Sam Harris and "The Science of Good and Evil"

Written in October 2010, Sam Harris's essay, "The Science of Good and Evil" tries to reconcile the notion that science cannot be used to prove morals. As a renown athesist, Harris believes that science, not religion, has in it the ability to empirically prove the "good" or "evil" of certain actions. He writes that, 

Scientists generally believe that answers to questions of human value will fall perpetually beyond our reach—not because human subjectivity is too difficult to study, or the brain too complex, but because there is no intellectual justification for speaking about right and wrong, or good and evil, in universal terms. (Harris)

Harris, in order to counter this belief, brigns together the concepts of  morality and well-being. He says that morality is just another way to say well-being. For instance, if an action increases the well-being of a large group of people, that action must be morally good and vice-versa. he then goes to add that each moral question may have a variety of answers, some more or less equivalent. In this way, Harris is not saying that science will find the one true answer of morality but more that science can be used to find answers to moral questions.

Q: Do you think moral questions can be answered through science?

Here's a link to Harris' article, in case anyone wants to read it: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-science-of-good-and-evil/