Last Straw

Sam Har­ris respond­ing to con­fu­sion about his TED talk:

Last month, I had the priv­ilege of speak­ing at the 2010 TED con­fer­ence for exactly 18 minutes. The short format of these talks is a bril­liant innov­a­tion and surely the reason for their potent half-life on the Inter­net. How­ever, 18 minutes is not a lot of time in which to present a detailed argu­ment. My intent was to begin a con­ver­sa­tion about how we can under­stand mor­al­ity in uni­ver­sal, sci­entific terms. Many people who loved my talk, mis­un­der­stood what I was say­ing, and loved it for the wrong reas­ons; and many of my crit­ics were right to think that I had said some­thing extremely con­tro­ver­sial. I was not sug­gest­ing that sci­ence can give us an evol­u­tion­ary or neuro­bi­o­lo­gical account of what people do in the name of “mor­al­ity.” Nor was I merely say­ing that sci­ence can help us get what we want out of life. Both of these would have been quite banal claims to make (unless one hap­pens to doubt the truth of evol­u­tion or the mind’s depend­ency on the brain). Rather I was sug­gest­ing that sci­ence can, in prin­ciple, help us under­stand what we should do and should want — and, per­force, what other people should do and want in order to live the best lives pos­sible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral ques­tions, just as there are right and wrong answers to ques­tions of phys­ics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the matur­ing sci­ences of mind. As the response to my TED talk indic­ates, it is taboo for a sci­ent­ist to think such things, much less say them public.

It’s worth read­ing the whole lot.