refrigerator companies came up with free on which is not poisonous. so they just replaced refrigerant. as we know decades later we discover that freon doesn't poison people but it poisons the atmosphere. that is another one of those examples of unforeseen consequences of. >> we are talking with henry >> hi, i'm a longtime book festival reporter, and i'm really glad to see so many people here late on a sunday afternoon.

i'm introducing sam harris, and everybody says, who's sam harris? >> well, of course, he's the atheist, right? is. [laughter] jon stewart called sam harris a professional atheist, "the new york times" says he heads the youth wing of the new atheists. his first book ignited a debate about religion. he gained many fans and, of course, many detractors, and so he wrote his second book in response to the unhappy christians, and it's called "letter to a christian nation." his new book which just came out the first part of october is called "the moral landscape." and in that he tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. he urges us to think about morality in terms of human and

animal well being viewing that these experiences of being well and being not so well as the peaks and valleys of the moral landscape. his message is that the questions of good and evil cannot, cannot be answered by what god says or what scripture says or what my culture says posing the questions in this way allows us to be judgmental saying i'm more horl than he is because my god says so or abandoning judgment saying, i can't say whether anyone is more moral than anyone else was there are no right answers. ..

as an english major, but he dropped out. eleven years later, he went back to stanford and completed his bachelor's in philosophy. ended 2009, he obtained a phd in narrow science at ucla. so he is a scientist and a philosopher. he's not really journals, newspapers and magazines in his work has been discussed and even more. he's a cofounder with his wife and ceo of the project reason a nonprofit devoted to spreading scientific alleys and society. and we are so pleased to have them here at the texas book festival today.

[applause] [cheers and applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. well, it's a pleasure to be here. i apologize and somewhat captive to these microphones. normally i would stand up and walk around in sweats even more than i am going to sweat in front of you. it is hot if you haven't noticed. but it's an honored to be here. it's an honor and is the first time i've spoken in texas. thank you for coming out. as many of you know, i spent the last two years publicly criticizing religion. when you do that, you immediately discover all the reasons why people think it's a bad idea. [laughter] and there's not so many reasons. and the first reason is almost never that there's so much evidence for the existence of god, not even fundamentalists tend to bleed off with a story about the empty tomb or the

textual reasons why the bible is probably written by the greater university. what you hear from people on every point of the spectrum of belief is that religion is the only way to think about morality of human values and universal terms. now i used to think that was an entirely empty claim because obviously atheists can be moral. atheists can be as moral as any religious person. and very many other reasons to think that morality is not as cut and from religion. and i'll talk about some of those. i've come to discover that it's actually not an entirely empty claim because they are many very smart people, many very well educated people the scientific community and the academic community more generally, who

are quite confused about how they can be such a thing as moral truth. and i give you an example that has really been seared on my brain. and my motivating this writing my book to some degree. i was at a conference i was talking about the link to the morality and human well-being. and i said the moment you noticed the human well-being is dependent in some way on the laws of nature and states of the human brain, and then you notice they are right and wrong ways to maximize the. there's more science progressives, but we are do know enough now that certain cultures are not maximizing and i cited as an example that women in afghanistan and the taliban. it can to me rather obvious the violet misogyny and religious bamboozlement was not the perfect recipe for human employer shame. and afterward a fellow speaker

of the conference came out to me and said well, how could you ever say that the compulsory veiling of women, forcing women to live in burqas is wrong from the point of view of science? i said well it's similar time because the moment should make the questions are right and wrong have something to do with human well-being, then it becomes immediately obvious forcing half the population to the then cloth bags and beaten them or killing him would make it out is not a perfect way of maximizing that. and she said let's just your opinion. i said well, let's make it simple. let's say we found a culture that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. would you then agree that we have found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being? and she said well, it would depend on why they were doing it. [laughter] i said, after he picked my jaw

up off the floor, i said that say they are doing it for reasons. let's say they have a scripture that says every word should walk in darkness or some such nonsense. [laughter] and she said then you could never say that they were wrong. i said i perceived a problem here because first of all this is a person who has a background in philosophy and science. she's actually a noted bioethicists. she is on the presidents council for bioethics. she's one of 13 people advising the president on all the ethical ramifications cocteau by the progress of medical science. she had just delivered a talk on the ethical problems that she saw of using narrow imaging technology is light detection. and she was worried we might be exposure and capture terrorists to lie detection techniques and thereby infringing upon their

cognitive liberty. and so on the one hand she had these very fine-grained and quite scrupulous ethical notions applied to our possible overreach, but was quite sanguine about the prospects of removing the eyeballs of children. and it seems to me -- she seemed to be astonishingly detached from the very real suffering of millions of women in afghanistan. and so this idea, which is actually an especially clear example, but i guess it's by the hundreds and thousands of e-mails and blog hosts now, many people in our society think something has happened in the last 200 years of intellectual progress that has made it impossible to speak about moral truth. and the purpose of my book now and what i will try to persuade you of in my talk is that's not true. that is in fact a myth. and the myth is really angered to this notion that there is a

radical disjunction between facts and values. the facts are the sort of thing that science can deal with. and this is physics and chemistry and biology. values are thought to be completely different. they are thought to be -- and inconveniently these are values captured the most important questions of human life. how do we raise children, would constitute a good life. what goals should we strive for. and it's not that answers here are purely the product of culture where personal one and there is absolutely no framework. there's no intellectual terrain to stand on by which we can say anyone is ever really right or any wrong about that. now, it's long been obvious that we needed some universal framework for human use because, for instance, in the immediate

aftermath of world war ii, the u.n. struggle to put forth a universal declaration of human rights, which was obviously quite a sensible names to do given what it happened in europe at that point. and yet the american anthropological association came forward saying this is a fools errand. you can't do this. this is merely one culture wasting its entirely provincial conception of value on the rest of human society. it's intellectually illegitimate. and notice this is the best or social sciences could do with the prematurely of auschwitz still smoking. this is 1947. so i would argue to you that we can understand values in terms of facts. they reduce facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. and there are many old and i think ultimately boring and

confusing debates in philosophy then i'm going to sites that appear. but i want to invite -- there will be a q&a session after i speak. and if anyone feels that i've missed the boat philosophically, i would very much like to hear from you. but i will give you sort of one philosophical argument which to make this case. imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as they can. i call this the worst possible misery for everyone. that's bad. if you don't think that's bad, i don't know what you could mean by the word bad. if you think there might be something worse than the worst possible misery for everyone, i don't know what you mean. and what's more, i think you know what you mean. so from my point of view, all you have to buy is the worst

possible misery for everyone is that. and then immediately that creates a continuing free of the worst possible misery for everyone over here. and then every other possible state of the universe, which is better by definition. and given that conscious experience is arising out of how the universe is. it is in some way dependent on the last of the nature, then you see there must be right and wrong ways to move in this space. there will be wrong ways to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. and there will be right ways to seek different possible states of well-being. and therefore values -- that which can be valued falling to the domain of facts. facts -- all the facts that determine the conscious experience of conscious creatures. and i think we have some very serviceable equitable transition to bother ethical obligations to

its creatures, other people and other animals which tacitly track this terrain because we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects. and i think were right to be simply because we have every reason to believe that primates can suffer a much broader range of experience. they have states of well-being that can be cut off their mistreatment of them. but again, the thing to notice, this is a factual claim. i could be wrong about this. they could be i'm wrong at the way physical complexity relates to subject its complexity. and if we are wrong, maybe the internalized those and for something and that are far richer than we imagined. there's no reason to believe that. but again i'm putting out this is a factual claim between the relationship between mind and manner. and we don't worry about fox -- or treatment of rocks because we

don't think rocks can suffer. so we are concerned about changes in the well-being of conscious creatures when they think ethically. and also, even if you are beliefs about good morality are anchored around religion. even if you think the real cash value is what happens after death, he read their experience and of happiness with god or an eternity of suffering in hell. you are still worried about consciousness and its potential changes. you're worried about -- in this case you think the most important changes in consciousness happen after death. so again, i don't think religion offers a different framework. it just offers a different timeline for thinking about changes in consciousness. now many people worry that arguing that well-being is the basis of value and morality is somehow arbitrary. and unless we could define well-being really rigorously,

this is an eligible and thing to do. finally i ask you to consider the physical health. this is the concept of changes over the years. and when the statue was carved, the life expectancy of a human being was about 25 or 30. it could be that will one day live to have completely different expectations of normal -- the normal range of human health. we may look to see a time where you could expect to be able to recruit a missing limb like a salamander. and if you couldn't do that, you would go straight to the hospital because there's something terribly wrong with you. the fact that health is a concept is open-ended and can change based on her progress in science does not make the distinction between health and disease any less clear or consequential. and certainly the distinction between life and death is

perfectly clear and consequential. and there's a science of human health and medicine. and it's not -- the elasticity of the concept itself is not a problem for science. and you don't -- but you never hear in the face of this concept of health is a fundamentally skeptical challenge of this sort did i get them talking about morality. so someone will say who were you to say that well-being has anything to do with morality? what if someone wanted to torture every person on earth to the point of madness? who's to say they're not been as moral as you were? at the kind of skeptical philosophical challenge a gift. she never hear someone say well, who are you to say that someone died of terminal smallpox is not as healthy as you were? how could you convince someone with smallpox is not as healthy as you are. you never heard the philosophical underpinnings in

this way. another way to see the distinction between facts and values makes no sense is to look at just how we make the most basic scientific claims about the nature of the world. so we have a substance called water. about 150 years ago we realized it was made of components. it's two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. now what do we do when someone comes into the room saying, that's not how i choose to think about water. that's chemistry for me is whatever confirms the book of genesis. a person is free to use the word chemistry anyway they want, but no one is under any obligation to take them seriously. or simply not talking about chemistry. and when you have to convince someone that water is two parts hydrogen one part oxygen and come the most basic factual claim about the nature of

matter, all you can do is appeal to values. you have to appeal to scientific use like the value of understanding the world with a value of evidence. if someone doesn't respect evidence, what evidence are you going to give them to prove that they should respect it? if someone doesn't value logical consistency, what logical arguments are you going to give them that will demonstrate that they shared. so there are people who based on alternate value schemes place themselves outside the conversation of science. and it would be the same as any scientific understanding of human value. but it's no different. if it's not a problem in chemistry, it shouldn't be a problem with morality. and so too with any other scientific value, parsimony, respect for mathematical

evidence. these are value terms. now another way to bridge this gap between facts and values is to look at what the leaf is, how we form beliefs about the world and just what it is to try to represent reality in our thoughts. and we form beliefs about facts. and this constitutes science and history of journalism and every other domain reclaimed to be talking about the way the world is. we also for beliefs about values. and this captures all the juicy questions in life, meaning and morality and spiritual experience. but it does not seem to me that these two operations, when many people think they're quite different are the same. and so it is a mirror imaging work we put people in an smr i scanner and we gave them steepness to read, very simple statement strong for many different categories.

and some of these categories with mathematics and geography at ethics and religion. it's a very dissimilar content areas. but we found that the difference between belief and disbelief was essentially the same regardless of content. so when the last to have all of our categories together and you get this area of signal in what's called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain. but we are able to separate mathematics and ethics which were our most dissimilar content area. mathematics is just equations being judged true or false. and ethics was value laden statements like it's good to be kind to children versus it's good to torture children. different content to get the difference between accepting a conference as true or rejecting it as false with essentially the

same. what i would argue is that the brain is doing the same game when it accepts the proposition versus when it rejects it, regardless of whether it's about jesus being born of a virgin or about mathematics, we should be hesitant to ascribe radically different categories to those operations and our conversation with one another. so from my point of view, belief is really our best effort to map reality in our thoughts. and when we seem to succeed in doing this, when our claims about the way the world is seen to survive every test that the world can throw at them, we call it knowledge. so there's no radical difference between belief and knowledge. knowledge is a category believes that we take seriously. and we have high confidence in. and it's clearly a continuum of

facts about which we can be more or less aware or more or less confused that relate to how human communities flourish. and we know that it's possible to live in a failed state where everything that can go wrong does go wrong. where mothers can see their children. where strangers can find no basis to cooperate with one another peacefully. you look at a place like congo now, where people's daily's concerns are avoiding getting murdered by drug addled soldiers and women are being by the tens of thousands continuously. we know that there is something to be known about how human sees individually and communities can move out of those conditions towards something quite a bit more ideally. something much more like the lives we tend to live, where we can value creativity or have intellectual interest. we can read books, even conceive

of going to a book festival. i mean, all of this is taking place on the basis of some very real gains in civil society. and there's something to be understood about that. most processes can be understood on many levels. they can be understood at the biology level, genes that predispose people to trust one another. we can understand psychopathy at the level of the brain. and positive social emotions like compassion and empathy. we can also understand that collect a scale we can understand the influence of economics and political arrangements on human beings individually in their collective behavior. but all of these facts fall potentially within the purview of science. i mean, were talking about genetics and narrow biology and

psychologists as theology and economics. so again i'm arguing that the truths that spell the difference between abject human misery and a kind of flourishing of possible for us in this world. these truths fall within our factual discussion about the way the world is, which is to say an ongoing scientific of the human mind. i think this is easier to see if you just imagine two people living on earth. you just imagine adam and me, no one else. clearly there are right and wrong answers to the question of how they might maximize their well-being. i mean, wrong answer number one, they can smash each other in the face with a large rock. clearly that is not the best answer to the problem of how to human beings can thrive given an opportunity to live in this

world. now, how does the situation changed when you add 6.7 billion more people to the argument. i'm arguing that it doesn't. it clearly gets more competition or the difference between right and wrong answers they think is entirely preserved. so what i'm asking you to visualize is the kind of landscape. i call it a moral landscape, where the peaks correspond to the height of human well-being and the values correspond to the lowest depths of misery. and the first thing that started outside of this model is it's very likely that there are many peaks. there may be many different ways for individuals and for communities to drive that are not equivalent, they're not compatible. and you can see many very dissimilar ways to organize human societies so as to produce

the kind of well-being that possible for us. but clearly there are many more ways to not. there are many worse answers to many of those. now, the fact that there are many right answers to the question of how to produce human flourishing or there may be many right answers isn't the problem. and by analogy, i would ask you to consider food. i never argue that there must be one right food to eat. clearly there are many right answers of the question to what is said. but the difference between food and poison is still absolutely clear. and it's clear even though there are exceptions like some people are allergic to peanuts and will die. we can understand all of those caveats in the context of chemistry and biology and every science related to human nutrition. and so too with principles that

seem to admit of exceptions. many people worry if you have an ethical principle that admits of an exception, will then there's no such thing as moral truth. for instance, if it's wrong to lie, then it always has to be wrong to lie. and if you can find a situation in which it's right to lie, then there's no such thing as moral truth. but notice we don't do this. see a game like chess. if you want to play good chess, don't lose your queen has a very good sensible to follow. but it clearly admits the perceptions. there were moments where it's absolutely essential to sacrifice your queen or it's a brilliant interview. and yet, chess is the prototypical situation of objective right and wrong answers. and not losing your queen is one of the best principles you can follow. and this notion of a moral man

gave allows for the prospects of what we call spiritual or mystical experience. i think there's no question that they are contemplative insights people can have. we can maybe require a lot of training and talent to have. i think it's quite possible there is such a thing as moral genius and people are insight into bash of the kinds of priorities they should have and the ways they should live so as to really experience times of well-being that very few of us are aware are even possible. i used to be in the habit of saying undoubtably there is a tiger woods of compassion out there somewhere. now for obvious reasons that analogy doesn't quite run through. [laughter] but in any case, positive mental states like compassion are now viewed as skills and neurosciences. the people have different talents with regard to being

aware of the differences of others and being able to be motivated altruistically. and there undoubtedly are right and wrong ways to raise children to be as compassionate as they can be. so again, all of this falls with an the purview of a growing scientific understanding of the human mind. how many of you who can see this photo recognize that? this is a photo of apparently happy not seize. but there is a photo album recently discovered called the auschwitz album and these were entirely our mark. people didn't know who these nazis were and the little research revealed that this was the staff of auschwitz in its heyday as a killing factory. and this is how they were amusing themselves on their

weekends off at a chalet at those sort of close to the death camp. so essentially these people are enjoying accordion music and other photos where they are eating and sunbathing. under the plan must human ash coming out of the crematory of auschwitz. now, my notion of a moral landscape admits the possibility of pathological island of relative happiness like this, where i don't doubt that these people are really smiling. these are fake smiles. or certainly not all psychopaths. i think these are rural people who love their kids about their pets and went home and listen to wagner and shed a tear. and yet they have a belief system that is walled off their moral concern for the rest of humanity. it's a clearly this is not a peek on the moral landscape. this seems to be the challenge we all face. the challenge we all face as a

global society is to extend the circle of our moral concern to the rest of humanity. and they're obviously ideologies that make that difficult or impossible. now i want to spend a little time talking about islam because i think -- and i want to talk about why religion is not the proper source of our moral norms at this point. and the reason why it shouldn't be becomes scoresheet and likely when you focus on islam. and so i want to do that or a minute. i want to be very clear about the spirit in which i do this, however a lot because of not muslims obviously. and i'm not talking about races rather cities. i'm talking about the logical and behavioral consequences of certain ideas. i'm talking about doctrines. the doctrine of islam.

in the one thing to notice is we have this one word repligen, which is a suitcase turned that is not very useful. religion is a word like sport. now there are sports that are entirely safe that entail no physical risk at all. and their sports that are synonymous with violence. so this is more like.net and and thai boxing. and they've basically nothing in common apart from breathing. and religion is a lot like that. i mean, there is a religion of peace in this world. it's called janus on. the religion of india has something like 10 million at this point. the chains, their core principle is nonviolence. i mean, the more extreme you get, the less we have to worry about you. [laughter] so the problem is not -- i mean, we hear the problem is religious extremism. the problem is not religious

extremism. the problem is actually deas in specific religions. because extremist james are basically paralyzed by their pacifism. vegetarian needless to say. but they drink every sip of water through cloth to filter out any bugs they might follow. when they walk to keep their eyes on the grounds that they don't tread on an insect. okay, now, islam is not remotely a religion of peace and not a problem that we are taking refuge in the euphemisms about it. so for a minute i just want to talk honestly about the doctrine of islam. and you may recognize these men. as mullah omar, and sheikh mohammed and whenever they disagree with they agree with the nature of reality and how to live in it.

i would think these three men agree about those core questions more than any three people in this tent. i mean, they are on the same page because they are literally trying their worldview from a boat. and this is a book they imagine was dictated from the prophet mohammed in a cave by the archangel gabriel. i apologize for the cartoonish nature of this illustration. but illustrations of mohammed are somewhat difficult to come by at the moment. [laughter] for reasons we are familiar with. but the net result of this is we have a boat, the koran, which is believed to be the perfect word of the creator of the universe. and it is a profoundly mediocre book. it is not the best book humanity has ever produced on any subject. and that is a fact that we use

the attention of anyone who wants to take a weekend to read the book. and there are many problems that visit us on the basis of this book. one is that it is a relatively short book. it's not like the bible. you can't cherry pick of the same same ease that christians can cherry pick the bible. i mean, christians can't cherry pick the new testament into jesus and have this doesn't come away with a truly benign police system. it doesn't mean it's actually true, but they come away with a savior who is essentially a hippie who got crucified, who gave the sermon on the mound and other kind of wonderfully benign and specific messages. there is no sermon on the mound in the quran. and the basic message of the carotid is that the infidel is fit only for the fires of hell and there's nothing better that can happen to a person of life is to die in the one true faith. and mohammed didn't get

crucified. hamas was the alexander the great of the muslim world. he was a conquering general. and these are differences that matter. and the great challenge of our time is to figure out how to inspire a renaissance in the muslim world. and again, the challenge is a great one because were talking about intellectual -- the arab world especially is isolated in a way that very few people can appreciate intellectually. the country of spain translates more of the world's literature at learning into spanish every year than the entire arab world has translated into arabic cents a night century. at a arab world is only 25% of the muslim world, but it controls a majority of the mosques and the arab world is the engine, the worldview that is islam.

in the proper attitude with which one should live one's life on the basis of his doctrine is in perpetual supplication to this invisible deity who gave us this perfect book. this is a photo of muslims in kashmir worshiping at a shrine who is working to contain a single ear to hear from the prophet mohammed. now, i'd should not mean to make light of how difficult it might be for muslims in kashmir at this moment, undoubtedly difficult. and i don't mean to denigrate the kinds of positive experiences you can have practicing in this way. i think devotion is a positive missile state and having a strong community is a positive. but it seems to me that given all the challenges that these people face in this world and the prospects of real collaboration that this society can discover, these people have

something more important to do with their time than worship the beard hair of a person who may very well have been a schizophrenic. and another message that comes out of the stock turn, which is truly unavoidable, though you can dance around the facts, is that the status of women is secondary and the ultimate expression of that think at this moment his life for women fully veiled under a burqa. i think it's a great failure of liberalism at this moment. and i consider myself a liberal on basic legal questions. it is a great failure of liberalism that we hear kind of sanctimonious appeals to religious sensitivity. but it's somehow wrong to criticize this practice. when there's no sensitivity for what life is actually like for

women forced to live this way. i mean, are sensitivity is misplaced up for word about defending the mend who want their wives to live this way. we should be concerned about the women. and yet, even feminists in our society take issue with any strong condemnation of this part is. another result of this worldview is it has become an engine of a kind of death cult in our time, but especially noticeable in our time given to knowledge he and collision with this world. but this has existed since the time of the prophet. but the endless suicide bombings that we see are an expression of the theological expectation. i mean, this is what certainty of paradise get to. and so this photo is the

aftermath of a bombing of sunni -- i'm sorry, of shia muslims in pakistan by sunnis. the sunnis consider shiites to be apostates and regularly bomb their mosques and funeral processions and pilgrimages. notice this has nothing to do with u.s. foreign policy. this is muslim on muslim violence. the only difference between these people is religious confessions. this is nothing to do with israel on the plight of the palestinians. this is sunni waking up in the morning, deciding that it is worth dying for the privilege of blowing up shia policies. i want to linger over these details because i fear that it's very difficult for secular people to connect with just how deeply these beliefs are held. this is a -- they bombed the procession of shia, but then they sent another suicide bomber

to bomb the hospital when the ambulance came and the casualties. this photograph is outside the hospital where the doctors and nurses in casualties were bombed by another suicide bomber. just imagine not on the scale of business and human energy. i think is a jealous creativity. this is kind of a smart idea on the suicide bombers part. but someone had to volunteer for this. and you just look at the aftermath of this. you look at this girl over the body of her mother. it seems to me it is absolutely obvious that this is smallpox for the mind. there's nothing good about this. and the crucial point i want to make is it is not unscientific to say this. the fear that there is something i unscientific about saying this is tantamount to are saying that

we know absolutely nothing about human well-being. it's identical to saying, we have 150 years of her in science and psychology and behind us and we've made some real gains in the treatment of women in our society, but maybe blowing up shia professions and blowing up mothers in the.drinks, maybe that's as good as everything we've come up with. okay, well i have to many slides. for a moment, was to get the at the the sense that merely focus on the problem of islam, i want to say that the disconnection between religion and the real details of animal and human well-being as office and many other ways. so for instance, the catholic church assembly is working there and about stopping contraception at this moment than stopping a

the rape of children. it's more concerned about gay marriage. this is a diabolical set of priorities. and what i would suggest to you at the moment you link questions of morality to questions of human and animal well-being, you see that the use of the terminology, you're talking about morality, the moral problem of contraception is a false use. i mean, the church could talk about the physics of the transubstantiation. he could talk about the physics that allows the holy ghost to be here, there and everywhere. but no physicists would have to take that discourse seriously. that's a misuse of the word physics. and we define our terms and physics very much a detriment of anyone who would want to talk about the physics of the eucharist. so we can do this on the subject

of morality as well. and so, finally i would say to you that the only prospect of building a global civilization where we converge on the same kind of answers to the most important questions in human life, the same kinds of environmental and economic and political goals is for us to come up with a framework in which we can talk about values and right and wrong and good and evil in universal terms. and i think an honest discussion about the prospects of human and animal well-being is that framework. thank you very much. [applause]

[applause] >> we have a few minutes for questions. we have a few minutes for questions and there's a microphone right here. so if you have a question, if you come up to the microphone. >> talus would sure position of france implementing -- >> were talking about the wisdom of france banning the burqa legally. and no, i'm not sure. i'm not sure. my bias is that passing laws of that sort is the wrong move because i think people should be free to wear whatever they want. the reason i'm not entirely sure in this case is clearly their women and girls being forced to avail themselves. and it's hard to see how you provide a context in which they

could be free to meet kinds of choices they want without passing a law. but by analogy, there's a law passed in austria and i believe germany as well that makes it illegal to deny the holocaust. okay, that's an idiotic law. that's not the lover you want to move turned public opinion is not a law banning bad ideas. and we don't need laws banning bad ideas. we need to criticize bad ideas. but the burqa band may be a little bit more difficult than not. >> i was wondering how you differentiate your idea of the moral landscape from utilitarianism, getting the most good for the most people and then how you might defend the moral landscape against as many criticisms of utilitarianism. >> good question. well, i think that the traditional presentation of utilitarianism has been

understandably prayed at certain circumstances. so when you present a narrow focus on pleasure or happiness, people are led to believe, so it develops about pleasure, why not take care when all day. that's really pleasurable. but clearly that isn't anyone -- that doesn't meet the test for anyone's best possible life. and i think a fully searching notion of utility is actually not vulnerable to those kinds of criticisms. i think the categories of utilitarianism versus p. ontology and virtue ethics and a lot of the debate that happened in philosophy there have broken down on false distinctions and arguments that don't have to be continually rehearsed. and so i am a consequentialist in some sense. but i don't think -- i don't think what argument is foldable

to the traditional claims against utilitarianism. i go into an centigrade in the book come about a try to sort of sidestepped it because a lot of it i think is frankly unnecessary. and you also get for instance -- if it's all just about maximizing well-being, then what is your attack your was aware that he's got some genius in the back room is going to do great work, but he needs a new kidney and a liver and lungs. and so your doctor decides to go into the waiting room and everyone is waiting there for an appointment to save the genius in the back room because your organs could be better used in him apparently. a narrow focus on the well-being of society seems to suggest that might be an ethical thing to do. who would want to live in a society where at any moment your organs could be stolen because

some very brave person needs them. i mean, there's very obvious reasons not to do that. so when you have a sufficiently broad inception of well-being and the kinds of principles that maximize it. i think many of the things that critics of utilitarianism and fear are not captured by notions of justice and fairness and having a clear conscience. the cash value of all that is well-being at the end of the day. so i do know that deals with it completely, but -- >> hi, where you said today that stood out the most for me was something that even for people who have strong faith in an afterlife, i forgot what it was, but they're still object to facts about well-being to be

found there. if it exists, yeah. and i see that the utility of that in making the case, but it's so whatever effect -- is so justified that it would even apply to an imaginary place. when in your last book one of the most popular quotes was one about certainty in the next life. and we were seemingly the portability of people who have such strong faith in the afterlife of being able to be tolerant. is that worth making that case, you know, that even the faith in the afterlife.

>> i think the certainty is dangerous and there are no good reasons to be certain that the afterlife. anyone who is pretending to be certain about the afterlife is lying to himself or herself. and given we have incompatible certainties, given the religions actually teach different things in a very zero-sum nonnegotiable way, the certainties have shattered a world unto the separate moral communities. there are hundreds of examples of this. but a very clear one is if you're really going to be a christian, you have to believe that jesus was divine. and if you're going to be a muslim you have to believe he wasn't. it says in two places in the koran if you think jesus was divine you're going to spend eternity in hell. so this is a dealbreaker. this is a coin toss. >> for a huge portion of the population they actually had

scriptures. but i think there's a broader or a lot larger portion of the population for whom the real dealbreaker is since this universal -- of hope and something waiting for us after a life of struggling and suffering. >> i think that -- it's easy to see how that helps people in certain situations and that it obviously -- if you can believe that, there are certain occasions where clearly believes your suffering. there's no question. and if atheists want to deny this it's undeniable. if your child's eyes and you really put the shoes taken it to be with jesus in a few short years are going to be reunited, that solves the problem. and there's now --

>> and it was so wonderful. >> right, but that comes at a tremendous cost, that kind of anodyne effect of faith. i'm a classifier -- i mean, the costs are so large as a geo-political level, the collision between income bondable face. >> and there's obvious opportunities for sake and in light of that belief. and you know, we are -- the thing we can be sure of, absolutely sure a is we're in a circumstance now i can get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse. and what we need is truly intelligent, open-ended nondogmatic come anoxic carrion conversations about how to do that.

and religion nine times out of 10 is a glaring obstacle, even when it's providing comfort to people in certain situations. >> i mean, i'm glad you didn't -- what you said today, i'm glad it wasn't in the book. >> thank you very much. >> i just wanted -- some of that morality was a neat. would you say basically that your events education through science, et cetera allows you to have a certain morality. and if that case, are you very pessimistic as far as he would say -- using your same education, colleges, et cetera. enter your knowledge of philosophy, thousands of years, why do you -- i mean, what to bring to the table now. i'm sorry haven't read you latest book. what are you doing to convince other people or why now or what to have as far as that. and i would you say are you more

or less apologetic for religion now. i thought interface, et cetera be more apologetic kurds demand that the change in terms of apologizing. his claim that morality is and they can be a little confusing. clearly we have moral emotions and moral reasoning determine how to fire analogy and at some level are modified by coulter's. i analogy you think of language. i mean, we all come into this world ready to speak the language. but then you learn the language based on what culture you happen to arrive in. but we all come ready to speak chinese, but we don't because were not raised in china. and we come into this world ready to recognize morally salient situations and we feel discussed in response to certain things. we have a notion of non-harming. we have something very much like the golden rule is something

that is probably by default where we wind up in ethical terms. but all of this can get modified by coulter. and there are people who don't have the full toolkit. they're psychopaths who don't feel empathy for other people and that's something we can understand or logically. now science up until this moment has limited itself to understanding all of that descriptively. you can tell of the evolutionary story about why we're social primates and we've come to be the way we are based on millions of of negotiating other social encounters with each other. and we can understand how this type of reason arises in the brain. what does the brain how to do to experience from situations. science has been purely descriptive. what i'm saying is there is another chapter open to us in science, which is the moment we

recognize that we can talk about morality -- evolution has not designed as to flourish to the ultimate degree. evolution doesn't care about our well-being really. it doesn't care about most of what we care about. doesn't care about novels, music, mathematics or science. it cares about successful reproduction of the species. it's a basically everything -- we have sort of slow the purge that has been prepared for us i evolution and we have to do that with the brain through a bald to live. but the prospects of human flourishing can be understood scientifically. they can talk about morality of human valadez cannot larger conversation. and that's no longer just a descriptive conversation about what people happen to do. it's a conversation about what can and should do to maximize well-being. and many scientists here that somehow you forsake your

scientific dispassion the moment you start talking about the way people should live. but we don't do that here that's not true of health. i mean, people shouldn't get smallpox, you know that we don't do it on chemistry. people should reliant of events invoke a sound arguments. and yet -- when you see that morality really translates into psychological and social health and the and, then the stigma around making recommendations i think should fall away. >> we've got just a couple of more minutes. >> first i'm not standing to be freaked your past position of the cheeses being undefined. >> that's true. but he is not