Sam Harris on The Daily Show in 2010

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Sam Harris on his book, The Moral Landscape; How Science Can Determine Human Values.

Appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

October 4, 2010


The challenge we’re faced with is to create a global civilization based on shared values, economic, political and social goals. We have to begin giving similar answers to the most important questions in human life. We have to talk about morality and human values in the context of our growing scientific understanding of ourselves in the world.


There is an intellectual and moral emergency. The only people in the world who think they have the right answers to moral questions are religious demagogues who think the universe is 6,000 years old. Everyone else thinks there’s something suspect about the concept of their moral truth.


Morality and values clearly relate to human and animal well-being. Our well-being emerges out of the laws of nature. It’s fantastically complex. Genetics, neurobiology, psychology, sociology and economics and everything that can influence the states of the human brain. All of these domains fall within the purview of science.


There’s a gulf between religious-based morality and the facts we’ve learned. In the best case, religion gives us bad reasons to be good where good reasons are actually available. In the worst case, it separates moral thinking from the actual details of human and animal suffering.


You have an institution like the Catholic church, which, based on its doctrine and actions in the world, is more concerned about preventing contraception than preventing child rape. It’s more concerned about preventing gay marriage than genocide.


Scripture is a real mixed bag. If you want to talk about getting wisdom from scripture, the God of Abraham gets slavery wrong. Slavery is probably the easiest moral questions we’ve ever had to face. If this book was written by an omniscient deity, the true source of moral wisdom in the universe, it should at least get the question of whether it’s right to own people and treat them like farm equipment right. The God of Abraham clearly expects us to keep slaves.


Anyone in this room could improve on the ten commandments in five seconds.


Most people in science believe there’s no place in science to say it’s wrong to oppress women. There’s an intuition that something has happened in the last 200 years of intellectual progress which has made it difficult to say that the Taliban is really wrong in their treatment of women. The moment you realize that the only way to ask whether it’s good for women to be forced to wear burkas is to wonder whether it’s good for human flourishing on any level. Does it make more compassionate men or confident women; does it improve relationships between men and women. We know at this moment in human history that the answer to that question is no. To doubt this scientifically is to pretend that we know nothing about human well-being.


There are so many ways to bring order that are objectively terrible, that make people suffer needlessly. We can understand this at the level of the brain, at the level of society. This is not a no-go area for science. Science of the human mind will understand how to make communities flourish and it’s a myth that we can’t get there through science.

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