Objective Morality and The Moral Landscape

Looking back from 2026. I’m keeping this essay as-is because it’s an honest record of how I argued this in 2016, and I still find the moral-solipsism parallel genuinely useful. But I’d be doing you a disservice to let it stand as if the argument went unchallenged, because it didn’t. Harris’ core move - that you can cross the is/ought gap by defining morality as the well-being of conscious creatures - has taken a decade of serious, and in my view partly successful, philosophical fire. The sharpest version: physicist Sean Carroll argued that “well-being” is doing all the smuggling here, that it’s a fuzzy concept that isn’t obviously the thing morality is about, and that you can’t get there by experiment even in principle (Carroll, 2011). Harris was confident enough to run the Moral Landscape Challenge in 2013-14, a $20,000 prize for anyone who could change his mind; the winning essay by Ryan Born pressed exactly this point - that “the well-being of conscious creatures” is not itself a scientific finding and has to be justified from outside science - and Harris conceded it was the best rebuttal without conceding the thesis (Clarifying the Landscape). Where I land now: I think the choice of well-being as the axis is a value choice, not a scientific one, and my 2016 essay leans on the solipsism analogy to wave that away a little too smoothly. Read the below as “the strongest form of the case I could make then,” not as a settled result. The axioms are load-bearing, and axioms are exactly where the fight is.

Secular morality is a subject I frequently find myself discussing online. Surprising numbers of armchair theorists, whether religious or not, make assertions I’m not sure they truly understand or could justify. Here are just a few:

• You can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’
• Without some sort of creator or god, there can be no objective morality
• If there was no objective morality, <insert bad thing here>, therefore, god exists

My goal is always to hold as many true beliefs as possible, and as few false ones. For this reason, I try to make as few assumptions as possible. I take the minimum assumptions necessary as axioms, and then build as much knowledge as possible on top of that. Furthermore, most importantly, I continuously search for evidence that my axioms are not an accurate description of reality (either they aren’t effective, or cause contradictions). The longer I go without finding such evidence, the more confident I can be that the knowledge and beliefs I have based upon those assumptions are a true and accurate reflection of reality.

Religion has long claimed to have a monopoly on morality. Only via an understanding of god, people claim, can we know right from wrong. It is because of the mark god left on our hearts, you see, that we know right from wrong. Some apologists such as William Lane Craig even go so far as to say god is synonymous with good - if he orders it, it is good by definition. Under this view, murdering babies, raping women and children, and enslaving entire races are all perfectly benevolent if and only if it is god’s will. Some of humanity’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, fortunately, have given us an alternative with greater consistency, greater explanatory power, and superior results. This essay is going to discuss my own views, based heavily on those of Sam Harris from his book “The Moral Landscape”, in depth. I believe what I write here is an accurate reflection of Harris’ arguments, and that he would agree with this, but these views are based on my understanding of what he and others have argued, and so they are my responsibility alone to defend.

The Science of Morality

The science of morality can be built upon just two simple axioms. Those axioms are (1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences relate in some way to states of the brains of the sentient creatures living them. (Harris’ “The Moral Landscape”, p14). To make these somewhat abstract things more concrete, however, I will borrow a bit more of Harris’ argument. First, Harris presents “The Bad Life”, which I summarize as “you are a young widow who has lived her entire life in the midst of civil war, whose seven-year-old daughter was raped and dismembered before your eyes, an act perpetrated by your fourteen-year-old son who was goaded to this evil at the point of a machete by a press gang of drug-addled soldiers, leading you to run barefoot through the jungle with the killers in pursuit.” While this would certainly be the worst day of your life, it is not entirely out of character with the other days of your life, having experienced violence and cruelty practically uninterrupted since your moment of birth. Continuing to quote Harris, “You have never learned to read, taken a hot shower, or traveled beyond the green hell of the jungle. Even the luckiest people you have known have experienced little more than an occasional respite from chronic hunger, fear, apathy, and confusion.” The imagery and detail here are important because it is worth genuinely trying to imagine what it would be like to live that short, anemic life, instead of the life you are living now which is almost certainly beyond comprehension to the people who live in the world we are imagining, a life which someone somewhere likely has lived before.

Now, in stark contrast, I will summarize Harris’ example of “The Good Life”. “You are married to the most loving, intelligent, and charismatic person you have ever met. Both of you have careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding. For decades, your wealth and social connections have allowed you to devote yourself to activities that bring you immense personal satisfaction. One of your greatest sources of happiness has been to find creative ways to help people who have not had your good fortune in life, and with your own finances and billion-dollar grants awarded to your foundation you have changed the lives of millions of children in the developing world for the better. If asked, you would say you could not imagine how your time on earth could have been better spent, and you and your closest friends will live long and healthy lives, untouched by crime, disease, or other misfortunes.” As Harris immediately points out, these examples are generic but real in the sense that they represent lives that some human beings are likely to be leading at this moment or some moment in the past or future. And while you could probably extend the examples to try to produce a worse or better life, they certainly indicate the general range of experiences accessible, in principle, to most of us. I will now, just as Harris does, concede that if you don’t see a distinction between these two lives that is worth valuing - if you do not think we can objectively say it is preferable to live one of these lives over the other, or that if we could make it so no human ever had to live the bad life ever again that would be an objectively good thing to do - if you cannot agree with that, then I can scarcely imagine we have anything to talk about.

Now that we agree that some people live lives that are objectively better, or worse, than others, and those lives are better or worse due to the brain states available to those sentient beings, we can see how the science of morality follows. We can study brain states. We can study the differences between different lives. There may be many different lives possible on the “moral landscape” which are of equivalent, or indistinguishable, flourishing or suffering - equal peaks or troughs - but there can be no doubt that there exist lives such as our examples above where the difference between them is so stark it would be difficult to find an honest interlocutor who would doubt the distinction. This makes questions about how to create more “good lives” and fewer “bad lives” for all the sentient beings currently alive also an objective question, one to which proper investigation can proffer objective answers.

Moral Solipsism

The principal objection levied against the science of morality is the inability to obtain an “ought” from an “is”. Who says “good” is good? Why is flourishing preferable to suffering, some would ask? How do I justify my axioms? This is where we come to what I call “moral solipsism”. In epistemology, a solipsist is one who argues that only one’s mind is sure to exist, and for all we know, everything else we perceive is not real. We could be automatons, a simulation, a brain in a vat, or some other creature’s dream. Solipsism is an intellectual dead end - if you think you can’t know anything about reality, what is the point of anything? It’s like nihilism squared, but for knowledge. The fact is, without some starting assumptions, this result is inescapable (known as “the problem of hard solipsism”). Most philosophers and scientists reject hard solipsism by applying axioms such as “My senses, while imperfect, at least occasionally reflect an objective reality which we all share”. We could put this axiom in a recognizable pattern to see how well it parallels the axioms of objective morality. (1) There exists an objective reality we all share and (2) our observations comport with this objective reality frequently enough that the more observations we make, the better we can understand it.

Notice that without these two base assumptions, we have solipsism. We cannot have any justified beliefs about the world we inhabit without these. Yet, scientists take no issue with this - people are happy to accept these simple, reasonable assumptions. Furthermore, if either of these assumptions were mistaken, we would have a good chance of noticing. We would expect our observations to lead to inconsistencies which no theory of the universe can square. Or the theories we did produce based on those observations would fail to work. In a way, the fact that you are (almost certainly) reading this on an electronic device which is a veritable marvel of modern engineering which would not be possible if these axioms were not true, is telling.

Our assumptions in the field of moral science are no less reasonable, and also no less testable. Were we mistaken about any of these things, it would likely become clear in the fullness of time, when our “moral theories” based upon those assumptions lead to inconsistencies or contradictions, or simply don’t seem to work to produce a world with more flourishing and less suffering. Just like with science itself, the final adjudicator is whether or not it works.

What is Flourishing?

First of all, if you really need to have a discussion about whether we want to live in a world that maximizes suffering, or flourishing, you are welcome to do so, but I am not interested in it. What I am asserting is that the flourishing experienced by sentient beings is linked to the brain states which are a part of objective reality we all share. As such, it is objective and can be measured. We might lack the technology to do so with precision today, we might never be able to measure it perfectly, but that is no different from our inability to directly observe quantum phenomena - we can still see the impacts of them, and have every reason to believe they are a real part of the objective reality we share. Flourishing may even be a complex multi-axis quantity, much like the physical properties of matter include charge, spin, position, velocity, etc. This complexity does nothing to weaken the conclusion that flourishing is still an objective, potentially-measurable quantity, and some states of flourishing are simply preferable to others.