Harris starts with a naturalist/atheist/humanist/utilitiarian meta-ethic, and goes from there. But he doesn't (and cannot, due to the nature of science) show that such a meta-ethic is correct to begin with.
Neither of these assumptions appear to be true, at least to me. It may be better for society to have the individual lead a life in which they find no emotional value. Or it may be better for the species to have an entire society live a miserable life. The idea that immediate individual emotional well-being is a metric for morality is dubious at best.
That's not saying that science can't offer something of value: I'm sure it can. It's just that many times scientists in various fields have a tendency to overstate the implications of their research.
It's been my observation that if you ask most people who espouse a particular philosophy couched in "morality", that they claim that following their particular moral code will lead to well being. I've also found that the strong that belief is, the less likely that those followers have actually spent time thinking on the ramifications of their moral code towards that goal. They think they have thought about it a lot, but typically they've just spent brain cycles thinking about the code and how to follow it most closely -- not what following that code leads to.
I'm not disagreeing, just throwing in an observation -- most moral codes claim to lead to well being, but in reality many of them do not actually go there.
This phenomenon seems to create a particularly powerful barrier to rational thought that very few people seem to be able to overcome and can even seem to defeat some individuals.
I've seen friends, family and colleagues fail repeatedly to come to terms with this, they think it's because they haven't applied themselves completely to some arbitrary code so the only solution is to double down again and again.
After decades of doubling down this seems to drive people closer and closer to a kind of insanity...I've seen a few withdraw into fantasy worlds constructed of such powerful cognitive dissonance (arising from the inherent contradictions of their moral code and the observed outcome) that having a normal conversation about simple things, like the weather, become impossible -- they can barely complete a sentence without contradicting themselves or becoming lost and sidetracked about how such and such random topic has some particularly deep meaning in their hyper acute moralist world.
Good points. It's a tough subject and, well, it's open to interpretation. That's the problem.
As a counter-example, I'd offer up Mother Theresa, who suffered a lot and had severe doubts both about her faith and her work, yet most outside observers believed she was a moral person. I would also offer up early Christians, which surprised the Romans at being more than willing to tend to people stricken by the plague. To them it was the moral thing to do.
Moving to the stoics, it's a common belief among them that you train yourself to enjoy life more by purposely taking away things from yourself: sleep on the floor, or try skipping a couple of meals.
The point is that there is no point. You can look at this short-term, medium-term, long-term, from the point of view of the individual, community, country, or species. Or you can imagine some ethereal world in which important things don't align with any physicality. Good arguments can be made for each of these viewpoints.
Hell, it may be that the reason things are generally more or less moral than others is that they promote advancement of the species as a whole, in which case to truly understand morality you would have to be able to understand the social, political, and technological dynamics of 4+ billion people interacting with one another. It could simply be incalculable.
Beats me. I just wanted to provide a counter-example. Your point is as good as any.
BTW, I've also observed this you notice as well, and it's very sad. Perhaps a noble goal of science would be to help folks identify these cognitive dissonances, both in themselves and in their work. I have a feeling it's much more prevalent than we imagine. Always easy to find the fault with the other guy -- much tougher to find it in ourselves.