Sam Harris on The moral argument
Harris contends that science can determine moral values, making God unnecessary as a foundation for objective ethics.
In The Moral Landscape, Harris makes the ambitious claim that science can, in principle, determine human values. He argues that moral questions are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that well-being is a natural phenomenon that can be studied scientifically. If morality is about flourishing, and flourishing is measurable, then we do not need God to ground ethics.
This directly challenges William Lane Craig's moral argument, which asserts that without God, objective moral values cannot exist. Harris responds that this is like saying that without God, objective health cannot exist. The concept of well-being provides an objective landscape of moral facts — some actions genuinely promote flourishing, others genuinely cause suffering, and these truths hold regardless of what anyone believes about God.
Critics, including Craig, argue that Harris conflates moral ontology with moral epistemology. Harris counters that the distinction is less meaningful than it appears: if we can identify moral truths through reason and evidence, the question of their 'ultimate ground' is no more pressing than the question of why mathematics works.
“Questions of morality are questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are objective truths to be known about human well-being — and there are — then science should be able to help us find them.”
“You do not need God to be good. You do not need the threat of hell to be compassionate. You do not need the promise of heaven to recognise that causing needless suffering is wrong.”