Ethics and the Hunter

Long time readers will know that I’ve been a long time advocate of objective morality, via Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. Those who have joined more recently may have instead noticed that I have relied on different moral frameworks when talking about morality - the appeal to a conceptual set of rules and values that…

Against the Moral Landscape: AI and universal truth

Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape (2011) is a thesis that claims morality is objective and knowable by scientific means. It is predicated on the initial premise that wellbeing is worthy of safeguarding, and thus intended actions can be objectively evaluated against that value. I have long agreed with this claim, with one subtle change: I…

Do I really have to answer such absurd depictions of my view? Enlightenment values help discover morality and let it flourish

In a recent conversation with oldschoolcontemporary (OSC) about objective morality, we ran into many stumbling blocks to our ability to properly communicate with each other. So far as I could tell, OSC had immovable metrics in place by which to measure objective morality that were almost necessarily religious (redemption, salvation and infallible imposable authority) which…

Mining in the Moral Landscape: explaining why Sam Harris’ moral framework is still better than a religious one

I like addressing and engaging with challenges to the ideas that I share here (I run a constant ask me anything policy). A blogger called Debilis shared a few challenges to The Moral Landscape that I want to discuss (on my post The Evidence for Objective (secular) Morality). I may not be the best person…

Does Studying Science Make You a Better Person?

I thought I’d take two minutes (I’ll add a footnote telling how long this really took to write) out of my uneventful morning to answer a question I just found in my WordPress feed: “Does studying science make you a better person?” The answer is no. That might sound weird coming from me, as I…

A Challenge to The Moral Landscape

The other week I explained the basics of ‘The Moral Landscape’ to my dad, and then made an argument in favour of its premise: morality is borne out of wellbeing. He almost immediately gave me a challenge that stumped me, and a little later I shared that challenge with my brother. My brother almost immediately…

Objective Morality for the Non-Believer

I do want to outline my view on morality, but I am less inclined than I once was to point out the failures of religious morality. It is important for me to outline morality and where I get my sense of value and purpose from so that I do not seem to be a nihilist…