There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.
Interpretation
Morality and values can be evaluated against scientific understanding, suggesting that some views are more correct than others.
In this quote, Sam Harris argues that morality and values are not purely subjective but can be assessed scientifically. He posits that certain beliefs about what is important in life may be more valid than others based on an understanding of human well-being, suggesting a framework where cultural perspectives can be judged on a scale of rightness and wrongness.
In practice
In a debate about ethical practices in science, this quote can underline the importance of grounding moral discussions in factual understanding.
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.
An independent Ireland would see its own independence in jeopardy the moment it saw the independence of Britain seriously threatened. Mutual self-interest would make the peoples of these two islands, if both independent, the closest possible allies in a moment of real national danger to either.
If honesty were suddenly introduced into American life, the whole system would collapse.
Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.
Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff. Your life is real." "Instead of asking 'what do I want from life?,' a more powerful question is, 'what does life want from me?'
The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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