Overview
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is Sam Harris’s book-length argument that moral questions have objectively right and wrong answers and that science—understood broadly as disciplined empirical inquiry—can help us discover them. The book’s central move is to identify moral values with facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. Harris writes that “questions about values—about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and he argues that because conscious experience depends on the brain and on the world, those questions can be studied empirically. The book is framed as a rebuttal to two opposed camps: religious traditionalists who claim moral authority from scripture, and secular relativists, skeptics, and anti-realists who hold that moral claims are merely expressions of preference or cultural convention.
The Moral Landscape
The organizing image is the “moral landscape”: a conceptual space whose peaks represent the heights of possible well-being and whose valleys represent the depths of suffering. Harris argues that this landscape is real—that there are genuine differences between better and worse states of conscious experience—even if there may be more than one peak. Different lives and cultures may flourish in different ways, but there are unmistakable valleys, and he singles out the worst possible misery for everyone as a state that no reasonable person can call good. Morality, on this account, is the project of moving toward the peaks and away from the valleys, and moral progress is real movement across that terrain.
Harris is careful to say that the landscape is not a single scalar quantity. Well-being is multidimensional, encompassing pleasure and pain but also meaning, love, beauty, engagement, and other features of conscious life. He draws an analogy with health: there is no single perfect state of health, and healthy people differ in countless ways, but medicine is nonetheless a genuine science with objective standards, and some conditions are unambiguously unhealthy. Morality, he argues, is in the same position. The absence of a single best life does not imply the absence of better and worse ones.
Facts and Values
A large part of the book is devoted to dismantling the fact/value dichotomy. Harris argues that values are a species of fact—facts about the experiences of conscious creatures—and that the supposed gap between “is” and “ought” is less formidable than it appears. His strategy is to show that the concept of “good” is unintelligible apart from the well-being of conscious beings: a universe containing no conscious life would contain nothing that could be good or bad in the moral sense. Once well-being is placed at the foundation, science can tell us which actions, policies, and institutions promote or undermine it. Harris concedes that science cannot, by itself, tell us to care about well-being; but he argues that no one can coherently fail to care about it, and that the whole notion of moral obligation is bound up with it.
He engages with the classical objections—Hume’s is/ought gap, G. E. Moore’s naturalistic fallacy and open-question argument—and argues that they do not block a science of morality once well-being is recognized as the relevant foundation. He insists that “mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion”: the fact that we do not yet know how to measure well-being precisely does not mean there is no fact of the matter.
Moral Relativism and Religion
Harris attacks moral relativism and cultural relativism as intellectually and morally indefensible. He argues that the tolerance of intolerance is not a virtue, and that practices such as honor killing, genital mutilation, and the suppression of women cannot be excused simply because they are embedded in a culture. He is especially critical of the idea—common in the academy and in liberal discourse—that we cannot judge the values of other societies. On his view, we can and should judge them, by reference to their effects on the well-being of conscious creatures.
The book also takes aim at religion as a source of moral authority. Harris argues that the idea that morality requires religion is false, that secular societies can be moral, and that religious moderation often provides cover for religious extremism. He contends that scripture is a poor guide to ethics and that moral progress has often required resisting religious teaching. At the same time, he acknowledges that religious communities can do good works and that religious practice can contribute to individual well-being; his target is the claim that religion is necessary for, or uniquely authoritative about, morality.
Belief, the Brain, and Free Will
Harris draws on neuroscience and psychology to argue that beliefs are brain states, that they can be studied empirically, and that the difference between true and false beliefs is a real difference in the world. He discusses the neural basis of belief formation and the ways in which belief can be distorted by emotion, group identity, and other factors. He also discusses psychopathy as a case study in how moral capacities depend on brain function, and he argues that understanding the neuroscience of moral emotion can inform our moral judgments without replacing them.
The book addresses the problem of free will. Harris argues that the kind of free will most people believe in—a contra-causal capacity to have chosen otherwise—is an illusion, but he insists that this does not undermine morality. Moral responsibility, on his account, can be understood naturalistically: we can hold people accountable, praise and blame them, and design institutions around deterrence and rehabilitation, without positing a mysterious agent that could have done otherwise. He argues that a deterministic picture of human behavior is compatible with meaningful moral judgment and with a serious commitment to moral improvement.
Well-Being and the Good Life
The later portions of the book explore what well-being actually consists in. Harris draws on positive psychology, including work on happiness, engagement, and meaning, and he argues that the good life is not simply a life of pleasure. He discusses the importance of relationships, purposeful work, and self-transcendence, and he suggests that practices such as meditation can give people greater insight into their own minds and greater control over their experience. He is careful to say that the science of well-being is in its infancy, but he argues that this is a reason to pursue it, not to abandon the project.
He also considers the problem of comparing well-being across persons and the possibility of trade-offs between different goods. He acknowledges that there may be many legitimate peaks on the moral landscape, and that reasonable people may disagree about which peak to aim for. But he argues that this pluralism does not collapse into relativism: some states of affairs are clearly worse than others, and the worst possible misery for everyone is a fixed point that no reasonable moral view can deny.
The Scope of the Argument
Throughout, Harris insists that he is not claiming science can answer every moral question today. His claim is that there are answers in principle, and that we can make progress toward them by studying the brain, behavior, and the conditions under which conscious creatures flourish. He argues that a science of morality would be continuous with medicine and with other applied sciences, and that the resistance to it comes less from genuine intellectual difficulties than from confusion about the nature of facts and values.
The book closes with a call for a more honest and more ambitious moral discourse—one that is willing to say that some ways of life are better than others, and that is willing to use the tools of science to help us find them.
The Is/Ought Problem
Harris engages directly with the philosophical tradition that treats facts and values as separate domains. He argues that the gap between “is” and “ought” can be bridged once we recognize that moral values are a particular kind of fact—facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. He also argues that “ought” is always relative to a goal: if you want to be healthy, you ought to exercise; if you want to maximize well-being, you ought to do certain things. Since well-being is a fact about conscious experience, the “ought” is grounded in an “is.” He contends that the fact/value dichotomy has been used to keep science out of moral inquiry, and that this has been a mistake.
The Critique of Moral Relativism
A significant portion of the book is devoted to arguing against moral relativism and cultural relativism. Harris contends that the reluctance to judge other cultures is often a form of moral cowardice rather than intellectual sophistication. He discusses practices such as female genital cutting, arguing that these are objectively harmful and that describing them as “merely different” ignores the suffering they cause. He insists that tolerance does not require relativism: one can respect persons and cultures while still maintaining that some practices are wrong. He also argues that moral disagreement does not imply that there is no moral truth; disagreement is compatible with there being a fact of the matter, just as disagreement about health does not imply that medicine is subjective.
Religion and Moral Authority
Harris examines and rejects the claim that religion provides the only secure foundation for morality. He critiques divine command theory, asking whether an action is good because God commands it or whether God commands it because it is good. If the former, morality is arbitrary; if the latter, morality is independent of God. He also argues that religious moral codes have sometimes enshrined practices that are now recognized as harmful, and that religious authority has often impeded moral progress. He does not claim that religious people are necessarily less moral, but he argues that religion does not offer a reliable method for determining what is good.
Moral Expertise and the Value-Ladenness of Science
Harris argues that just as there are medical experts who understand health, there could be moral experts who understand well-being. He acknowledges that moral expertise is likely to be more contested than medical expertise, but he insists that the analogy is apt. He also argues against the idea that science is value-free. Science itself presupposes values—truth, honesty, the welfare of researchers—and the notion that scientists can study facts without values is a misconception.
Consciousness and Moral Status
Throughout the book, Harris roots morality in consciousness. He argues that the well-being of conscious creatures is the only thing we can intelligibly value. Without consciousness, there would be nothing to care about. He discusses the possibility of non-human minds and the moral status of animals, arguing that the capacity for suffering and flourishing is what matters, not species membership.
The Role of Intuition and Reason
Harris is critical of the reliance on moral intuition in philosophy, particularly the use of thought experiments. He argues that intuitions are often unreliable and that they should be supplemented by empirical research into well-being. He does not dismiss reason, however; he sees reason as a tool for navigating the moral landscape. He argues that careful reasoning, combined with scientific evidence, is our best hope for moral progress.
