Sam Harris‘ talk at TED was just released and you can see some of the material he’ll be writing about in his new book — The Moral Landscape: How science can determine human values, which will be released October 5th. The thesis is that science can indeed answer moral questions.
I wasn’t really into it for the first half, but it got good (for me) around the 9:48 mark.
There are some really fascinating things he discusses, such as the question of whether a Muslim man who wants the women in his life to wear veils loves his daughters as much as his sons — and how brain scans could soon tell us the answer to that. And how even that scan could have a loophole…
Certainly, if we could show that science can lead to positive ethics, it would take away one of the biggest reasons people think they need religion.