The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the prioritization of theoretical moral considerations over the tangible suffering of individuals.
In this quote, Sam Harris argues that individuals who prioritize the moral status of a blastocyst—an early stage of human development—over the well-being of a child with a serious medical condition exhibit a troubling skew in their moral judgment. He suggests that such a viewpoint may be distorted by religious beliefs that place undue emphasis on potential life, to the detriment of recognizing and addressing the realities of suffering and injury in already living individuals.
In practice
During a debate on bioethics, this quote could be used to illustrate the conflict between moral philosophy and practical considerations.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning-it is not as hard as you think.
Through the centuries, men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and maximum of reason.
The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up. And if a truth is as old as that, it is also in a fair way to become a lie, gentlemen.
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
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