Can morality be defined by laws and data or is that just science fiction?

However, in The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris proposes an alternative view: that morality may be amenable to the scientific method, in the same way that George Boole and others provided a mathematical basis for the study of logic in the 19th century.

The Moral Landscape conceives of morality as a “science of human well-being” which, subject to definitions and rules, may develop in the future as other sciences have. The landscape metaphor is useful.

That there are moral peaks, each corresponding to a high point of well-being, in this landscape is self-evident. The recognition of such summits is crucial, but creation of a journey map between them is equally important.

A science of human well-being will require definitions that are agreed among its practitioners. Harris recognises the difficulties of establishing such definitions. He contrasts the ‘bad life’ — a young widow who has lived her entire life in the midst of civil war and has experienced at first hand the most unspeakable atrocities — with the ‘good life’ — a person who lives free from worry in a warm and loving family environment and who makes a valuable contribution to society. These two contrasting life situations may be self-apparent, but even this simplistic approach gives rise to fundamental questions. Can suffering be good? Is it possible for a person to believe the wrong things? Can good things arise from bad situations?

The author stresses the importance of human cooperation and asserts that failures of such cooperation give rise to many everyday tragedies. The news services provide us with a daily chronicle of such failures and such tragedies. The point is also well made that selfish interests and selfless interests are not necessarily mutually exclusive and that “our own happiness requires that we extend the circle of self-interest to others — to family, friends, and even to perfect strangers whose pleasures and pains matter to us.”

Part of the reason that morality has remained the domain of religion is that scientists have, in the main, failed to challenge that perception. Many scientists believe that their task is done when the experiment is completed and the conclusions drawn. They cede the moral implications of their work to others.

Emerging breakthroughs in the study of the brain, with its complex states and elaborate interactions, will have a major role to play in the new science of well-being. As a result of these developments, the attitudes of scientists may require a substantial overhaul.

Harris repeatedly questions the authority of faith-based religions — particularly Catholicism and Islam — to advise on matters of morality. Although he describes any attack on the Catholic Church’s record on child sexual abuse as being “somehow unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel,” he includes some stark and disturbing evidence from the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in the appendices. He queries the morality of a Muslim suicide bomber, who is led to believe that he will secure a place in paradise, not just for himself but for 70 of his closest relatives as well. He also recounts the Danish cartoon controversy, which has resulted in Kurt Westergaard (and 87 other unfortunates of the same name) living in hiding for the past five years.

Harris reserves special disdain for Francis Collins, appointed by Barack Obama as director of the National Institutes of Health, controlling an annual budget of $30m. Collins is often portrayed as a bridge-builder between science and religion; Harris all but declares him a fraud. Collins’s bridge-building is between science and a version of a specific religion — Christianity. This leads Harris to pose the pertinent question. “Just imagine,” he asks, “how scientific it would appear to most Americans if Collins, as a devout Hindu, informed his audience that Lord Brahma had created the universe and now sleeps; Lord Vishnu sustains it and tinkers with our DNA (in a way that respects the law of karma and rebirth); and Lord Shiva will eventually destroy it in a great conflagration.”

Is it possible to give a scientific basis to questions of morality? Can we express right and wrong, good and evil, in scientific terms? Sam Harris makes a plausible argument, and his adherence to reason as the basis for his arguments strengthens his hypotheses. Yet there is nothing in The Moral Landscape that constitutes absolute scientific proof of his proposition. However, that is not perhaps the point. Sam Harris has set out the first principles; it may be for others to follow them up.