PZ responds he's not finished reading the book and will withhold judgment until he's had time to digest the ideas, but goes on to say that Harris is "a little" wrong that science determines values and goes on to affirm that those values are personal and subjective.

 

I remembered quite clearly this passage in the moral landscape, and thought about it for a while.

 

 

What Harris writes about assumptions:

 

"To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. Yes, both endeavors rest on assumptions (and, as I have said, I think the former will prove to be more firmly grounded), but this is not a problem. No framework of knowledge can withstand utter skepticism, for none is perfectly self-justifying. Without being able to stand entirely outside of a framework, one is always open to the charge that the framework rests on nothing, that its axioms are wrong, or that there are foundational questions it cannot answer. Occasionally some of our basic assumptions do turn out to be wrong or limited in scope—e.g., the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry does not apply to geometry as a whole—but these errors can be detected only by the light of other assumptions that stand firm."

 

From my perspective Harris and PZ are actually in agreement.

 

It seems to me that when we talk about morality we are intrinsically stating that we're interested in the well-being of others, the assumption is already in the choice of the subject matter. In other words, you cannot claim to have a more efficient moral framework if well being is not your prime consideration. That morality means good and well-being is not a scientific proposition, but a linguistic one.

 

What science then allows us to do, like no crazy superstition ever could, is to determine when is the well-being of conscious creatures being increased or decreased, to guide moral decision making. Basing our decision on real world metrics, as flawed to gather and difficult to set as they may be, is hugely more useful and precise than to trust in intuition and uncapped imagination.

 

It seem contradictory but from a systems operational viewpoint, science cannot claim that specific brain activity patterns are subjectively more desirable than others. Neural activation has nothing intrinsic good or bad about it, it just is. Like any natural phenomena, such as fire, thunderstorms or tides. Scientific scrutiny can assert empirically that "happy" or "joy" brain activity patterns are more conducive to personal satisfaction, well being, and even to broader social benefits. But it doesn't have a definitive say in which brain state you ought to have while alive and conscious. Science doesn't determine that one must be happy, or that happiness is the only reasonable way to live, but it empowers us as to what the possibility are, and what are the probable consequences of going down one path instead of another.  

 

Choosing to live a happy life is a personal matter, one can just as well choose to spend his life being miserable, feeling shame or depression. Science can shed light as why these brain patterns may be harmful to your mental and physical fitness (as to the current health paradigm), and sometimes even show how it affects the ones around you, but ultimately the decision to modulate one own brain states remains sovereign, a personal subjective choice not determine by evidence.

 

If the well-being of conscious creatures is not your goal or concern, than morality has nothing to add to you.