Subtitled “How Science Can Determine Human Values”
(Free Press, Oct. 2010, 291pp, including 100pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index)
Sam Harris came to fame in the years after 9/11 for writing a critique of religion called THE END OF FAITH. He, along with writers of later books, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, became known as the “four horsemen” of the “new atheists”. I reread that book a few years ago and reviewed it here. The present book followed in 2010, and I read it the first time in 2014 and quoted from it a bit in this post. Then I reread this book about three years ago and took detailed notes, which I’m now summarizing here.
\\
Gist: Harris is challenging the nostrum that science can tell us about the world but not about how to behave: that is, science can have nothing to say about morality. Yes it can, he claims, essentially by applying a utilitarian policy upon the world: design society to maximize the happiness, or well-being, of as many people possible. Further, what science can say avoids the trap of inconsistent religions making contradictory, and incorrect, claims about the nature of reality
