Sam Harris's new book, The Moral Landscape has just hit bookshelves, and it’s already inspiring new words!

Now, I’m not entirely familiar with Mr Harris’s work, but I can tell you that he is considered as biting a critic of religious faith as Mr Dawkins and my beloved Chris Hitchens. And while his newest book apparently carries on with this tradition, it also offers what appears to be an intriguing argument as to why science offers us, as a globe, a framework from which to construct a universal morality.

Whoa. Hold on. Science and morality? One is all concerned with facts, the other busies itself with the human condition. In what way could they possibly interconnect?

From a recent Globe and Mail interview I was able to piece together his argument, and it goes something like this:

What we value – that thing on which we make what we call moral judgements – is ultimately our conscious experience on this planet. All else is conjecture. There are good conscious experiences and bad ones and we can place these experiences along a continuum, rank them if you will from good to bad. And here I turn it over to Mr Harris himself:

Given that experience depends on the laws of nature in some way, there must be right and wrong ways to move across this continuum toward states of greater well-being. The totality of all these possible experiences is what I call “the moral landscape.” There may be many peaks on it – which is to say that there might be many ways for us to thrive – but there are clearly many ways not to be on a peak.

Morality – the questions of right and wrong, of good and evil – is thus a question about human well-being. And, as human experience depends on everything ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy and these are all “domains of facts”, they fall squarely within the purview of science. Therefore, the argument goes, we see that science can, at least in principle, answer such questions.

But why not let religion take care of the moral questions and leave science out of it. Well...since morality can only be said to be based on conscious human experience, and religion often concerning itself with states of being outside the conscious, religion, in Mr Harris’s analysis, is incapable of providing us with any meaningful strategy to deal with life here on Earth. Instead, and here again I turn to the articulate Mr Harris:

Religion is remarkably unhelpful on moral questions for many reasons. The most important being that it tends to separate moral concern from the genuine reality of human and animal suffering. Take, for example, the Catholic Church: Here is an institution that is more concerned about preventing contraception than preventing child rape. It’s more concerned about preventing gay marriage than genocide. The moment you realize that Catholic doctrine is not really focused on human well-being, you see that it is not offering an alternative moral framework: it is offering a false one. The Catholic Church is as confused about morality as it is about cosmology.

Ouch.

Putting aside the rather large and blunt hammer employed by Mr Harris, what is the most intriguing, and perhaps promising about this proposal is that it makes no concessions to the scourge of postmodern relativism. Indeed, he has harsh words for those would maintain the subjectivity of right and wrong:

Yes, I think that moral relativism – the idea that right and wrong depend entirely on one’s cultural context or personal preference – is intellectually bankrupt and genuinely dangerous. The moment we connect morality to questions of human and animal well-being, we can see at a glance that the Taliban are advocating an obscene distortion of morality. To not judge the Taliban from the point of view of science is tantamount to saying that we know absolutely nothing about human well-being. It’s like saying: “We’ve got 150 years of psychology, neuroscience and sociology to draw from – and we’ve made some very impressive gains on civil rights – but maybe, just maybe, forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing when they try to get out is as good as anything we’ve come up with.” This form of “tolerance” or “contextual understanding” is pure, masochistic stupidity.

In doubting whether we can talk about human values and moral truth scientifically, we are essentially saying that when we do our best thinking, when really try to get our biases out of the way and are most committed to careful observation and honest reasoning, these efforts have no application whatsoever to the most important questions in human life. That should seem ridiculous on its face.

Such a moral framework is indeed attractive if only for this reason. It does get beyond the predictable claims of cultural bias and imperial scheming, but only so far. And while Mr Harris's dismissal of religion wholesale is somehow off-putting, he does at least offer us something in its place. That's at least is something.