980 birthday presents and all other luxuries? Might the best of human civilization just come crashing down

00:14:05.780 upon the worst? How can we spread wealth to the developing world if we do not create vast wealth in

00:14:12.260 the first place? These reflections, self-serving and otherwise, land me in a toy store looking for

00:14:18.280 something that isn't pink. So yes, it is true that my thoughts about global well-being didn't amount to

00:14:24.600 much in this instance, and yet most people wouldn't judge me for it. But what if there was a way for me

00:14:29.660 to buy my daughter a birthday present and also cure another little girl of cancer at no extra cost?

00:14:36.300 Wouldn't this be better than just buying the original present? What if there was a button I could push

00:14:41.440 near the cash register that literally cured a distant little girl somewhere of cancer? Imagine if I

00:14:48.920 declined the opportunity to push this button, saying, what is that to me? I don't care about other little

00:14:54.760 girls and their cancers. Of course, that would be monstrous, and it's only against an implicit notion

00:15:01.060 of global well-being that we can judge my behavior to be less good than it might otherwise be.

00:15:06.220 It is true that no one currently demands that I spend my time seeking in every instance

00:15:11.320 to maximize global well-being, nor do I demand that of myself. But if global well-being could be

00:15:17.980 maximized, that would be much better. By the only definition of better that makes any sense. I believe

00:15:25.140 that this is an objectively true statement about subjective reality in this universe. The fact that we might

00:15:32.460 not be motivated by a moral truth doesn't suggest that moral truths don't exist. Some of this comes

00:15:39.340 down to confusion over a prescriptive rather than descriptive conception of ethics. It's the difference

00:15:45.620 between should and can. Whatever our preferences and capacities are at present, regardless of our

00:15:52.000 failures to persuade others or ourselves to change our behaviors, our beliefs about good and evil must still

00:15:58.040 relate to what is ultimately possible for human beings. And we can't think about this deeper reality

00:16:04.000 by focusing on the narrow question of what a person should do in the gray areas of life, where we spend so

00:16:10.620 much of our time. It is rather the extremes of human experience that throw sufficient light by which we can

00:16:16.960 see that we stand upon a moral landscape. For instance, are members of the Islamic State wrong about morality? 1.00

00:16:24.740 Yes. Really wrong? Yes. Can we say so from the perspective of science? Yes. If we know anything at all about

00:16:36.620 human well-being, and we do, we know that the Islamic State is not leading anyone, including themselves, toward a

00:16:45.660 peak on the moral landscape. We know to a moral certainty that human life can be better than it is in a society,

00:16:54.500 where they routinely decapitate people for being too rational. When I wrote The Moral Landscape,

00:17:01.900 I didn't appreciate how much ethical philosophy was conflated with concerns about personal motivation

00:17:07.480 and public persuasion. For instance, it's widely imagined that a belief that one act is truly better than

00:17:15.020 another, that is, that moral truths exist, must entail a commitment to acting in the prescribed way,

00:17:22.020 that is, that is, motivation. It must also rest on reasons that can be effectively communicated to

00:17:28.160 others, that is, persuasion. If, for instance, I believe that I would be a better person and the

00:17:33.560 world a marginally better place if I were a vegetarian, this is a possible moral truth,

00:17:39.580 then many people expect that I must be motivated to exclude meat from my diet, and I must be able to

00:17:45.900 persuade others to do likewise. The fact that I am not sufficiently motivated to do this suggests that

00:17:51.780 my presumed knowledge of moral truth is specious. Either no such truths exist, or I do not in fact

00:17:58.980 know them. The common idea is that for a moral claim to be objectively true, it must compel a person to

00:18:06.280 follow it. Real values must cause action, not contingently, not in combination with other motives,

00:18:13.200 but absolutely, and they in turn constitute rational reasons for such action. Otherwise,

00:18:19.880 the philosopher David Hume would be right, and the only way for claims about moral truth to be effective

00:18:24.540 is for them to be combined with some associated passion or desire. Reason alone would be useless,

00:18:31.500 but this paints an unrealistic picture of the human mind. Let's take a simpler case. Let's say that I want

00:18:37.660 to lose 10 pounds. As it happens, I do, and I have absolutely no doubt that losing 10 pounds is

00:18:43.840 possible. Okay, this is a biological truth. I also know that I would be marginally happier for having

00:18:50.200 lost those pounds. This is a psychological truth. I'm also quite certain that I understand the process

00:18:55.980 by which pounds can be lost. I need only eat less than I generally do, and persist until I've lost the

00:19:02.080 weight. This is another biological truth. These beliefs are cognitively valid in that they describe

00:19:08.820 objective truths about my body and mind, and about how I would feel in a possible future. I am totally

00:19:15.780 unconflicted in my desire to lose the weight, in that I absolutely want to lose it. Unfortunately,

00:19:22.700 that's not all I want. I also want to eat ice cream, preferably once a day. The fact that I am not

00:19:29.700 sufficiently motivated to shun ice cream says nothing at all about my unconflicted desire to be

00:19:37.020 thinner, or the accuracy of my understanding of how to lose weight. My desire for ice cream is an

00:19:43.520 independent fact about me, and gratifying this desire has consequences. The point, of course, is that

00:19:50.480 we can know what is true without any doubt, and yet our knowledge is not guaranteed to produce behavior

00:19:56.920 that is aligned with that truth. Such failures of will do not suggest that the relevant truths

00:20:04.500 are just fictions. At this point, I think we should differentiate three projects that seem to me to be

00:20:11.560 easily conflated, but which are in fact distinct and independently worthy endeavors. The first project

00:20:17.520 is to understand what people do in the name of, quote, morality. We can look at the world, witnessing all of

00:20:24.280 the diverse behaviors and cultural norms and institutions, and morally salient emotions like

00:20:30.240 empathy and disgust, and we can study how these things affect human communities, both now and

00:20:35.860 throughout history. We can examine all of these phenomena in as non-judgmental a way as possible,

00:20:41.960 and seek to understand them. We can understand them in evolutionary terms, and in any present

00:20:47.060 generation, we can understand them in psychological and neurobiological terms.

00:20:50.520 And we can call the fruits of this effort a, quote, science of morality. This would be a purely

00:20:56.920 descriptive science of a sort that many scientists have begun to build. And for most scientists,

00:21:03.100 this descriptive project seems to exhaust all the legitimate points of contact between science and

00:21:08.740 morality. But I think there are two other projects we could concern ourselves with, which are arguably

00:21:14.060 more important. The second project would be to actually understand how good human life could

00:21:21.020 be. This would require that we get clearer about what we mean and should mean by terms like right and

00:21:27.780 wrong and good and evil. We would need to understand how our moral intuitions relate to human experience

00:21:34.420 altogether, and to use this understanding to think more intelligently about how to maximize human

00:21:40.320 well-being. Of course, philosophers may think this begs some of the important questions, and I'll get

00:21:45.320 back to that. Again, the lurking question is, what makes well-being important? But assuming for the moment

00:21:51.980 that it is important, understanding how to maximize it is a distinct project. How good could human life

00:22:00.100 be, and how can we get there? How do we avoid making the mistakes that would prevent us from getting

00:22:06.320 there? What are the paths upward on the moral landscape? The third project is a project of

00:22:13.180 persuasion. How can we persuade all of the people who are committed to silly and harmful things,

00:22:19.780 in the name of, quote, morality, to change their commitments and to lead better lives? I think this

00:22:25.560 third project is actually the most important project facing humanity at the moment. It subsumes everything

00:22:30.740 else we could care about, from arresting climate change, to reducing the risk of nuclear war, to curing

00:22:36.940 cancer, to saving the whales. Any effort that requires that we collectively get our priorities

00:22:42.840 straight and marshal our time and resources would fall within the scope of this project. To build a viable

00:22:49.880 global civilization, we must begin to converge on the same economic and political and environmental goals.

00:22:56.700 Obviously, the project of moral persuasion is very difficult, but it strikes me as especially

00:23:02.120 difficult if you can't figure out in what sense anyone could ever be right or wrong about questions

00:23:08.520 of human values. Understanding right and wrong in universal terms is Project 2, and that's what I'm

00:23:15.440 focused on. Now, there are impediments to thinking about Project 2, the main one being that most right-thinking,

00:23:21.980 and well-educated people. Certainly most scientists and public intellectuals, and I suspect most journalists,

00:23:28.520 have been convinced that something in the last 200 years of our intellectual progress has made it impossible

00:23:34.420 to actually speak about moral truth. Not because human experience is so difficult to study, or the brain too

00:23:40.920 complex, but because there is thought to be no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever really

00:23:47.020 right or wrong about questions of value. My aim in the moral landscape was to undermine this assumption,

00:23:53.360 because I think it is based on several fallacies and double standards, and frankly on some bad

00:23:58.120 philosophy. And apart from being just wrong, this view has terrible consequences. For instance, in 1947,

00:24:06.240 when the United Nations was attempting to formulate a universal declaration of human rights,

00:24:10.880 the American Anthropological Association stepped forward and said that it just couldn't be done,

00:24:15.980 for this would be to merely foist one provincial notion of human rights on the rest of humanity.

00:24:22.120 Any notion of human rights is the product of culture, and declaring a universal conception of

00:24:27.160 human rights is an intellectually illegitimate thing to do. This was the best our social sciences could do 0.92

00:24:33.680 with the crematoria of Auschwitz still smoking. It has long been obvious that we need to converge

00:24:40.820 as a global civilization in our beliefs about how we should treat one another. For this, we need some

00:24:47.240 universal conception of right and wrong. So in addition to just not being true, I think skepticism

00:24:53.460 about moral truth actually has consequences that really should worry us. Definitions matter, and in

00:25:00.460 science we're always in the business of making definitions that serve to constrain the path of any

00:25:05.660 conversation. There's nothing about this process that condemns us to the epistemological relativism

00:25:11.520 or subjectivism that nullifies truth claims. For instance, we define physics as, loosely speaking,

00:25:19.140 our best effort to understand the behavior of matter and energy in the universe. The discipline of physics

00:25:24.820 is defined with respect to the goal of understanding how the physical world behaves. Of course, anyone is free

00:25:31.740 to define physics in some other way. A creationist could say, well, that's just not my definition of physics.

00:25:38.540 My physics is designed to match the book of Genesis. But we are free to respond to such a person by saying,

00:25:45.180 you really don't belong at this conference. That's not the physics we're interested in. Such a gesture of exclusion

00:25:51.280 is legitimate and necessary. The fact that the discourse of physics is not sufficient to silence such a person,

00:25:59.280 the fact that he cannot be brought into our conversation and subdued by its terms, does not

00:26:06.200 undermine physics as a domain of objective truth. And yet, on the topic of morality, we seem to think that

00:26:12.620 the possibility of differing opinions puts the very reality of the subject matter in question.

00:26:18.580 The fact that someone can come forward and say that his morality has nothing to do with human

00:26:24.120 flourishing, that it depends upon following Sharia law, for instance. The fact that such a position

00:26:29.640 can be articulated has caused people to think that there's no such thing as moral truth.

00:26:35.280 Morality must be a human invention. Because look, that guy has a morality of his own.

00:26:40.040 The Taliban don't agree with us. Who are we to say they're wrong? But this is just a fallacy.

00:26:45.580 We have an intuitive physics. But much of our intuitive physics is wrong, with respect to the

00:26:50.980 goal of understanding how matter and energy behave in this universe. I'm saying that we also have an

00:26:56.660 intuitive morality. And much of our intuitive morality may be wrong, with respect to the goal

00:27:01.940 of maximizing human flourishing, and with reference to facts that govern the well-being of conscious

00:27:07.640 creatures generally. I'll now deal with the fundamental challenge to the thesis I put forward in the

00:27:13.060 moral landscape, and argue, briefly, that the only sphere of legitimate moral concern is the well-being

00:27:19.920 of conscious creatures. I'll say a few words in defense of this assertion, but I think the idea

00:27:25.100 that it even has to be defended is the product of several fallacies and double standards that we're

00:27:30.760 not noticing, and I'll mention a few. I'm claiming that consciousness is the only context in which we

00:27:37.160 can talk about morality and human values. Why is consciousness not an arbitrary starting point?

00:27:43.060 Well, what's the alternative? I just imagine someone coming in.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 23, 2024

#364 — Facts & Values

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