By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH [New York Times Book Review] – [Sam] Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science — the right values being ones that promote well-being. “Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health,” he writes, “it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.”

But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems.

Continued at the New York Times Book Review

Sam Harris’s bleak landscape.

By MARILYNNE ROBINSON [The Wall Street Journal] – Bias is a criticism Mr. Harris has anticipated, though, and he damns the torpedoes. He comes down four-square against jihad and burqas and attacks on Danish cartoonists. He frets that Europe is on its way to becoming a new Caliphate. He despises American religion in all its forms and reproduces poll results to prove that among us fools are at best a substantial minority. Yet he identifies a suite of contemporary American values as elements of a universal morality—gender equality, for instance, or the move away from corporal punishment for young children—for all the world as if they were universal among us, and as if they were not products of very recent evolutions in our own thinking.

Mr. Harris never takes account of the issues that arise around the problems of negotiating moral differences. Stigma, coercion, tribalism and prejudice are also important contributors to the history of human grief. The gist of his argument is that persons with scientific insight can dismiss as incompetent anyone who disagrees with them in judgments of value. It is true that he defines science in broad terms as “our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality,” which includes, for example, history.

Continued at The Wall Street Journal (subscriber access) | More Chronicle & Notices.