Naturalism.org

In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris argues that the rewarding conscious states which he says constitute human flourishing should be available to all, not just a privileged few. It’s an objective moral truth, certified by science, that we should seek “the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people” (p. 28). Some conceptions of morality prevent many from flourishing, so there’s a disparity between what some believe about morality and moral reality, according to Harris.

Introduction and Overview

Opening gambit: could you have done otherwise?

The natural vs. the supernatural

Introduction

2010 Free Will Roundup

Leveraging Harris: Making moral progress by denying free will

Sam Harris takes the lead in denying contra-causal free will, repudiating retribution

Abstract and overview

Drawing primarily on the work of Thomas Metzinger, but other philosophers as well, this paper takes a representationalist approach to explaining consciousness: how might the 1^st person, subjective, private phenomenal states that constitute consciousness be entailed by being a physically instantiated representational system?