Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.
Interpretation
Morality is rooted in the experiences of conscious beings, shaped by their capacity to feel well-being and suffering.
In this quote, Sam Harris emphasizes that moral values are not inherent in the universe but are rather dependent on the existence of conscious minds. He argues that our understanding of good and evil is based on the experiences of well-being and suffering that conscious beings can perceive, suggesting that morality is a human construct founded on our shared experiences in life.
In practice
In a discussion about ethics, this quote can highlight the importance of subjective experiences in moral philosophy.
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.
Mankind invented the atomic bomb, _x000D_ but no mouse would ever construct _x000D_ a mousetrap.
Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
The highest spiritual quality, the noblest property of mind a man can have, is this of loyalty ... a man with no loyalty in him, with no sense of love or reverence or devotion due to something outside and above his poor daily life, with its pains and pleasures, profits and losses, is as evil a case as man can be.
We think the way we do partly because Socrates thought the way he did. His basic idea - that the unexamined life is not worth living - is what it means to live in the modern world, to develop ideas and ask questions.
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