Can Science Determine Human Values?

Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values?

1hr 40min long Fora presentation held at UC Berkeley. The questions starting at 1hr 20m are the best part. I was disappointed with the substance of the presentation. As the presenter gave more so a critique of religion rather than a secular, science based, alternative. Some of the speaker's philosophy tangents were over my head. That said, I found the title of the presentation relevant.

I'll sum up the speakers thesis: Morality can be measured by human well-being. Human well-being can be measured by proxies such as physical health, freedom of speech, ect.

Like most scientists, I suspect he's very liberal. His starting point for well being is individualism. Individualism taken to it's logical conclusion, endorses extreme Malthusian practices. Malthusian practices lead to negative birth rates. I'd maintain that a pre-requisite for well-being is just "being". You cannot have well-being for something that's not born at all. Therefore the basis of a moral society by default should be a positive birth rate. Anything short of a positive birth rate is a moral failure. One then needs to ask what social arrangement creates a positive birth rate? I'd argue only a strong family unit does. Strong family units only seem to thrive in religious communities.  

I don't even understand this question.  Can science determine a dog's values or a bacterium's values?  Values are built in, wired into the brain.  Humans are a little different than most species in that our values are influenced by our culture.  In a culture that taught that sneezing was immoral, one can assume that 80% of men and 99% percent of women would strongly value refraining from sneezing.  Actually these percentages would vary depending on how many people feel that the culture has failed them.  It is those, usually men, for whom the culture failed to deliver what is generally expected from a tribe, that are most likely to reject the prevailing morality and look inside themselves for another morality.  And this alternative morality is formed by searching one's own feeling as well as analyzing the expected results caused by various behaviors.

"I'll sum up the speakers thesis: Morality can be measured by human well-being."

Sounds mostly like Utilitarianism, where everything is measured against the pain/pleasure scale. Meh.

I was reading that one of the problems with modern culture is that it looks too much to science for moral guidance. The problem with that is it can quickly result in things like eugenics and tightly controlling people's lives for some greater good, especially if most of its practitioners have no real moral compass. The other problem is that modern science is ensconced heavily with big-governmentalism and liberalism. So anything that goes against those two tenets is suppressed and censored, even if it is well-done scientific research.