I've been looking forward to this book
From A Q&A with Sam Harris, on his upcoming book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values:
The Taliban are a perfect example of a group of people who are struggling to build a society that is obviously less good than many of the other societies on offer. Afghan women have a 12% literacy rate and a life expectancy of 44 years. ( Read more... )
The Taliban are a perfect example of a group of people who are struggling to build a society that is obviously less good than many of the other societies on offer. Afghan women have a 12% literacy rate and a life expectancy of 44 years. ( Read more... )
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Thinking on it.
On the one hand I'm wondering how this differs from straight utilitarianism. It sounds like he's taking a convoluted road to arrive back at the same principles he started with in the faculty lounge (any American faculty lounge). He's not willing to take the Bible as the grounds for being judgmental about another moral system, so he's cast about and settled on science as the grounds of his judgments. But he clearly had a set of judgments already in place (burkas are bad, selling magazines with bikini pix is bad, murdering a daughter for being a rape victim is bad) and had no example of a principle that was revised by using science as his basis ( ... )
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