The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris

"Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for Muslims in Kabul…. Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework – but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. In practice, relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to tolerance is not put forward a simple one relative preference among others deemed equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about morality than intolerance is."

-Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Such moral relativism was condemned by Sam Harris as he believed that moral absolutes do actually exist. The question is, how do moral absolutes in the first place? Robin Philips who reviewed the book here, says "Moral absolutes can and do exist, he asserts, but they are rooted in neither God nor biological evolution. Rather, [according to Sam Harris] they are grounded in neuroscience."

The underlying claim is that while science is the best authority on the workings of the physical universe, religion is the best authority on meaning, values, morality, and the good life. I hope to persuade you that this is not only untrue, it could not possibly be true. Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.

 - From the opening chapter of The Moral Landscape

Richard Dawkins was also convinced, endorsing the book with the following quote "I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me.”

So are we like "a phenomenological glockenspiel played by an unseen hand"? 

"From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) that you are for the fact that you were born into this world."

- Sam Harris

A glockenspiel