Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values?

In this highly anticipated, explosive new book, the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion's monopoly on morality and human values. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values to dismantle the most common justification for religious faith -- that a moral system cannot be based on science.

The End of Faith ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In its aftermath, Harris discovered that most people, from secular scientists to religious fundamentalists, agree on one point: Science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Even among religious fundamentalists, the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence that God exists, but that faith in Him provides the only guidance for living a good life. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science has officially had no opinion. Until now.

Morality, Harris argues, is actually an undeveloped branch of neuroscience, and answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a "moral landscape" -- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to human states of greater or lesser wellbeing. Different ways of thinking and behaving -- different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. -- translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels, ranging from biochemistry to economics, but they have their crucial realization as experiences in the human brain.

Bringing a fresh, secular perspective to age-old questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, Harris shows that we know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, cultural relativism is simply false -- and comes at increasing cost to humanity. And just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Sam Harris delivers a game-changing argument about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation.

11.10.10
Berkeley Arts and Letters
First Congregational Church of Berkeley (2345 Channing Way at Dana, Berkeley)
Berkeley, CA

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over fifteen languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

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I'm always tempted when I see an audience like this to say

"Sam Harris needs no introduction", and then sit down.

But... you're such a weird group, I know that

But maybe I'll say something to try to find out why you are here

Of the "three horsemen"

or the Great Trinity of those people who've been called "The new atheists"

we have had or tried to have all three of them here:

Cristopher Hitchens got sick and had to cancel,

Richard Dawson was here, filled the place,

and lectured for an hour about evolution.

In Berkeley; we had to go out and try to find somebody in Berkeley

who didn't believe in evolution.

So, I'm expecting more from Sam Harris.

Sam Harris' credentials are so numerous:

he, after an experience with ecstasy,

he dropped out of college and decided to try to find

the way to wisdom and enlightenment in a more direct way.

He went to India, meditated, learned a great deal about

this tradition, came back, went to Stanford and graduated.

After that, he also took a degree in Neuroscience,

a PhD in Neuroscience.

He's written... I believe this is four books:

End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation,

and now the Moral Landscape,

which is very appropriate for Berkeley because it's trying to see how science

can determine and enlighten values, and our senses of "right" and "wrong",

good and evil. I think it's a...

even gentle to say that Sam is an iconoclast,

especially, of religion. He's been very hard on

all forms of fundamentalism, especially Islam,

and that might give some of us

in the progressive religious movement

...make us feel more comfortable.

But the fact is, he is very critical

of progressive religion also. Seeing it

as very often enabling of those with more radical beliefs.

I always think of when I read of him

how Paul Tillich said, you know, we always need atheists around, believers need atheists.

Sam is not an atheist, but he

and Hitchens, and Richard can be said
"anti-theists".

They are warriors in the battle against ideas of god

which are demeaning and which produce violence and ignorance.

So, it's nice to have him here.

I don't think "nice" is the word - it would be illuminating
to have him here!

Sam!

[wild applause]

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Well Sam, that is the first introduction that has detailed

my history of drug use. I think that is probably appropriate here in Berkeley.

Well, it's an honor to be here - I've never spoken in Berkeley before.

And, as many of you know I've been speaking for the last

six years or so, very critically about religion

and when you criticize religion in public,

what you immediately get are all the reasons

why people think it's a terrible idea.

The first reason: is never that there's so much evidence that god exists,

that you're denying the obvious, that you haven't read the Bible closely enough.

The first reason, even for fundamentalists, the truth of religion

is not the first line of defense.

The first reason is that religion, it is imagined, offers the only possible

framework to think about morality in truly global terms, in universal terms.

And, there are several things wrong with this claim.

Obviously, it's not an argument.

Even if it were true, it wouldn't prove that god exists:

religion could function as a placebo.

It also doesn't reconcile the obvious contradictions among the world's religions.

It doesn't reconcile the contradictory truth claims of Christianity and Judaism,

or Christianity and Islam. So, it is kind of a non sequitur as a defensive god.

But, I used to think it was a totally empty claim,

but now I've come to believe that actually religious people, and even fundamentalists,

perhaps, especially fundamentalists, are worried about something that is worth worrying about.

They are worried that secular people, for the most part, have become convinced

that something has happened in the last two hundred years of intellectual discourse,

that has made it impossible to speak about moral truth.

And I continually meet people who seem to have had their convictions of moral truth eroded by something

that has happened in science and philosophy.

And this, I think troubles them. I think we are in danger of waking up in a world

where the only people who are sure that moral truths exist,

are religious demagogues that think the Universe is 6,000 years old.

That's not the world we should be eager to live in,

so I'm going to push your intuitions around on this front.

But, just to give you a sense of the problem, and to tell you how this issue was really seared onto my brain.

I'll tell a little story. I was at a conference few years ago

talking about the link between morality and human well-being

as I'm going to tonight; and I said something that I thought would be quite uncontroversial in this context.

I said, "Listen, we know that morality relates to human well-being.

We know that human well-being relates to the facts that allow mind to emerge in the brain,

so it's constrained by truth claims, in some sense.

And therefore, we know that certain cultures are wrong about how to maximize human well-being -

and therefore, they are wrong in terms of what they value."

And I cited as an example life for women, especially

under the Taliban. It seemed to me their violent misogyny and religious lunacy

was a pretty obvious context in which people, especially women, were not thriving.

Now, it turns out to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific conference is to court controversy.

So, after I spoke another speaker came up to me and said:

"How could you ever say that the compulsory veiling of women is wrong, from the point of view of science?"

I said, "Whoa, ok, the moment you link the questions of right and wrong

to questions of human well-being, then it seems pretty clear that forcing half of the population to live in cloth bags

and beating them or killing them, when they try to get out, is not a way of maximizing well-being,

and therefore, not a good practice. And she said, "Well, that's just your opinion."

I said, "Ok, well, let's just make it easier - let's imagine we found a culture

that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. Would you then agree that we've found a culture

that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being?"

And she said, "It would depend on why they were doing it."

[laughter]

So, after I picked my jaw back up off the floor, I said:

"Ok, let's say they're doing it for religious reasons.

Let's say, they have a scripture which says "every third should walk in darkness"

or some such nonsense.

[laughter]

And, you'll be pleased or horrified to know that she just bit the bullet here and said:

"Then you could never say that they were wrong!"

OK, this was a woman who has background in science and philosophy;

she's now on the President's Council for bio-ethics;

she's one of 13 people, advising our President on all of the issues

related to progress in medicine and life-science generally.

She had just delivered a totally lucid lecture on the moral implications,

as she saw them, for the use of Neuroscience in our courts.

She was very worried that we have been developing lie-detection technology,

and that we are using this on captured terrorists,

and she viewed this as an invasion of cognitive liberty.

On the one hand, her moral scruples were really finely calibrated

to our own possible missteps, in this case in our war on terror.

But she was rather sanguine about the ritual enucleation of children

and seemed to me terrifyingly detached from the very real suffering of millions of women

in Afghanistan at this moment. So, this kind of impossible juxtaposition of views

is something I'm encountering a lot now, among disproportionately well-educated and liberal people.

So, it's something we have to grapple with.

Now, the issue for most people is that it has been said, over and over again,

that there is a distinction between facts and values,

and that science and rationality generally, can only really make truth claims

about the former. So, science obviously can deal with facts;

we have a universe of facts that we can understand to greater or lesser degree.

Facts transcend culture in some basic sense.

But it's not that values are another thing entirely;

values are the domain of questions of right and wrong, and good and evil,

and inconveniently for us, this is the area where the most important questions of human life arise.

These are questions like: how should you raise your children,

what goals should you strive for in life, what constitutes a good life.

And it's not that science will never be able to tell us the right answers to these questions,

just as science is never going to tell you whether you should like chocolate over vanilla,

it's not going to tell you how you should raise your children or treat your neighbour.

I think this is an illusion, this is quite confused.

It's a dangerous illusion, for as I said, it erodes the conviction of very smart people

in the face of really barbaric practices, which occasion needless human misery.

Now, it's long been obvious that we have needed a universal framework

to think about values and morality.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the UN put forward its Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

and yet, the American Anthropological Association, in all its wisdom, came forward

and said: "This is a fool's errand. You can't put forward a Universal Declaration of Human Rights

because you're merely foisting one provincial notion of value onto the rest of humanity.

It is an intellectually illegitimate thing to do."

Notice, this is the best our social scientists could do,

really with the crematoria of Auschwitz still smoking: this is 1947.

Now, I think the connection between facts and values is actually straight forward and philosophically uninteresting.

And i'm going to alight many of the common categories and distinctions one finds in philosophy

in what's called 'meta-ethics'. I just want to say there's going to be a Q & A afterwards,

and if you think I've missed some crucial bit of philosophy in my treatment here,

please come to the mic and deliver the devastating argument.

I want to hear from you. I don't want you to leave with your doubts intact,

but I'm convinced that many of the categories we have in philosophy,

to talk about the truth value of morality and the relationship between values and facts,

are needlessly confusing, and there's no reason to keep rehashing these ancient,

and I think, truly moribund debates.

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

The well-being of conscious creatures is what can be valued in this universe.

If you doubt this, just imagine a universe populated entirely by rocks.

OK, rocks, presumably, have no inner dimension:

there's nothing that is like to be a rock.

We are right to be unconcerned about the experience of rocks,

because we think there's no possibility of experience there.

And I think, we are right to be more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects,

because we think there's an inner dimension there that can be modulated to a much greater degree

by changes in the universe. A universe... for changes in the universe to matter,

they have to matter to some conscious system.

Now, if you doubt this, here's the one bit of philosophy I'm going to anchor this to.

It seems to me the only assumption you have to buy.

Imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it possibly can

for as long as it can - I call this "the worst possible misery for everyone".

The worst possible misery for everyone is bad.

If the word "bad" is to mean anything, surely it applies to the worst possible misery for everyone.

[laughter]

Now, if you don't think the worst possible misery for everyone is bad,

or you think there might be something worse, or you think it might have a silver lining, -

I don't know what you're talking about.

[laughter]

And I'm pretty sure, you don't know what you're talking about either.

The moment you grant me that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad,

therefore worth avoiding, and if we should do anything in this universe

we should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone.

Well, then you've the worst possible misery for everyone over here

and you have every other possible constellation of conscious experience

which, by definition, is better.

You see, we have this continuum here of possible states of consciousness,

and given that consciousness is related to the way the universe is.

It's constrained by the laws of nature in some way

there are going to be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum.

There going to be ways to think you're avoiding the worst possible misery and to fail.

It's going to be possible to have erroneous beliefs about how best to move

from your current space in this continuum to something better.

Now, this is, in philosophy, a somewhat controversial statement, again, I do not see how.

But it meets with objections of the following sort:

You hear people say, "What if someone wanted to torture all conscious beings to the point of madness?

How could you ever prove that he's not as good as you are?"

This is kind of email I get.

[laughter]

Or, more relevantly, if a member of the Taliban wants to throw battery acid

in the face of a little girl for the crime of learning to read.

How could you ever convince him that he is not as moral as you are?

Again, this is really the kind of email I get.

Now, this is a pseudo-problem.

Notice, we don't confront this (I failed to anticipate a slide.)

A religious conception of morality, again,

falls into the same concept of well-being and its possible changes,

the conscious well-being of creatures.

So if you are concerned about a lifetime of happiness with god after death in heaven

and avoiding a lifetime of misery in hell, again,

you are concerned about consciousness and its changes.

You just happen to think consciousness and its changes

are most importantly experienced after death for eternity.

Now again, this is a claim about which science has some rather obvious doubts,

but this is still the same framework.

We're talking about consciousness and its changes.

Now, this challenge, this fundamental skeptical challenge, about well-being not being worth valuing,

and how you could convince someone who doesn't value it.

Notice, how this maps onto our notion of physical health.

Physical health is loosely defined; we don't have a clear definition of health.

We sort of know when we see it: has something to do with not dying too early,

has something to do with not always vomiting,

not being in continuous pain.

Now, if we re-engineer our genome so that we can live to be a thousand,

and regrow missing limbs like a salamander,

that would become part of our expectation of basic physical health.

So, this notion of health is truly elastic, and yet, the fact that it can't be clearly typed out

is not a problem for the science of medicine.

You don't hear a philosophical challenge to medicine of the following sort:

"Who are you to say that not always vomiting is healthy?"

[laughter]

"What if you meet someone who wants to always vomit and wants to be dead tomorrow?"

You don't hear someone say:

"How do you convince a person with terminal small pox that he is not as healthy as you are?"

This kind of attack upon medicine would make no sense,

and, yet, this is precisely the attack one hears from moral relativists and multiculturalists,

when you talk about the very obvious and needless, and horrific misery

of millions of people in situations that are anchored to really pathological notions of good and evil.

Now, even the most basic, apparently value-free descriptions of fact in science

are also anchored to values in a way that would never survive

this kind of skeptical challenge you meet when you talk about morality.

Consider water. Water is a substance we now dimly understand;

for about 150 years we've known it's 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen.

What do we do when someone doubts that proposition?

What do we do if someone comes into the room and says:

"Well, that's not how I choose to think about water"?

What do we do when someone says, "Well, I'm actually, I'm a biblical chemist.

[laughter]

You can get your chemistry from science, but I get my chemistry from the book of Genesis,

and whatever squares with Genesis, is chemistry for me."

Again, see the analogy to moral truth.

The only thing we can do in that case - is appeal to scientific values.

I mean, you have to value understanding the Universe,

you have to value evidence, you have to value logical consistency.

If you don't value these things, the conversation stops.

There is no convincing someone who doesn't value evidence that they should value.

What evidence are you going to provide to convince someone they should value evidence?

[laughter]

What logical argument are you going to offer to convince them

of the necessity of obeying the rules of logic?

So, even the most basic scientific statements:

You don't get more basic than the chemistry of water.

You don't get more value free than the chemistry of water.

...are anchored to values at every point.

This covers Hume's famous notion of "you can't get an 'ought' from an 'is'."

You can't get a statement of how we should behave or how the world should be,

based on a description of the way it is. You can't get an 'is' without an 'ought';

you can't make the most basic scientific statement

without conforming to the norms of scientific rationality.

So, science is very much in the values business.

It is a myth that there is this division between facts and values in science.

Now, there's another way to bridge this supposed gap between facts and values,

and it's this. When you look more closely at what beliefs are,

we form beliefs about the world in many domains:

We form beliefs about facts, obviously, and this constitutes science,

but it constitutes every truth claim we make about the world;

journalism, and common sense, and your personal memories of your past.

But we also form beliefs about values,

and this includes religion, and ethics, and questions of right and wrong, and good and evil.

We decide to look at these operations to level the brain;

we put people in fMRI scanners and gave them statements to read,

statements from many different categories,

and just looking to see if the difference between judging something true,

and rejecting another statement is false,

was sensitive to content. So,

statements from science, statements from religion, statements from ethics...

and we found that the brain is essentially doing the same thing, independent of content.

So, on the left, we have all of our categories in together,

and you get this region of signal, in what is called 'ventromedial prefrontal cortex',

and in the middle we have mathematics, and on the right we have ethics.

So, mathematics and ethics were probably our most different category areas.

Mathematics was just equations; you just had 'true' and 'false' equations.

Ethics was statements like "It's good to be kind to children"

vs. "It's good to torture children".

So, obviously very value-laden statements,

and the difference between accepting a proposition

and rejecting it seemed to be importantly similar,

within the tolerance of an fMRI experiment

those are essentially the same maps.

So, I'm not placing too much emphasis on this,

but I would just suggest to you that, if the brain thinks it's doing the same thing,

when it's accepting a proposition about ethics vs. rejecting another proposition about ethics,

and accepting mathematical statements vs. rejecting mathematical statements,

then I think we should be very slow to break our world-view

into separate fundamental categories of values and facts.

So, I would suggest you that belief is really our best effort to map reality in our thoughts.

And when we seem to succeed in doing this, when our beliefs about the world survive the tests

that the world throws up at them, then we call it knowledge,

then we don't talk about believing things, we talk about knowing things.

But still we're simply talking about linguistic representations of the world.

I think it's clear there's a continuum of facts about which we can form true or false beliefs

that relate very directly to human happiness,

to the question of how human beings, both individually and collectively, can flourish.

There's clearly continuum where on a one hand, you can live in a failed state,

where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong.

Think of place like Congo at the moment.

This photo is from Somalia in the '80s,

but Congo at this moment, and Somalia also a failed state,

but the worst example, probably, of any place to be at this moment, is Congo,

where everyone's daily concern, essentially, is to avoid being raped and killed by drug-addled soldiers.

There's absolutely no basis for cooperation, to think about the education of children.

Things can go disastrously wrong in human communities,

but they go wrong for a reason,

and how we move from a state of absolute and needless misery

to something much more idyllic, that movement is still constrained, clearly,

by the dynamics of human psychology, and social systems, and economic incentives,

and the rule of law and all these... We can't just make everything up.

This is not merely culture that explains these movements,

and clearly there are many levels at which we could understand

how human life can be improved,

how human well-being can be maximized.

There's the level of the genome, and clearly there are genes for positive social emotions

that people can have to a greater or lesser degree,

and there's at the other extreme, the dynamics of economies and political arrangements.

But every place in between, we're talking about anything

that can possibly influence states of the human brain.

We're talking about genetics and neurobiology, and psychology, and sociology and economics.

So, I'm not talking... when I talk about science, giving us an understanding of human values,

I'm not narrowly talking about white-lab-coated experimentalists scanning brains,

I'm talking about any area of human life where we make truth claims honestly,

based on honest observation and clear reasoning about the nature of reality.

There are clearly right and wrong ways for human beings to seek to thrive.

This I think, is easy to see. If you just imagine two people living on Earth,

we can call them Adam and Eve.

If you think of just two people here, it's pretty clear that they have better and worse options.

That there're better and worse responses to the predicament of simply appearing in this place.

Bad option number 1: they could smash each other in the face with a large rock. OK.

But clearly that is the failure to discover the most promising sources of collaboration

that the human condition offers.

Now, how does this change when you add 6.7 billion people to the experiment?

I don't think it does, it just gets more complicated.

So, what I ask you to consider is what I call 'a moral landscape'

where the peaks correspond to the heights of well-being,

and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering,

and one thing to realize about this analogy that it's pretty clear there can be multiple peaks on this landscape.

It's not obviously so, it doesn't have to be so but I think, it's quite plausable,

that there are many different ways for human beings and human communities to thrive

that are dissimilar, and therefore importantly different,

and if you were living one way, you can't live another way,

but clearly there are going to be many more ways to not be on the peak.

There gonna be many more ways to fail to be as happy and as creative,

and as intelligent as human communities could be.

Now, why wouldn't multiple right answers be a problem?

Well, consider the analogy of food.

I would never be tempted to argue that there must be one right food to eat.

There are clearly many right answers to the question, 'What is food?',

but there are obvious wrong answers.

The distinction between food and poison is still scientifically true,

and it's true even with all of the caveats.

Some people are allergic to peanuts, they'll die if they eat them;

peanuts are poison for them, but a food for us.

We can understand all of this in the context of chemistry and biology

and every science related to human health.

People also worry that, if there's going to be an ethical principle

that's true, it has to always be true,

and if you find a single exception,

well then there's no such a thing as 'moral truth'.

Well, consider by analogy the game of chess.

The principle of not loosing your queen in chess is absolutely

worth following, almost all the time it is one of the best things

you can seek to do,

and yet it admits of nearly countless exceptions.

There are moments where loosing your queen is a brilliant thing to do.

Now, this is, think by analogy the principle of not lying.

Not lying, 'truth telling', is obviously, in so many circumstances, a good thing to do.

Telling lies is almost the easiest way to screw up your life.

Yet, when the Nazis come knocking on the door, and say,

asking whether you have Jews in the basement,

that might be a time to forget about Kant and tell your first lie.

[some laughter]

Now, the fact that there's a situational exception to the principle of not lying

does not mean that there's no such thing as 'moral truth'.

This model of a landscape also admits of the possibility

of what we call 'spiritual' or 'mystical' experience.

I think that there's no question that human mind

is capable of having remarkable self-transcending experiences,

many of which can be very hard-won, many of which you have to have a talent, perhaps, to access,

and certainly, training to access.

And many positive social emotions that we all experience

can be brought to a much higher register, than we bring them.

It's something like compassion or empathy.

I used to be in the habit of saying that, 'undoubtedly, there's a Tiger Woods of compassion out there'.

For obvious reasons that analogy doesn't work so well at the moment.

[laughter]

But I think, compassion is best thought of as a skill.

It's clearly trainable, it's clearly something that people have

to a greater or lesser degree, and we're beginning to understand

the neurology of both of its appearance and its encouragement.

Our minds are, to a significant degree, plastic.

I mean, you're sort of become what you pay attention to.

And, this is something a maturing science of the human mind

really can put us in a position to understand.

How many of you recognize this photo?

This is a photo of, apparently, very happy Nazis.

(You can't quite make it out.)

This is from a book that's now called "The Auschwitz Album";

there was a photo album that was discovered in an attic somewhere,

of just Nazis having a gay old time.

And it took some research to figure out who they were

and what they were doing.

These were people working at Auschwitz during the peak of its productivity

as a factory of death, and this was a... they were at a kind of a chalet

that was a few kilometers from the death camp.

So, this is, more less their mood as they were listening to accordion music

and lying in the sun, and eating blueberries

under the plume of human ash coming out of the crematoria of Auschwitz.

Now, there's nothing about my view of the moral landscape,

or the link I'm drawing between morality and human well-being,

that insists that I deny the obvious happiness of these people.

I don't think they are fake smiles that we see there,

and I don't think these people are psychopaths.

I think, for the most part, these are normally normal people who would go home

and pet their dogs and cats, and they love their children, and they would listen to Wagner and shed a tear.

The problem with these people was not that they had a radically different conception of morality,

they have a 'moral circle' that they had radically delimited.

They had put most of humanity outside the sphere of their moral concern

and that's what we continually run into in the world,

based on some divisive dogmatism, we run into groups of people,

who just managed to put the better part of humanity, or significant groups of humanity,

outside the theater of their moral concern.

I want to talk about Islam for a moment,

because I think we are wise to be concerned about it.

As you know, I'm concerned about religion in general,

but I think, we are wise to differentiate specific religious beliefs.

And we are, I think, quite encumbered by political correctness and just frank confusion on this front.

One problem is that we have this one word, "religion", which names

truly diverse spectrum of fascinations and ideological commitments.

And religion is a nearly useless term; it's a term like "sports".

There are sports like Badminton and there are sports like Thai Boxing,

and they have almost nothing in common, apart from breathing.

[some laughter]

There are sports that are just synonymous with the risk of physical injury, or even death.

I mean, there are sports that are just synonymous with violence.

If you get injured playing badminton, you're just embarrassed.

[laughter]

We're facing a problem at this moment:

there is, I'm happy to say, a religion of peace in this world,

but it's not Islam.

To call Islam "a religion of peace", as we hear, ceaselessly reiterated,

is completely delusional.

Now, Jainism actually is a religion of peace.

In Jainism, the core principle of Jainism is non-violence.

Gandhi got his non-violence from the Jains.

The crazier you get as a Jain, the less we have to worry about you.

[laughter]

Jain extremists are actually, they are paralysed by their pacifism.

Jane extremists just can't take their eyes off the ground when they walk,

lest they step on an ant.

They filter every sip of water through cheese cloth, lest they swallow and thereby kill a bug,

and, needless to say, they are vegetarian.

So the problem, notice, is not religious extremism,

because extremism is not a problem, if your core beliefs are truly non-violent.

The problem isn't fundamentalism, which we often hear this said, these are euphemisms.

The only problem with Islamic fundamentalism are the fundamentals of Islam.

[some laughter]

Now, we have Melo Omar, Osama bin Laden, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

These guys agree about the nature of reality and how to live within it,

and the problem is they are giving a very plausible version of the faith.

Osama bin Laden is not the Reverend Jim Jones of the Muslim world.

It would be wonderful if he were, but the problem is he's giving a truly straightforward version of Islam,

and you really have to be an acrobat to figure out how he is distorting the faith.

Now, if these guys were Jains, or Buddhists, or Amish, or Quakers, it would be patently obvious

how they were distorting their religion.

In fact, their behaviour would be unintelligible.

Ok. It is not obvious by the light of Islam; this is just a fact we have to speak honestly about.

And no-one should be speaking more honestly about this, and more volubly about this,

than moderate Muslims. Moderate Muslims have to find some way to grapple with this fact.

But to say that Osama bin Laden is David Koresh, is just a lie,

and it's a dangerous lie at this point.

Now, I just want to rehearse for you what these core beliefs are and what they entail.

The belief is, that Muhammad got the Koran directly from the archangel Gabriel in his cave, in the 7th century,

and it is the perfect word, therefore, of the Creator of the Universe.

I apologize for the cartoonish nature of this image of Muhammad,

but quality images are difficult to come by at the moment.

[laughter]

The consequences: we have this single book, which is imagined to be the best book

on any subject ever written, never to be superseded by any human effort

at any point in the future. Now, this is a problem

because this is a profoundly mediocre book.

[some laughter]

It is dangerous to say this. It is suicidal to say this as a Muslim.

It is true, and we have to grapple with this fact.

And, the idea that this is the best book ever written on any subject

can only be maintained in a kind of fantastical, intellectual isolation.

And this isolation has actually been achieved in the Arab world

to an astonishing degree, some of you probably have heard this fact,

but the country of Spain translates more of the world's literature and learning into Spanish every year,

than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the 9th century.

That's scary! It's scary given that the contents of this book really offers

precious little rationale for living in a sane and pluralistic global civilization.

What it does give you a rationale for, is ceaselessly worshiping the perfect being

who has given you this mediocre book.

This is a photo of Muslims in Kashmir worshiping at a shrine,

believed to contain a single beard hair from the prophet Muhammad.

In showing you this image, I don't actually mean to denigrate the positive emotions

that can be associated with this kind of practice.

I think, devotion is a positive emotion that we want in our lives.

And I certainly don't mean to make a light of how difficult life, undoubtedly,

is for Muslims in Kashmir.

But it seems to me patently obvious, given the challenges that they face and that we all face

in creating world worth living in, these people have something more important to do

than worship the beard hair of a man, who may well have been a schizophrenic.

And again, when I talk about Islam, one thing I should make perfectly clear, and should've made it clear at the top,

I'm talking about the logical and behavioral consequences of ideas.

I'm not talking about people, i'm not talking about all Muslims.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, obviously, not all Muslims support terrorism,

not all Muslims take Islam all that seriously.

I'm certainly not talking about a race of people, I'm not talking about Arabs,

I'm not talking about nationalities or ethnicities.

I'm talking about ideas, and what people can plausibly do on their basis.

And what people do on the basis of these ideas, turns out to be very bad for women

to a remarkable degree, and in general.

And there really is no basis, in Islam, to argue that there should be true equality

between the sexes. You can finesse this issue, but what you cannot get is

a clear statement of "men and women are equal and have the same moral stature".

It is just not true. You have to edit the faith to get that.

And one thing you also get, by the logic of the faith at this moment,

is this death-cult behaviour we're now all too familiar with;

suicide bombing of the most extraordinary and ceaseless kind

(you can reliable turn to page 8 of New York Times every day and discover that someone

has blown up a mosque somewhere); first thing to point out is that

no-one suffers by this more than Muslims.

I mean, there are Muslims are getting killed by this; it is not Americans, for the most part.

This is a bombing in Pakistan, where Sunni bombed Shia procession.

The Sunnis view the Shia as apostates, and bombing them makes sense.

The core issue here is a notion of martyrdom -

the notion that death, in defense of the faith, is the surest way to paradise.

This belief is what makes sense of this behaviour.

I wanna linger over this image for a minute, actually.

This is a little girl (you can't quite see her in this lighting) crouched over the corpse of her mother.

And this is actually not the initial bombing.

What they did is, they bombed a procession of Shia pilgrims

and then they sent another suicide bomber to the hospital, to wait for the ambulances to come in,

to blow up the casualties, and the doctors, and the nurses, and the ambulance drivers.

So, this is a shot from outside the hospital. Just imagine this...

Just imagine what was like for someone to come up with that idea;

it's kind of creative in a truly diabolical way.

Someone had to volunteer to be the suicide bomber;

someone had to get up in the morning, thinking this is the best use of his life,

to blow up this little girl's mother.

This is, again, realize, this is not a collateral damage, this is the point of the exercise.

In fact, by the logic of this belief, it is impossible to kill the wrong people.

Because all the good Muslims, you blow up, are going to go to paradise, and they are going to thank you.

All the bad Muslims, all the apostates and the infidels, are going to go to hell where they belong.

It is impossible to screw this up.

And just, so you don't get the sense I'm narrowly focused on Islam.

[some laughter]

I would point out that the moment you see the link between morality and human well-being,

you can see that notions of "right" and "wrong", and "good" and "evil",

that come to us from religion, often break this connection,

and that's what so dangerous about religion.

In the best case, religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available.

In the worst case, it just disregards human well-being entirely.

For instance, the Catholic Church is simply more concerned about stopping contraception

than stopping the rape of children. That is a fact about both of the beliefs of this

particular person, the use of his energy over the last several decades, and just the energy of the Church.

If you know anything about the child-rape scandal in the Catholic Church,

it is mind-boggling, the effort that was not spent to protect children,

and the effort that was spent on sheltering the rapists from secular justice.

The Catholic Church is also more concerned is about stopping gay marriage than stopping genocide.

This is what its attention is on.

When you realize that questions of "right" and "wrong"

actually relate to questions of human well-being,

this is not morality, this is not an altered moral framework that we have to take seriously.

The Catholic Church could talk about physics. It could say:

"Well, we're actually interested in the physics of the transubstantiation,

or the physics that allows the holy ghost to be here and there, and everywhere, all at once."

But there's not a physicist alive who would have to take those utterances seriously.

I'm saying that, if you talk that way, you don't get invited back to the physics conference.

[laughter]

The moment we admit that morality relates to human and animal well-being,

you don't have to get invited back to the morality conference either.

Now, I'm gonna briefly remind you of some of the reasons

why religion can't be the repository of our moral wisdom generally.

One is that when we go to scripture, we are the guarantors of the wisdom we find there.

We find 'the golden rule' and we say, a-ha, that's why you should read the Bible,

and that's just about the wisest thing ever said.

But then we, and "we" includes Fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews, we ignore the rest of the book;

we ignore the places in Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, and Second Samuel

where the most mind-numbing, theocratic barbarism is recommended.

We bowdlerize the book.

So, clearly, our moral tools are coming from outside the text.

There's also the fact that there are obvious contradictions between the world's faiths.

This is a map of world religion.

(This is an example I've taken from my colleague, Richard Dawkins.)

This is not how knowledge spreads over the face of the Earth.

There's no reason, if you are in the business of understanding truths of any kind,

truths about human well-being, truths about the Universe,

you wouldn't expect your belief system to hug national boundaries in this way.

And no one, i think... Just imagine India. Is it possible that they believe,

the billion Hindus in India at the moment, that they alone, among all the worlds' people

(they could probably build me a better remote, there's no doubt about that),

[Laughter]

do they even think that they know that Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, exists and must be worshiped?

This is not the way we're discovering things about the nature of the world,

that people are accidentally born into the right belief system by dint of geography.

Apart from the contradictions between faiths, there are impressive patterns of contradiction within every faith.

Each one of these red arcs is linking two verses in the Bible,

that are just deal-breakers for omniscience.

These are statements that the Bible is just self-refuting in hundreds of places.

Jesus was crucified the day before the Passover meal;

Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal.

You just cannot make sense of these two claims.

There's also the inconvenient fact that the most important and easily resolved moral conundrums,

are conundrums that the Creator of the Universe apparently gets wrong.

So, slavery is, perhaps, the most consequential and easiest moral problem

we've ever had to confront. Slavery is supported in the Bible,

both in the old Testament and the new.

The god of Abraham never envisioned a time, where human beings ceased to keep slaves.

That is a fact, and then Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy,

was right to point out that theology was on the side of the slaveholders.

It was despite theology that we got rid of slavery.

Now, I want to talk to you for a minute, before I wrap up, about moral intuition

and how it can seem to be confounded.

Because people take the difficulties we have in answering moral problems,

as a sign that there can be no such a thing as 'moral truth',

and I want to argue that that is, in fact, a sign of no such a thing.

This is the 'trolley problem', which some of you have probably seen.

A trolley is coming down the tracks. If you do nothing, it will hit and kill 5 people.

But you stand at the switch, and you can throw the switch

diverting the trolley onto another track, so that it kills only one person.

So, you'd save a net 4 lives.

Presented this way, something like 95% of people think, "you absolutely have to throw that switch."

You'd be a monster not to throw the switch.

But the problem is, you can present it another way:

the trolley is coming down the track now,

but you stand on a foot bridge, and beside you is a suitably large fellow

who you can push into the path of the oncoming trolley,

killing him, unfortunately, but saving 5 workmen and a net 4 lives.

When presented this way, everyone's intuition seems to flip,

and something like 95% of people will think, "you'd be a monster to push that man."

I think, this is actually somewhat ill-posed because, I think, we have an intuitive physics

and most of us burn a lot of fuel, worrying about whether the guy's really gonna stop the trolley.

[laughter]

But even if you stipulate that he will stop the trolley,

and these are truly identical outcomes,

it's still a problem for most people, and our intuitions get pushed around.

That is not a sign that there is no right answer to the 'trolley problem'.

I think, in fact, one of the details is that they are not equivalent,

and it may just be different to push someone up close and personal, than to throw a switch,

in terms of the consequences of everyone involved.

In one scenario, you could wake up with nightmares for the rest of your life;

and the other, you could think you're a hero,

and if that's just a difference of human psychology, we have to take that into account

in our evaluation of consequences.

But consider what we do with our logical intuitions.

This is the Monty Hall problem.

How many of you have seen the Monty Hall problem?

OK, this is Berkeley, I'm just taking coals to Newcastle here...

[some laughter]

So you're on a game show, and you are given a choice of three doors:

behind one door is a new car, behind the other two are goats,

and you pick door number one (obviously, if you pick the car, you get to keep it).

You pick door number one, and Monty Hall then opens door number two,

revealing a goat and he gives you a choice

to switch your bet to door number 3.

How many of you think you should switch?

How many of you think there's no reason to switch?

OK, there's a powerful intuition that many people, certainly many naive people share,

that there's no reason to switch. There are two doors: we've got a car behind one,

a goat behind the other, why would you switch? It's a coin toss.

It turns out, you should switch - and your chances double if you switch -

because you had a one-third chance, when you picked door number one,

and now the [remaining] two-thirds chance has fully collapsed onto door number 3.

But even very smart people, even mathematicians, people who understand probability theory,

can just get led back into thinking, "Wait a minute, there are two doors; there's a car,

there's a goat, why do you switch?"

And now, incidentally, it is easier to see, if you imagine being confronted

with a thousand doors. And you pick door number one, and then Monty Hall nullifies

998 doors, leaving door 576. Here, it's pretty obvious you've been given a tonne of information,

and switching makes sense. The point, however, is that the fact that our intuitions get pushed around,

never leads anyone to say, "maybe there's no right answer to the Monty Hall problem",

"maybe there's no such a thing as logical truth."

There's not... we're never tempted to do that.

There are perceptual illusions that are truly reliable.

Anyone who's got a clear shot of this screen,

sees the tower on the right leaning further to the right than the tower on the left.

And yet, these are the same photograph.

We can get behind our failures of intuition in science.

Our failures of intuition tell us a lot about how we are wired - in this case,

about how the visual system is organised.

But there's no question that just as there are perceptual illusions,

there are moral illusions, and these are illusions that we have to find a way to get behind.

This is based on research by Paul Slovic.

He asked groups of people: How much would you give to help a little girl in need?

When you ask people that question, you get a maximum rating of empathy

and a maximum donation, and if you ask a group: "How much would you give to help a little boy in need?"

you get the same response; maximum empathy, maximum donation.

The problem, however, is that when you ask them how much they would give to a little girl and to a little boy in need,

you get a 25% diminishment in both self-reported empathy and material donation.

Our concern goes down by a quarter by adding another child.

This is clearly not a normative result, this is a bug, not a feature.

[laughter]

I mean, if you care about a little girl and you care about a little boy,

you should care, at least, as much about their combined fate.

And it gets worse; the more kids you add, the more altruism and empathy diminishes.

This explains what Slovak has called 'genocide neglect', this fact about ourselves,

that many of us have noticed, that we find genocides boring.

We do not have the attentional and emotional resources to pay attention to the greatest occasions of human misery,

and yet we have endless resources to pay attention to the story of one little girl

trapped in a well. This is an image that perhaps many of you are too young to

recognize, but this is baby Jessica pulled from a well.

For something like 120 hours she was in this well and there was just

wall-to-wall television coverage of it.

Everyone with a television was desperate to see how this was going to turn out.

And yet 800 thousand people can be hacked to death in Rwanda

and even if it makes the news we can barely pay attention to it.

This is something we have to... We have to engineer our better selves

into our laws and social institutions, so that we can protect ourselves

from our moment-to-moment failures of moral intuition.

So, to conclude, I would point out that the moment we admit that

there are right answers to questions of human well-being and that

morality relates to this domain of facts,

then we have to admit that certain people care about the wrong things.

Which is to say that certain people, certain individuals, subcultures,

and even whole cultures perhaps, care about things that reliably produce

needless human misery.

And it seems to me that the only way we're going to converge

on a truly common project and build a global civilization, in which we

can live toward the same shared values, is to admit that this intellectual terrain exists,

to admit that morality relates to questions of well-being

and well-being relates to how we are, at some basic level,

and how the universe is. Thank you very much.

[Loud Applause]

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

[Questioner 1] I guess I get to be first here.

[Q1] Sam, in many of the speeches you get sort of the same thing, you know,

there's some quest for some type of universal truth based on science

and then there's also putting down all the other moral systems that

religion has that obviously don't work, you know, completely,

some work to some extent, some work to the other.

But did you know that there's already a system written of

morality based on science? If you look it up, you know you can put yourself like

way ahead of the game because it's already been done.

[Sam] What is that system?

[Q1] Church of reality!

[Sam] Church of reality, okay...

[Q1] Church of reality. Look at the website. It's something I started about 12 years ago.

[Sam] I've heard of the Church of reality but...

[Q1] Okay, you gotta read the website because it's more than just the name.

It started out as just the name but then it occurred to me like it occurred to you that...

[Sam] Well I'm inclined to shorten it a bit, to just "reality."

[Applause]

Then I think we can talk about it.

[Q1] I know people turn off when they hear the word "church",

but I put the word "church" in there because I wanted to get the attention of

the religious world, so that I can win souls for Darwin.

[Sam] Well, I mean we're clearly on the same team and I wish you the best of luck with it.

Okay, but here's the thing about it is that...

[Sam] Apologies, but there's a very long line forming behind you.

But everyone can go to the website.

[Q1] If you read the site, I have built a complete moral system based on science.

Read the site.

[Sam] Thank you.

[Q2] Bertrand Russell said philosophy is basically gorging upon the stew

of every conceivable idea and recently Peter Hacker had an article that

followed that up, dealing with how language kind of confounds a lot of our

problems by creating nonsense...

[Sam] Right.

[Q2] How much of that do you think is sort of inherent in the whole problem with

creating a science out of religion, and that a lot of people who have objections

seem to be basing their objections on things that really are more

tricks of language than actual?...

[Sam] Yeah, yeah, it's a huge problem, It's a...

People have associations with words that are very difficult to correct for

in an elegant way and... For instance... and it's true in science as well.

I run into scientists who think that the difference between subjective and objective

is hugely important and that subjectivity in some sense can never be understood scientifically.

It happens more among physicists than...

It's just that how would we ever understand what it's like to be another person?

And, there are some very philosophically unsophisticated views even among

very smart scientists.

This is a crucial distinction that I'll just briefly go into:

We use words like "subjective" and "objective" in two very different ways.

Actually, a local giant here John Surrel is the first to make this point, at least in my hearing.

We talk about subjectivity and objectivity ontologically, which is to say,

in terms of what exists, but we also talk about it epistemologically in terms of

how we know things. Ontologically there are just objective facts,

third person facts about the physical world, and there are subjective facts,

facts about what it's like to be a certain conscious creature,

and we can talk about both of those honestly and searchingly and in the context of science.

The epistemological subjective-and-objective difference is where bias

and personal views, and "I like chocolate and you like vanilla" and...

"how should I cut my hair", and all of this, those kinds of questions, merely personal,

merely subjective, the notion of subjectivity that diminishes truth claims,

that has nothing to do with studying the nature of any conscious system.

We're using the difference between subjectivity and objectivity in

very confusing ways, and so people think: "Well, it's just merely subjective,

that's just your opinion. Who can say what a good life is?"

It doesn't make any sense when you talk about physical health, and it

shouldn't make any sense when you talk about psychological health or the health of societies.

[Q3] I have two hopefully brief questions, I hope you'll answer at least one.

I think the point evangelist christians might make if they ever read your book,

which is wishful thinking, I agree, is this: even if there are theories of morality that

do not depend on God, as you clearly demonstrate, they'll say they're not relevant.

Why? Because without God to punish them, people will do whatever they like.

Dostoyevsky, I'm sure people know, is often quoted as writing

"If God is not then all is permitted." So you still need religion, they would say,

or at least a history of religion, even now in godless Denmark, for human beings

to behave themselves. So how would you respond to that? That's question one...

[Sam] Well, actually I just gotta limit you to one, cause it's just the line behind you is daunting.

One, it's not true, because clearly atheists can be motivated to be good in the same way,

and in fact the most secular societies on Earth, in fact the most atheistic societies on Earth

right now, are societies in Western Europe that are characterized by highly moral behavior

by any index you would use.

[Q3] But they have a history of religion.

[Sam] Okay, but they've shed their history and they seem to be better for it.

So that's inconvenient for the thesis, but...

[Applause]

Clearly, there is a challenge here for us to want the right... I mean there

are people who are not capable of wanting what they should want, and there are psychopaths.

They are people who have brain damage which we're beginning to understand.

And they don't feel empathy for other people. Okay, so there's... certain people are not

up to the challenge of living a wise and ethical life. And we have to understand that.

There are cultures that make their ways of raising children,

ways of talking to one another in the public sphere, and institutional mechanisms to put in place,

that can encourage the greatest number of people to want to collaborate freely,

and not oppressively, and creatively, with everyone else, and thats the challenge for us.

We have to build a global civilization that allows most of the people who want to do that, to do that,

and there are some obvious principles that are so obvious that they basically should be non-negotiable.

Things like free speech, and the rights of women, you know. Those are

probably not on the table to be doubted, and yet, so many societies don't even have that.

The most basic rudiments of building a sane sphere for public discourse.

So we have to... kind of the first pass of what we should do, is what any sane person would want to do,

given all the facts, and the trade-offs between individuals and the collective,

or between free speech VS privacy, all of these things, there are difficult ethical dilemmas that

we can run into at the margins, or in our lives personally. But the biggest moves for us to make,

as whole cultures, are so obvious, and they're moves that would lift every boat with the same tide.

I mean, stopping nuclear proliferation, stopping our contribution to climate change,

stopping the causes of war, stopping pandemics, all these things are good for everybody.

So you don't need divisive religious dogmatism to help that project along.

In fact, it's one of the most obvious things standing in its way, I think.

[Q3] Thank you.

[Q4] The proof of concept visual you showed about the moral landscape...

How do you think we can take... how do you think scientists, your peers or yourself,

could get inspiration from that and actually come up with, say, a mathematical model

or framework that will be ever-evolving for sure? Something that we can start with,

so we can get something actionable out of the scientific research. I mean, I can't wait for the day

where I could I go the BBC news website and be able to see:

"The moral finding of the week" with the landscape visual there.

[Sam] I think it's, you know, in detail it would certainly take a long time, but I think the most important moves,

again, don't even require more data. We know that throwing battery acid

in the face of little girls who want to learn to read, is not a good thing to do.

We don't have to scan anybody's brain to figure out that that's not really compassion,

and that's not really good for society.

The core move is to admit that there are right answers

to the question of how human beings can live lives worth living.

[Q4] I'm just appealing to the visual market ability of...

[Sam] I think it does... There are many things that fall out of it. One is just the many peaks,

as I've said, but there are other dynamics of it, there is the fact that

we might often have to move downward in order to move upward to a higher place,

and I think there's an evolutionary argument, for instance, that altruism could only have formed

in communities that were warring with other communities.

And so our core moral tool at the moment,

of caring to collaborate with one another within a group,

is something that could've only been born, if Samuel Bowles is right,

by first kind of descending into this valley of
internecine struggle.

Now, if that's true then so be it. But clearly that's not our circumstance now.

I understand your question. I just think we have to, one, admit that

human well-being is an intelligible subject to be studied scientifically.

That has started to happen in psychology and neuroscience, but we then have to admit

that whatever we find there has truly trans-cultural consequences,

in the same way that facts about human health do, and if culture does make a contribution,

which I think it certainly does, if culture changes us in ways that are relevant to human well-being,

it does that by changing our brains. I mean that still it's realized at the level of the brain

and we can understand that in science, but it's gonna be a long time before we have

a lot of detail. I'm just trying to get the project motivated.

[Q4] Thanks.

[Q5] I apologize for the vagueness of the question but... I don't stay up at night wondering

about whether 2 plus 2 really equals 4 but I do stay up at night wondering about

how much I should donate to charity and, you know, what it does mean to live a good life.

I'm wondering if you can envision a point at which the certainty that we have about

mathematical truth... Is it just a matter of the complexity of the issue, do you think,

that begets this kind of, you know, difficulty in understanding these things or is it?...

Are there other factors?

[Sam] Yeah, a good question, that there are... There are a few factors, one is that there's...

Understanding it in terms of science, clearly it's a much more complex issue and

one analogy is economics, you know. When is economics gonna be a science?

Who knows? I mean, clearly, we're in a position to be just surprised by the dynamics

of economic systems, and maybe that's always gonna be true,

but no one would be tempted to say "Well, there's just no truth there",

or "It's a sign of bigotry to criticize somebody's response to a banking crisis".

I mean, clearly, we're operating in a situation where there are truths and we just don't know them,

and we are worried.

There's an analogous issue there with morality. But, speaking personally,

it's nowhere written that it's easy to be good, you know, and we have other motives.

We're selfish and we want certain things that we know we probably shouldn't want,

which is to say we would be happier and we wouldn't regret it if we could overcome these wants,

you know, but we still want. We want to lose weight but we also want a hot fudge sundae.

So we're multiform in our motives. And I think the most important move for all of us to

make is in our most reflective moments to come up with an honest opinion about what should happen,

and then to engineer that at the level of society. So, if our tax code

dealt with the problem of how much we should be giving to, homelessness, say,

we wouldn't be having to recalculate every minute about whether we give or we don't give.

We have to solve the problem of homelessness, to take one problem among a myriad.

There are more and less intelligent ways to address it, we clearly haven't discovered the way

that is actionable, that is really gonna work. But the idea that there's no way to address it,

seems frankly crazy, and the idea that we're all left with just deciding whether to take a dollar

out of our pocket, that's clearly not the remedy. Yet that's the kind of problem that each of us,

in the privacy of our own lives, worries about in terms of our own ethical responsibility.

I think the bigger swings are going to happen at the level of what we engineer

at the level of society.

But it's a hard problem, it's just the cold one we have to solve moment to moment.

[Q6] Mark Lewis, optimalhumanvalues.com. Thank you for your work, Sam, in this area.

I see two central challenges to your basic premise or your basic conclusion,

that science can determine human values.

One is the philosophical case, which I believe you address relatively effectively in your book.

The second is, we could say, a fear that if we cede the realm of values to science,

that science will make a mistake and tell us to value the wrong thing,

and in the process, destroy things that are truly valuable and important.

The challenge that that poses, seems to me, from the people I've spoken with about your book,

has them not want to face the arguments in your book, because they're afraid that

if they listen to your arguments then they'll have to see that...

[Sam] People have creepy associations with the word "science",

and they think what I'm advocating is a kind of brave new world scenario,

where everyone's just going to be medicated with the right drug.

Science is our truly open conversation in which we are most constrained by

honest observation and clear reasoning.

It's when we make our best effort to get our biases out of the way,

and our wishful thinking out of the way, and just talk honestly about

what we know and what we don't know.

The suspicion that that might... it's a very strange intuition,

that the most important questions in human life must fall outside of science,

because what we're saying is that when you become most intellectually honest,

when you get your wishful thinking out of the way, when you get your biases out of the way,

when you rely upon clear reasoning and honest observation,

that's precisely the mood you can't be in to address the most important questions in human life.

Okay, that's weird and we should point that out.

[Applause]

There is no other mood to be in to address the most important questions.

Again, I don't define science narrowly. It's evidence-based rational discussion,

where people's convictions are going to scale with the quality of the arguments

and the quality of the evidence,

and that is really the antithesis of what happens in religion,

and it's what's brought to an exquisite refinement in science per se,

but it's also true of all intellectual discourse.

So it's not about getting your science... your fear is... or the fear you're expressing

could be applied to medicine, you know, we're all afraid that science is gonna get human health wrong,

and disease wrong and cancer wrong and... Well, it's possible to get these things wrong,

but the remedy for getting them wrong is always just better science,

it's understanding the facts more clearly,

and the antidote is never some other process of irrational faith-based claims

about the nature of reality. So...

[Q6] I hope you'll lead a forum to that end as well.

[Sam] Well, thank you for that vote of confidence.

[Q7] Hi, I did want to preface this by saying that I am not a muslim, I am not any religion at all,

but it bothered me when you were talking about Islam being not a religion of peace.

Mohammed was a very peaceful man...

[Sam] No, he wasn't.

[Q7] Yes, well if you read... yes... and he had a great respect for women.

His wives were given a great deal of power over him...

[Sam] Have you been reading Karen Armstrong? Is that where this is coming from?

[Q7] No...no, I've read Karen Armstrong, but no.

You know, what's happening now with Islam, is it's bastardized,

just like all the other religions, but it bothers me that you kind of single...

[Sam] So you're saying that the true Islam, if we could only return to it,

would just nullify all of my concerns about Islam.

[Q7] I don't think any religion is a good religion, but it bothers me that you singled Islam out

and that you said that... actually that Mohammed was a peaceful man, and that...

[Sam] Mohammed, whoever he may be... who knows who Mohammed was...

I mean, Mohammed was actually closer to history than Jesus and many of the other patriarchs,

and we know more about him,

but obviously there's a lot of uncertainty about what's factual,

but the example of Mohammed as held in Islam universally is not of a pacifist.

He was a conquering warlord who spread the faith with the sword quite successfully,

and the expectation is, this is a way of being in the world that is by example totally justified.

Now, this is different from Jesus. Jesus did not spread the faith with a sword,

he was essentially a hippy who got crucified. That's a different example,

and it's a difference that is a benefit to christianity at the moment,

because in christianity you can come up with a rationale for saying:

"Listen, it's not about conquering the world, it's not about winning in this life.

We just gotta wait for Jesus to come back and get raptured."

You can't really do that in Islam.

Christianity has a line like "render unto God that which is God's and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"

and that line has done, from Matthew, has done huge work,

to separate christianity from claim upon terrestrial power.

Now, it's imperfect work and there are a lot of crazy christians who want terrestrial power,

but at least there's some rationale within christianity for doing that.

That rationale doesn't exist in Islam. There's no line in the Koran which says:

"Listen, guys, this is not about politics, it's not about controlling people's lives,

you can be privately religious and let everyone else flourish."

[Q7] But the subjugation of women was not something that Mohammed was...

[Sam] You're just not... please, just go read the Koran...

[Q7] I've read the Koran.

[Sam] Okay, then surely you read the part in the Koran which talked about husbands scorching

or whipping (depending on the translation) their wives who were disobedient.

[Q7] That's in judaism also.

[Sam] What was that?... Okay, so it's in judaism but... I will grant you that the worst books ever written

were in the Old Testament. Okay?

But... there's a reason why Jews are not stoning their wives for adultery,

at this moment in history, and we can talk about those reasons.

What I said about Islam was intended to counter exactly the presuppositions you are now bringing to me,

I don't have time to do it here, but I can only invite you to read more on the subject,

because we are deluding ourselves with a lot of wishful thinking.

We are desperate to believe that all of the problems in the world are of our own making,

if we could just spread more money around and behave better on the global stage,

people will treat us well, and that everyone wants the same thing

and it's all a matter of just more education and this religion is intrinsically benign.

It's just not true. And... Osama Bin Laden...

I've said this but I think I should say it again, the real problem is

that Osama Bin Laden is giving a very plausible version of the faith.

Now you can split a few hairs and say: "Well, listen, apostates shouldn't be killed

unless they speak kind of endlessly against the faith." But the penalty for apostasy is death under Islam,

and there's no school of Islam which says: "Oh no no, we don't mind apostates."

That just doesn't exist. There is no 'reformed Judaism' version of Islam.

[Laughter]

That's a huge problem. It's a problem that has to be solved by muslims.

We can't help them solve it by just lying to ourselves about the nature of their religion.

[Q7] I also want to say one more thing...

[Host] I'm sorry, thank you...

[Host] Are you good to keep going?

[Sam] Yeah... Maybe... There's no way we'll get to the back of the line,

so I'm going to let you decide. I'm long-winded and I'm sorry.

[Q8] I'll try to be short-winded. Thank you for your books, they made a huge impact on me,

and your breaking down of taboos has been phenomenal.

In this book which I enjoyed very much, one thought kept nagging at me and I just want some clarification.

[Sam] Sure.

[Q8] When I think of this moral landscape and your visual in my mind, it seems to assume...

I think it doesn't assume, but intuitively it assumes that the elevation starts the same, right?

And the question you just brought up of resources, as some people think

you can just spread money around, kept coming to mind. And I thought of...

I'm sure you encountered Robert Sapolsky at Stanford, and his work,

when looking at the same species of monkey...

You know, we are ourselves biped primates, right? I thought of this example that he has

of these monkeys that in an arid barren environment take risks more,

are more aggressive, have a different social network,

and then in a more resource-rich environment they are more forgiving and equitable and so on.

I kept thinking, I'm with you so much on this project, but when I get to the prescriptive part,

we, I think, can say we can break down the fact-value distinction and say very clearly:

"We don't like people doing X, Y and Z either in a subculture domestically or internationally,

Taliban or anywhere else." However, are there situations in that moral landscape

where some community will have organized its...

[Inaudible shout]

[Q8] I'm sorry?

[Sam] Just continue.

[Q8] ... organized itself in some kind of optimal or suboptimal,

but somewhat utility-maximizing way, but it's abhorrent to us and how do we deal with that?

Resource question.

[Sam] Yeah, a good question. I think there are... Well, there are clearly islands

of sort of pathological happiness, the example from Auschwitz was one.

You get the guards of Auschwitz all together agreeing that they're loving life.

Clearly that can't be a peak on the moral landscape because all of that well-being,

such as it is, is predicated on just an immensity of suffering occasioned outside that circle,

and I think there are some obvious kinds of happiness that people like that are not

experiencing. In so far as compassion and the connection to other people

is a source of well-being, and I think there are probably frontiers for us all to discover there

just how happy and connected it's possible to be in the midst of others.

It's clearly not a peak, so we can grant that there are sort of weird areas where people,

based on isolation and based on what they've established culturally...

You can get an island of perfectly matched sadists and masochists, say,

where it's just... some people just like to be beaten on and some people just like to mistreat them

and they're just perfectly matched and pretty happy, you know.

But clearly it's not a peak, and clearly that kind of valuation of experience

isn't really well-packaged for export. [Laughter] And I think it's not an accident that...

I think we can converge, just as we converge on logical understanding of basic facts

and in a scientific understanding of the world. We don't converge perfectly, and obviously

in certain situations it's not even a majority of people who converge.

25% of Americans think evolution is a fact, the rest apparently don't,

but biology can still thrive in that context, and I think it's possible that there are moral truths

that even a majority may not be up to realizing, but they may still be true,

just as there are medical truths that the majority may not be up to understanding, but they're true,

and we have to find some way of empowering... just as we want to empower the biologist

to talk about real biology, even though they would get voted out of office if their neighbors could.

We have to empower the people who really understand the danger of nuclear proliferation, say,

and know that it's worthy of our attention and gay marriage isn't, to prioritize those things

at the level of public policy.

But yeah, I think there are probably weird places and weird things to pass through,

in order to advance but what is the alternative? All we have is human conversation

where we're trying to influence one another to share a common project

of peaceful cooperation.

[Q8] I guess it would refrain from some of the harsh judgement,

recognising that in situations of lack of resources...

[Sam] Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't deal with that piece. Clearly, material resources are a huge variable

in... it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you're starving, you really don't have the free attention

to worry about whether stealing is right or wrong, whether you should value other people's children

as much as your children or how much should you discount their hunger over your children's.

You can't think about human happiness when you're starving and so we need...

and you can't think about human happiness when you're being chased by somebody wielding a machete;

you're just reacting. So we need to create the most basic conditions of stability

in any society, where people then have the free attention to worry about things like education

and creativity, and how they should act so as to maximize their well-being in society.

[Q8] Thank you.

[Host] Let's do two more quick questions because we want you to stay and sign books after this.

Sam: Okay.

[Q9] This is the 'brave new world' question.

[Sam] Okay.

[Q9] If I understand your premise that morality is based on the experience of human happiness

or the experience of the reduction of suffering, then how do you distinguish

a drug-induced experience of happiness from a reality-based one?

[Sam] Well, I think we want our subjective states of well-being to be coupled to reality

for very obvious reasons, because if they're not coupled to reality then they're vulnerable to

the next insult from reality. So why not just take heroin all day long? It's a very pleasant state to be in,

you can just keep doing it. Well, a problem is you can't just keep doing it and you can't value...

you can't attend to all the other things you value in life that are your sources of happiness,

like your relationships, like having a career, like not dying. It's not a stable source of well-being,

and most of what we care about in life, like loving other people and experiencing love in return,

is predicated on our states of consciousness actually tracking the reality of our lives,

not perfectly perhaps, but to a significant degree. You can't have real relationships if you're delusional,

or if you're stoned all the time. There's a... And this is something we actually will face.

We will get drugs that can really, for instance, take away grief. I think at some point,

in the lifetime of someone in this room, there will be an antidote to sadness.

So that when your wife dies and you're inconsolable, there will be a pill that you can take

that will take that feeling away. Now the question is when do you want to take it?

Do you want to take it 15 minutes after she dies? You want to take it a month after?

You want to take it a year after? You want to take it before she dies so that you'll be indifferent to her dying?

[Laughter]

These are real ethical problems.

[Q9] That movie, the Matrix, kind of created this scenario where the people

who were living in this drug-induced world - it was complete. They did not need reality to fulfill...

[Sam] OK, but that's not our situation in any foreseeable future.

If Ray Kurzweil is right... if the singularity is true and Ray Kurzweil is right,

and we're just going to upload ourselves onto the internet in 30 years or whatever it is,

well then that's a real challenge. The question is:

what connection to reality do we want if we can sort of disappear into this dreamscape

where our happiness can be perfectly maintained? My moral intuitions get a little shaky there,

but in some sense we are in a bit of a dreamscape already,

I mean, all of this is being run on our brains and we are... We have to creatively respond

to the opportunity to experience happiness and avoid suffering in this space.

[Q9] So there's a second logical premise, which is experience...

[Sam] I'm saying... The answer to your question is, in our context, we want to be truth-tracking

to a significant degree, for obvious reasons, because the moment we're not, we begin to suffer mightly.

If that ever ceases to be true then we can have a conversation about what reality we want to live in.

But at the moment we're living in this one and we have to understand how we're entangled with it

or we will suffer.

[Q9] Thank you.

[Host] Please stay seated in your seats for one last question.

[Q10] Kind of feel like the chosen one here.

[Laughter]

I want to ask a question because I'm trying to understand if you're claiming

that there is one moral truth for a given action or if there can be multiple opposing ones,

because I can imagine some sort of moral dilemma that can have a

positive well-being effect on one person while at the same time having a negative well-being

effect on the other.

[Sam] That's true.

[Q10] I'm trying to understand if you're claiming that there is only one. Can there be multiple?

Can they be opposing? Is it not absolute? Cause...

I'm sort of getting the impression that you're saying it's absolute.

[Sam] Well no, what I'm saying is that there... for that case there are clearly zero-sum moments

when there's, you know, one slice of pie left and only one person is gonna get it,

and if person A gets it, person B doesn't and vice versa.

I think there are probably right solutions, if we could understand human well-being

in a truly fine-grained way, there are probably right solutions to most of those...

I mean, either it doesn't matter who gets it in the scheme of things,

or it would be a little bit better if one person got it or it would be much better if one person got it.

So when it really matters, I think the trade-offs begin to get obvious.

But even there there are situations in which some people really want something,

and some people really want its antithesis, and there's gonna be some obvious suffering either way you play it.

[Q10] I'm thinking like a euthanization sort of situation,

where you have a lifetime of pain versus just ending someone's life.

I mean, never mind even the effects on other family members and things,

but you've got those two things; how does science tell us, based on your claim,

which one of those we should value more, or less bad I suppose I should say?

[Sam] Well, again it would be science narrowly described as a mature science of the human mind,

well then it would have a lot to say. We would be able to just know how much people suffer,

the person suffering will be able to say: "I'm suffering this much" and we'll have our suffering detector,

which says: "Yeah, they are suffering that much and boy does that suck!"

[Short laughter]

But short of that all we can do is talk honestly about the trade-offs here.

But what I'm really trying to fight for is the trade-offs are in terms of human well-being.

They're not in terms of something else. So, if you're gonna advance a moral argument,

you have to at least talk that talk, otherwise it's not a moral argument.

So, if you're going to oppose gay marriage, and say: "there are all these trade-offs, who knows what is true,"

at least your side of the argument has to be: "here is all the suffering that gay marriage is going to cause,

here is what's going to happen to children if they get adopted by gay people,

this is what's going to happen to..."

There's no burden on anyone to make that argument at the moment,

because cause we're living in a world where the president of the USA can say:

"My faith tells me that marriage is between a man and a woman." End of argument.

That's the move that should no longer be open to smart people, and certainly people with responsibility.

[Host] I'm sorry, we have to stop now. Thank you!

[Sam] Thank you very much.