A book I don't have to read
Feb. 2nd, 2011 07:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essentialsaltesBecause Massimo Pigliucci took the bullet for me, reviewing Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape
"What Sam Harris wishes to do in his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is to mount a science-based challenge to [the is/ought problem]. For Harris, values are facts, and as such they are amenable to scientific inquiry. I think he is spectacularly wrong.
...
But he is a self-professed consequentialist — a philosophical stance close to utilitarianism — who simply ducks any discussion of the implicatons of that a priori choice, which informs his entire view of what counts for morality, happiness, well-being and so forth."
As I suspected, Harris fails before he even starts.
"What Sam Harris wishes to do in his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is to mount a science-based challenge to [the is/ought problem]. For Harris, values are facts, and as such they are amenable to scientific inquiry. I think he is spectacularly wrong.
...
But he is a self-professed consequentialist — a philosophical stance close to utilitarianism — who simply ducks any discussion of the implicatons of that a priori choice, which informs his entire view of what counts for morality, happiness, well-being and so forth."
As I suspected, Harris fails before he even starts.
