Atheism’s Poster Boy Sam Harris on the Science of Morality
- Olivia Koski: How can you scientifically determine whether something is good or bad?
- Sam Harris: The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that. Obviously it would be a good thing to stop nuclear proliferation and genocide and climate change, and to better educate our children. These are things that would be good for everybody and bad for nobody. People seem to believe that there’s no ground for truth-claims about human values—that these are not the sort of facts that science can ever deal with. But there is a place for science to argue, for instance, that the Taliban is really wrong. Its beliefs lead to unnecessary human suffering. Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.
- Olivia Koski: Religion makes those sort of truth-claims all the time.
- Sam Harris: But religion is precisely the wrong software for analyzing human well-being. It’s the one area of our lives where people win points for saying, “I’m not going to change my mind no matter what happens.”
- Olivia Koski: But hasn’t religion made some people behave more morally?
- Sam Harris: The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. Is it better to alleviate famine in Africa because you think Jesus Christ is watching and deciding whether to reward you with an eternity of happiness after death? Or is it better to do that because you actually care about the suffering of your fellow human beings?
- Olivia Koski: Why is science a better alternative?
- Sam Harris: Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
- Olivia Koski: Science has suffered when it’s seen as the enemy of religion. But in your book you criticize scientists who have tried to build bridges.
- Sam Harris: A religious scientist is someone who has decided he can behave rigorously in his scientific profession but has no obligation to connect that way of thinking to his larger worldview. If he did, he would notice contradictions between his science and his religion. Besides, the point is not to get religious people to accept evolution—it’s to get everyone thinking honestly about the nature of the world.
