The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam HarrisThe more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values. 70I value the human capacity for induction to create knowledge. As Hume put it there is no causality; only "constant concomitance". There is no absolute fact, only opinion and attitudes and emotions and uncertain knowledge. This is a basic limitation of the scientific method and its greatest strength. And it applies equally to the world of values and morality. As Sam Harris so fluently exposes in this solid book, values cannot be separated from facts, and both are the happy products of science.As the Greek rhetoricians used to say, " The only measure of mankind is mankind itself." We are the standard for the facts of science and of morality, and so understanding and advancing psychology should be a primary goal of all societies. Harris, instead of asking the Socratic question about what is the good life, asks about human well-being. There is not much difference, but science has given us much more food for thought than Aristotle ever had, and especially in the scientific field of psychology, there is much new understanding that impinges on our insights into the morality of human well-being. Harris provides a thoroughgoing synopsis of this new knowledge and it is the fundament for his thesis that a science of morality is not only possible but urgently needed to improve the general lot of mankind. He makes a convincing case. In fact, as an experimental psychologist, I agree with him completely throughout this book. Never have I read as lucid an account of the many twists and turns in people's rejection of a scientific approach to morality, and while his arguments are not always thoroughly convincing they are clear and analytic and unblurred by dogma. What can one ask more of a scientist? Nowhere does he make his case more clearly than his attack on the fundamentalist and religionist Francis Collins, who has a vision and religious conversion experience when he encounters a mystical frozen waterfall divided into a triune deity. The superstition of religion is a clear antagonist of science, and this conflict cannot be restrained without basic inconsistencies of reasoning.Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous;455For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain.1853The fact that religious belief is both a cultural universal and appears to be tethered to the genome has led scientists like Burton to conclude that there is simply no getting rid of faith-based thinking.2154Historically, a preoccupation with witchcraft has been a cultural universal. And yet belief in magic is now in disrepute almost everywhere in the developed world.2165What is surprising, from a scientific point of view, is that 42 percent of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world, and another 21 percent believe that while life may have evolved, its evolution has been guided by the hand of God (only 26 percent believe in evolution through natural selection).2502 I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain--but opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.82To say that the behavior of Muslim jihadists has nothing to do with their religious beliefs is like saying that honor killings have nothing to do with what their perpetrators believe about women, sexuality, and male honor.2630If there are objective truths to be known about human well-being--if kindness, for instance, is generally more conducive to happiness than cruelty is--then science should one day be able to make very precise claims about which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and which are worth abandoning. While it is too early180It is possible to be wrong and to not know it (we call this "ignorance").2961It is possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of admitting this publicly (we call this "hypocrisy").2961And it may also be possible to be wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one's commitment to one's erroneous beliefs (we call this "self-deception"). It seems clear that these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion.2962Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality--in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish--should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering.412There may be nothing more important than human cooperation. Whenever more pressing concerns seem to arise--like the threat of a deadly pandemic, an asteroid impact, or some other global catastrophe--human cooperation is the only remedy (if a remedy exists). Cooperation is the stuff of which meaningful human lives and viable societies are made. Consequently, few topics will be more relevant to a maturing science of human well-being.920Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false) and some form of consequentialism (viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures).1036Tomasello has found that even twelve-month old children will follow a person's gaze, while chimpanzees tend to be interested only in head movements. He suggests that our unique sensitivity to gaze direction facilitated human cooperation and language development.959It is not by accident that our most widely accepted moral phrase is "do unto others as you would have them do unto you ..." because our most essential intellectual competence is understanding others; whether through communication or modeling others' minds and awareness, later elaborated into the study of psychology. EditMoral view A is truer than moral view B, if A entails a more accurate understanding of the connections between human thoughts/intentions/behavior and human well-being.1081The one crucial exception, however, is that psychopaths are often unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others, And this may be the difference that makes all the difference.1660Blair points out, parenting strategies that increase empathy tend to successfully mitigate antisocial behavior in healthy children;1668Territorial violence might have even been necessary for the development of altruism. The economist Samuel Bowles has argued that lethal, "out-group" hostility and "in-group" altruism are two sides of the same coin.1701Sometimes our knowledge of psychology conflicts with itself, as in our undertstanding of revenge and compassion, and a resolution needs to be worked out:" the tragic experience of his late father-in-law, who had the opportunity to kill the man who murdered his family during the Holocaust but opted instead to turn him over to the police. After spending only a year in jail, the killer was released, and Diamond's father-in-law spent the last sixty years of his life "tormented by regret and guilt." While there is much to be said against the vendetta culture of the New Guinea Highlands, it is clear that the practice of taking vengeance answers to a common psychological need".1860In fact, mathematical belief (e.g., "2 + 6 + 8 = 16") showed a similar pattern of activity to ethical belief (e.g., "It is good to let your children know that you love them"), and these were perhaps the most dissimilar sets of stimuli used in our experiment. This suggests that the physiology of belief may be the same regardless of a proposition's content. It also suggests that the division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function. 2032And we can traverse the boundary between facts and values in other ways. As we are about to see, the norms of reasoning seem to apply equally to beliefs about facts and to beliefs about values. In both spheres, evidence of inconsistency and bias is always unflattering. Similarities of this kind suggest that there is a deep analogy, if not identity, between the two domains.2043Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds--and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.3259

The notion that morals cannot be determined by facts, proposed centuries ago by philosophical luminaries such as David Hume and E. G. Moore, is greatly challenged in Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape. Harris believes that what constitutes something being ethically "good" or "bad" can be shown through a harmonious combination of scientific evidence and simple rationality. His book thus follows a rhetoric of defining common psychological phenomena such as "belief" and "well-being" coupled with many examples of how subjective perception of these phenomena leads to objectively immoral decisions. Being a neuroscientist and well-known critic of religion, Harris speaks of morality as a frontier of science not up for religious or philosophical debate. He provides such great insight into the field of ethics that makes it a mandatory read for any current or aspiring scientist. However, the average reader is warned: Harris frequently slams religion and if you already have an unfavorable opinion on science, you will probably find this book difficult to agree with.With growing knowledge of the genetic and molecular basis of human behavior, Harris believes that by studying the states of the brain in relation to events in the world, a universal moral compass can be created to follow by all. Differences in gene expression among human beings highly accounts for the differences in our moral intuition and social perception - or at least our natural inclinations of these. However, just as the expression of certain genes can create biological predispositions unwanted by many individuals (tendency for psychopathy, fatal disease, etc.), Harris posits that it is likewise possible to have an undesirable, harmful moral intuition. Thus, morality cannot be treated as a purely subjective topic - there must be undeniable truths in morality.Harris effectively expresses "truths" and not "truth," specifically, because of what he calls the moral landscape, or the area in which there are multiple high and low points of viewing morality so that a great life can be fulfilled. What every individual wants to achieve in life and what kind of impact they want to leave is undeniably subjective; however, there will always be a right and wrong way to achieve their goal. He demonstrates rational differences between opinions of morality through many examples of torture, rape and suffering, often all in the name of religion. The zealots responsible believe these actions are for the well-being of mankind and produce the greatest happiness possible as promised by their religion; however, Harris cautions blind following of moral reasoning. Poor men and women who are castrated, exiled, who view their children being raped and murdered against their own will surely do not live with the same prosperity and happiness as lives that ensure longevity, wealth and intrinsic personal satisfaction. A sense of morality that leads to the former scenario cannot be the right choice or happier life - it just goes against everyway we think rationally.Perhaps Harris' largest flaw is his advocation of such rationality. Myself an aspiring neuroscientist in college, I've learned that science just should not be based off of the major differences in intrinsic reasoning found among everyone - science is meant to be a focused, honest approach to the mysteries of life. Human rationality itself is a much debated topic. Throwing that uncertainty into the supposed truth of science is very contradictory. However, Harris points out that it is nigh impossible to neglect all reason and rationality in science. His reasoning for that comes through the "moral landscape": since subjective rationality can reflect individuals' personalities, we should acknowledge it to understand the unique ways individuals can achieve a moral life. If an individual cannot listen to their own feelings at least to some degree, then how can they have an honest, happy life?Despite it being the biggest flaw in The Moral Landscape to me, I find he handles it quite well because he makes his arguments very agreeable. When he discusses "being right or wrong," he asks if we should be morally able to synthesize and publish a recipe for smallpox to the public. Due to the fact there will always be extremists who want human society to fall, I agree and feel most would agree that that would be immoral to do because many innocent individuals would die from a few individuals' management of a lethal disease. It's just irony that Harris uses rationality to suggest the usefulness of rationality. Future scientific research could show the use of rationality to be absolutely inappropriate in our search for truth, so Harris' opinion can only be tested with time.However, despite the potential flaw, Harris's really convinces you with his greatest point: what constitutes an individual's well-being and happiness can be proven through neuroscience, as we can see the molecular differences in brain states between unhappy people and happy people. For example, with use of fMRI, we can correlate happiness and quality of life with blood-flow in the brain (in his studies, mainly the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe are relevant). If certain reactions to stimuli depicting an event deemed to reduce an individual's quality of life cause higher brain activity associated with lower happiness, then we become closer to finding the truths of morality. It is easier to detect unhappiness, Harris suggests, than happiness, as the moral landscape has peaks in which every individual has his/her own pinnacle of maximizing moral decisions with subjective well-being. This is because every individual is still slightly unique in what makes them happy. Thus, he argues that morality should be a followed set of answers rather than a personal open-ended question, as we can find how the correct moral sense leads to what human beings intrinsically deem as "the best possible lives."Along with gene expression and activity in certain brain regions, The Moral Landscape enlightens you on how even evolution plays in determining moral values. Harris posits that we are not evolutionarily adapted for our society - we are not selected to become better government officials or shopkeepers. Thus, as we describe and define moral values with science, he suggests that we must recognize that morality will be impartial to personal thought. For example, Harris describes how individuals who see the life of one disadvantaged individual relevant to charitable organizations are much more likely to donate than if they saw how their donation is necessary for the world at whole. This, he suggests, may represent our selected behavior to care for only a few individuals; while we were not selected to care for the entire world, there is no argument against the entire world needing some form of care. Thus, according to Harris, we must disregard our predisposed beliefs and come to moral conclusions with science.In all, it is a truly inspirational read - a read that has changed my life and has helped me ground the way I think. The text is engaging and very enjoyable - Harris' memorable analogies are not only mind-stimulating but merit his book a delightful re-read. I will always keep this book in mind as I come across moral warfare in the realm of scientific research.

Let me start off by writing that this book is 10 years old. The direction the author takes is subjective yet the methodology, the matrix that brings it about is universal. What I mean is "The Moral Landcape" is a universally potent concept as he introduces it to the reader. "How science can determine human values" would be Harris' contention.He does a pretty good job at it too. As someone living in the west, I wholeheartedly agree with his choosing suffering as a scale on which to base the quality of human existence. And yes, science can and, once agreed upon, should weigh in and quantify acceptable and unacceptable degrees of existence brought about by certain types of behaviours.The single limit, not flaw, of his argument is his failiure to recognize that western civilization is the civilization of the person according to Henri de la Bastide. As such, individual pain and the drive to limit it to the point of warranting the pursuit of personal happiness is only broadly desirable in the west. Other civilizations verily deem religion to be the proper organisational metric of the moral landscape. I do not mean to say I respect their culture or wish to bring it about. I am simply saying that science can't really determine the optimal human existence. It can only determine human values in accordance to arbitrary wholly irrational customs.

The author attempts to universalize morality as the well-being and greater good for mankind as a whole. He lays out the argument as to how science can help out in this noble undertaking. He also provides some useful insights into the human mind and how our brains work. I highly recommend it for everyone irrespective of their own interests and beliefs.

A logically argued thesis for an objective moral framework, derived from cognitive neuroscience and our collective wellbeing. This book is vastly ahead of its time and is likely the best window we will get into the future of moral philosophy.

In The Moral Landscape, renowned writer Sam Harris presents the case for science as a challenge to centuries of religious monopoly on matters of morality. Convincingly presented with arguments from a scientific and responsibly social point of view-balanced with ideas from the other side, The Moral Landscape is Harris armed with the evidence, and infused with humanity and reason. The great tussle between the faithful and the secular provides a framework for Harris’s ideas, but in this book the fight is neither center-left nor center-right; it is where it is, from the standpoint of reason over superstition and mock-science. At the same time, Harris argues with a scientist’s careful humility-where evidence and reason inform powerful ideas of morality, effectively bringing the concept out of the Stone Age and into the rational era of Darwin and beyond. An admirable work, and one that will impress the man’s admirers, but also perhaps move some fence-sitters away from the grey areas of doubt and inbuilt respect for faith as our only route to moral cognition. Highly recommended.

An incredible book.“the Fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. In my experience, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion.”“Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures - and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”“Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His evidence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.”“Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic and environmental goals.”“I will argue that anyone who would seriously maintain that the opposite is the case - is either misusing words or not taking the time to consider the details.”“But the mere endurance of a belief system or custom does not suggest that it is adaptive, much less wise. It merely suggests that it hasn’t led directly to a society’s collapse or killed its practitioners outright.”“Every society that has ever existed has had to channel and subdue certain aspects of human nature - envy, territorial violence, avarice, deceit, laziness, cheating, etc. - through social mechanisms and institutions. It would be a miracle if all societies - irrespective of size, geographical location, their place in history, or the genomes of their members - had done this equally well. And yet the prevailing bias of cultural relativism assumes that such a miracle has occurred not just once, but always.”"Because there are no easy remedies for social inequality, many scientists and public intellectuals also believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions.""There are many tools one must get in hand to think scientifically - ideas about cause and effect, respect for evidence and logical coherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty, the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc. - and these must be put to use long before one starts worrying about mathematical models or specific data.""When we say that we are reasoning or speaking "objectively", we generally mean that we are free of obvious bias, open to counterarguments, cognizant of the relevant facts, and so on. This is to make a claim about how we are thinking. In this sense, there is no impediment to our studying subjective (first person) facts "objectively".""I am not denying the necessarily subjective (experiential) component of the facts under discussion. I am certainly not claiming that moral truths exist independent of the experience of conscious beings - like the platonic Form of the Good - or that certain actions are intrinsically wrong. I am simply saying that, given that there are facts - real facts - to be known about how conscious creatures can experience the worst possible misery and the greatest possible well-being, it is objectively true to say that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice.""Now that we have consciousness on the table, my further claim is that the concept of "well-being" captures all that we can intelligibly value. And "morality" - whatever people's associations with this term happen to be - really relates to the intentions and behaviors that affect the well-being of conscious creatures.""And, as I have said, there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive - many peaks on the moral landscape - so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in this life, such diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science.""This possibility - the prospect of radically different moral commitments - is at the heart of many people's doubts about moral truth.""Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science."Chapter 2"As we better understand the brain, we will increasingly understand all of the forces - kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence, intuitions of fairness, impulse control, the mitigation of aggression, etc. - that allow friends and strangers to collaborate successfully on the common projects of civilization. Understanding ourselves in this way, and using this knowledge to improve human life, will be among the most important challenges to science in the decades to come.""Being a fellow Homo sapiens, we must presume that the Dobu islanders had brains sufficiently similar to our own to invite comparison. Is there any doubt that the selfishness and general malevolence of the Dobu would have been expressed at the level of their brains? Only if you think the brain does nothing more than filter oxygen and glucose out of the blood. Once we more fully understand the neurophysiology of states like love, compassion, and trust, it will be possible to spell out the differences between ourselves and people like the Dobu in greater detail. But we need not await any breakthroughs in neuroscience to bring the general principle in view: just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health, it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.""However, it is interesting to consider what would happen if we simply ignored this step and merely spoke about "well-being." What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about "right" and "wrong", or "good" and "evil", and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important? And if important, wouldn't it be, by definition, a matter of someone's well-being?""Moral judgement is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an emotional nature.""Moral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if they were... If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and sociology - not normative ethics.""Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions. We must build our better selves into our laws, tax codes, and institutions.""this is precisely what is so important about science: it allows us to investigate the world, and our place within it, in ways that get behind first appearances. Why shouldn't we do this with morality and human values generally?""Most of us spend some time over the course of our lives deciding how (or weather) to respond to the fact other people on earth needlessly starve to death. Most of us also spend some time deciding which delightful foods we want to consume at home and in our favourite restaurants. Which of these projects absorbs more of your time and material resources on a yearly basis? If you are like most people living in the developed world, such a comparison will not recommend you to sainthood.""This is one of the paradoxes of human psychology: we often fail to do what we ostensibly want to do and what is most in our self-interest to do. We often fail to do what we most want to do - or, at the very least, we fail to do what, at the end of the day (or year, or lifetime) we will most wish we had done.""It seems abundantly clear that many people are simply wrong about morality - just as many people are wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding. What scientific purpose is served by averting our eyes from this fact? If morality is a system of thinking about (and maximizing) the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people's moral concerns must be immoral.""Am I free to feel that "opaque" is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.""consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our intentions become competely available to us.""When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. Many people do not feel the same way about regulating mood with antidepressants""We do not feel as free as we think we feel. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion."Chapter 3"The greater activity we found in the MPFC for belief compared to disbelief may reflect the greater self-relevance and/or reward value of true statements. When we believe a proposition to be true, it is as though we have taken it in hands as part of our extended self: we are saying, in effect, "This is mine. I can use this. This fits my view of the world." It seems to me that such cognitive acceptance has a distinctly positive emotional valence. We actually like the truth, and we may, in fact, dislike falsehood.""The point , of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning - norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties.""As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hew a positive state of mind - to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt, for instance - this is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking" and "self-deception". Such a person will, of necessity, be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out nonepistemic motives in another's view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person's connection to the world as it is.""a bias is not merely a source of error; it is a reliable pattern of error. Every bias, therefore, reveals something about the structure of the human mind.""Of course, people do often believe things in part because these beliefs make them feel better. But they do not do this in the full light of consciousness. Self-deception, emotional bias, and muddled thinking are facts of human cognition.""expectation can be, if not everything, almost everything. Rosenhan concluded his paper with this damning summary: "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.""As far as our understanding of the world is concerned - there are no facts without values."Chapter 4"This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide.The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto - in a single brain, in an institution, or in a culture - does not mean that there isn't a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world's "great," and greatly discrepant, religions.""The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to het them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself - conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc.""The fact that certain people can reason poorly with a clear conscience - or can do so while saying that they have a clear conscience - proves absolutely nothing about the compatibility of religious and scientific ideas, goals, or ways of thinking.It is possible to be wrong and not to know it (we call this "ignorance").It is possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of admitting this publicly (we call this "hypocrisy").And it may also be possible to be wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one's commitment to one's erroneous beliefs (we call this "self-deception").It seems clear that these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion."Chapter 5"Throughout this book, I have argued that the split between facts and values - and, therefore, between science and morality - is an illusion.""The claim that science could have something important to say about values (because values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures) is an argument made on first principles. As such, it doesn't rest on any specific empirical results.""we have all evolved from common ancestors and are, therefore, far more similar than we are different; brains and primary human emotions clearly transcend culture, and they are unquestionably influenced by states of the world (as anyone who has ever stubbed his toe can attest).""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 became 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.""Many people also believe that nothing much depends on whether we find a universal foundation for morality. It seems to me, however, that in order to fulfill our deepest interests in this life, both personally and collectively, we must first admit that some interests are more defensible than others.""If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, than some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlighted than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needles human misery. Whether or not we ever understand meaning, morality, and values in practice, I have attempted to show that there must be something to know about them in principle. And I am convinced that merely admitting this will transform the way we think about human happiness and the public good."Afterword"Is it really so difficult to distinguish between a science of morality and the morality of science?To assert that moral truths exist, and can be scientifically understood, is not to say that all (or any) scientists curently understand these truths or that those who do will necessarily conform to them.""To summarize my central thesis: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall wiithin the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.""I'm not simply claiming that morality is "fully determined by an objective realityy, independent of people's actual values and desires". I am claiming that people's actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of this - indeed, we must - in order to talk about what is actually good."