It is also conceivable that a science of human flourishing could be possible, and yet people could be made equally happy by very different "moral" impulses. Perhaps there is no connection between being good and feeling good—and, therefore, no connection between moral behavior (as generally conceived) and subjective well-being. In this case, rapists, liars, and thieves would experience the same depth of happiness as the saints. This scenario stands the greatest chance of being true, while still seeming quite far-fetched. Neuroimaging work already suggests what has long been obvious through introspection: human cooperation is rewarding. 12 However, if evil turned out to be as reliable a path to happiness as goodness is, my argument about the moral landscape would still stand, as would the likely utility of neuroscience for investigating it. It would no longer be an especially "moral" landscape; rather it would be a continuum of well-being, upon which saints and sinners would occupy equivalent peaks.
Worries of this kind seem to ignore some very obvious facts about human beings: 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). No one, to my knowledge, believes that there is so much variance in the requisites of human well-being as to make the above concerns seem plausible.
Whether morality becomes a proper branch of science is not really the point. Is economics a true science yet? Judging from recent events, it wouldn't 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 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.
Currently, most scientists believe that answers to questions of human value will fall perpetually beyond our reach—not because human subjectivity is too difficult to study, or the brain too complex, but because there is no intellectual justification for speaking about right and wrong, or good and evil, across cultures. 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. Indeed, some interests are so compelling that they need no defense at all.
This book was written in the hope that as science develops, we will recognize its application to the most pressing questions of human existence. For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion—that great engine of ignorance and bigotry— a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools. Granted, the practical effects of thinking in terms of a moral landscape cannot be our only reason for doing so—we must form our beliefs about reality based on what we think is actually true. But few people seem to recognize the dangers posed by thinking that there are no true answers to moral questions.
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, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Moral Landscape is based, in part, on the dissertation I wrote / for my PhD in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. Consequently, the book has benefited greatly from the vetting that this first manuscript received from my thesis committee. I am extremely grateful to Mark Cohen, Marco Iacoboni, Eran Zaidel, and Jerome ("Pete") Engel for their guidance and support—sustained, as it was, over many years during which the progress of my scientific research was difficult to discern. Each saved me from myself on several occasions—and, with unnerving frequency, from one another.
I am especially indebted to Mark Cohen, my dissertation advisor. Mark is an uncommonly gifted teacher and a model of caution in reporting scientific results. If our academic interests did not always coincide, I was surely the poorer for it. I would also like to thank Mark's wife and colleague, Susan Bookheimer: I always profited from Susan's advice—delivered, in my case, with the compassionate urgency of a mother rescuing a child from a busy intersection. I am also grateful to Suzie Vader, the smiling face of the Interdepartmental PhD Program for Neuroscience at UCLA, for providing generous encouragement and assistance over many years.
Sections of this book are based on two published papers: chapter 3 contains a discussion of Harris, S., Sheth, S. A., and Cohen, M. S. (2008), Functional neuroimaging of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty, Annals of Neurology, 63(2), 141-147; part of chapter 4 is drawn from Harris, S., Kaplan, J. T., Curiel, A., Bookheimer, S. Y., Iacoboni, M., Cohen, M. S. (2009), The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief, PLoS ONE 4(10). I gratefully acknowledge my coauthors on these works as well as their original publishers. I would especially like to thank Jonas T. Kaplan, now at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, for partnering with me on the second paper. This study was a joint effort at every stage, and Jonas's involvement was essential to its completion.
In addition to my dissertation committee at UCLA, several outside scholars and scientists reviewed early drafts of this book. Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, and Steven Pinker read the text, in whole or in part, and offered extremely helpful notes. A few sections contain cannibalized versions of essays that were first read by a larger circle of scientists and writers: including Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Anthony Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Pinker. I am pleased to notice that with friends like these, it has become increasingly difficult to say something stupid. (Still, one does what one can.) It is an honor to be so deeply in their debt.
My editor at the Free Press, Hilary Redmon, greatly improved The Moral Landscape at every level, through several stages of revision. It was simply a joy to work with her. My agents, John Brockman, Katinka Mat-son, and Max Brockman, were extremely helpful in refining my initial conception of the book and in placing it with the right publisher. Of course, JB, as his friends, colleagues, and clients well know, is much more than an agent: he has become the world's preeminent wrangler of scientific opinion. We are all richer for his efforts to bring scientists and public intellectuals together through his Edge Foundation to discuss the most interesting questions of our time.
I have been greatly supported in all things by my family and friends— especially by my mother, who has always been a most extraordinary friend. She read the manuscript of The Moral Landscape more than once and offered extremely valuable notes and copyedits.
My wife, Annaka Harris, has continued to help me professionally on all fronts—editing my books, essays, and public talks, and helping to run our nonprofit foundation. If her abundant talent is not evident in every sentence I produce, it is because I remain a hard case. Annaka has also raised our daughter, Emma, while I've worked, and herein lies the largest debt of all: much of the time I spent researching and writing The Moral Landscape belonged to "my girls."
/> NOTES
Introduction: The Moral Landscape
1. Bilefsky, 2008; Mortimer & loader, 2005.
2. For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between "science" and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss "facts"—e.g., history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of "science," broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality. Granted, one doesn't generally think of events like assassinations as "scientific" facts, but the murder of President Kennedy is as fully corroborated a fact as can be found anywhere, and it would betray a profoundly unscientific frame of mind to deny that it occurred. I think "science," therefore, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.
3. This is not to deny that cultural conceptions of health can play an important role in determining a person's experience of illness (more so with some illnesses than others). There is evidence that American notions of mental health have begun to negatively affect the way people in other cultures suffer (Waters, 2010). It has even been argued that, with a condition like schizophrenia, notions of spirit possession are palliative when compared to beliefs about organic brain disease. My point, however, is that whatever contributions cultural differences make to our experience of the world can themselves be understood, in principle, at the level of the brain.
4. Pollard Sacks, 2009.
5. In the interests of both simplicity and relevance, I tend to keep my references to religion focused on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Of course, most of what I say about these faiths applies to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and to other religions as well.
6. There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of Europe: Ye'or, 2005; Bawer, 2006; Caldwell, 2009.
7. Gould, 1997.
8. Nature 432, 657(2004).
9. I am not the first person to argue that morality can and should be integrated with out scientific understanding of the natural world. Of late, the philosophers William Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have each built similar cases (Casebeer, 2003; Flanagan, 2007). Both Casebeer and Flanagan have resurrected Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, which is generally translated as "flourishing," "fulfillment," or "well-being." While I rely heavily on these English equivalents, I have elected not to pay any attention to Aristotle. While much of what Atistotle wrote in his Nichomachean Ethics is of great interest and convergent with the case I wish to make, some of it isn't. And I'd rather not be beholden to the quirks of the great man's philosophy. Both Casebeer and Flanagan also seem to place greater emphasis on morality as a skill and a form of practical knowledge, arguing that living a good life is more a matter of "knowing how" than of "knowing that." While I think this distinction is often useful, I'm not eager to give up the fight for moral truth just yet. For instance, I believe that the compulsory veiling of women in Afghanistan tends to needlessly immiserate them and will breed a new generation of misogynistic, puritanical men. This is an instance of "knowing that," and it is a truth claim about which I am either right or wrong. I am confident that both Casebeer and Flanagan would agree. The difference in our approaches, therefore, seems to me to be more a matter of emphasis. In any case, both Casebeer and Flanagan go into greater philosophical detail than I have on many points, and both their books are well worth reading. Flanagan also offered very helpful notes on an early draft of this book.
10. E.O.Wilson, 1998.
11. Keverne & Curley, 2004; Pedersen, Ascher, Monroe, & Prange, 1982; Smeltzer, Curtis, Aragona, & Wang, 2006; Young & Wang, 2004.
12. Fries, Ziegler, Kurian, Jacoris, & Pollak, 2005.
13. Hume's argument was actually directed against religious apologists who sought to deduce morality from the existence of God. Ironically, his reasoning has since become one of the primary impediments to linking morality to the rest of human knowledge. However, Hume's is/ought distinction has always had its detractors (e.g., Searle, 1964); here is Dennett:
If "ought" cannot be derived from "is," just what can it be derived from?... ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature—on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy (Dennett, p. 468).
14. Moore [1903], 2004.
15. Popper, 2002, pp. 60-62.
16. The list of scientists who have followed Hume and Moore with perfect obedience is very long and defies citation. For a recent example within neuroscience, see Edelman (2006, pp. 84-91).
17. Fodor,2007.
18. I recently had the pleasure of hearing the philosopher Patricia Churchland draw this same analogy. (Patricia, I did not steal it!)
19. De Grey & Rae, 2007.
20. The problem with using a strictly hedonic measure of the "good" grows more obvious once we consider some of the promises and perils of a maturing neuroscience. If, for instance, we can one day manipulate the brain so as to render specific behaviors and states of mind more pleasurable than they now are, it seems relevant to wonder whether such refinements would be "good." It might be good to make compassion more rewarding than sexual lust, but would it be good to make hatred the most pleasurable emotion of all? One can't appeal to pleasure as the measure of goodness in such cases, because pleasure is what we would be choosing to reassign.
21. Pinker, 2002, pp. 53-54.
22. It should be clear that the conventional distinction between "belief" and "knowledge" does not apply here. As will be made clear in chapter 3, our propositional knowledge about the world is entirely a matter of "belief" in the above sense. Whether one chooses to say that one "believes" X or that one "knows" X is merely a difference of emphasis, expressing one's degree of confidence. As discussed in this book, propositional knowledge is a form of belief. Understanding belief at the level of the brain has been the focus of my recent scientific research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (S. Harris et al., 2009; S. Harris, Sheth, & Cohen, 2008).
23. Edgerton, 1992.
24. Cited in Edgerton, 1992, p. 26.
25. Though perhaps even this attributes too much common sense to the field of anthropology, as Edgerton (1992, p. 105) tells us: "A prevailing assumption among anthropologists who study the medical practices of small, traditional societies is that these populations enjoy good health and nutrition... Indeed, we are often told that seemingly irrational food taboos, once fully understood, will prove to be adaptive."
26. Leher,2010.
27. Filkins,2010.
28. For an especially damning look at the Bush administration's Council on Bioethics, see Steven Pinker's response to its 555-page report, Human Dignity and Bioethics (Pinker, 2008a).
29. S. Harris, 2004,2006a, 2006b; S. Harris, 2006c; S. Harris, 2007a, 2007b.
30. Judson, 2008; Chris Mooney, 2005.
Chapter 1: Moral Truth
1. In February of 2010, I spoke at the TED conference about how we might one day understand morality in universal, scientific terms ( www.youtube.com /watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww). Normally, when one speaks at a conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a coffee break. As luck would have it, however, my TED talk was broadcast on the intetnet as I was in the final stages of writing this book, and this produced a blizzard of useful commentary.
Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven't done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like "metaethics," "deontology," "noncognitivism," "antirealism," "emotivism," etc., directly increases the amount of b
oredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing this book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy will be unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the professional philosophers I've consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.
2. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been quite disconcerting to see the caricature of the overeducated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.
3. Searle, 1995, p. 8.
4. There has been much confusion on this point, and most of it is still influential in philosophical circles. Consider the following from J. L. Mackie:
If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else (Mackie 1977, p. 38).
Clearly, Mackie has conflated the two senses of the term "objective." We need not discuss "entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, uttetly different from anything else in the universe" in order to speak about moral truth. We need only admit that the experiences of conscious creatures are lawfully dependent upon states of the universe—and, therefore, that actions can cause more harm than good, more good than harm, or be morally neutral. Good and evil need only consist in this, and it makes no sense whatsoever to claim that an action that harms everyone affected by it (even its perpetrator) might still be "good." We do not require a metaphysical repository of right and wrong, or actions that are mysteriously right or wrong in themselves, for there to be right and wrong answers to moral questions; we simply need a landscape of possible experiences that can be traversed in some orderly way in light of how the universe actually is. The main criterion, therefore, is that misery and well-being not be completely random. It seems to me that we already know that they are not—and, therefore, that it is possible for a person to be right or wrong about how to move from one state to the other.