Critique of Sam Harris's Moral Landscape: Can Science Tell us What we Ought to do?
Sam Harris .... The ideological tendencies of scientism seek to scrap traditional philosophically based ethics and produce a whole new ethical system based upon a scientific understanding of human biology. We might call this “biologically based ethics,” or “scientific naturalism,” the official name for the school is “ethical naturalism.” [1] “Bio-ethics” implies the genuine ethical issues that emerge from biologically based intrusion of humanity into the natural processes of living; cloning, artificial insemination and the like. What I call “Ethical naturalism” is an attempt to actually replace the philosophical discipline of ethics with one derived from science. [2] Of course the major issue is that science has no mission to determine how we should live. Ethics is primarily about understanding how we should live, how we treat others, how we decide what actions to take in given situations. These are not scientific questions they are philosophical questions. In their atte...