One of the people I invite into my Critical Thinking classes via the technological wizardry of the Internet is the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. Here’s one of the reasons why.

In February of 2010, Sam gave a controversial TED talk in Long Beach, California, (see the video below) titled Science Can Answer Moral Questions which generated a barrage of comments, accusations, and other forms of Internet haggling. Sam subsequently defended and further explained his ideas in a follow-up article on the Huffington Post titled Moral Confusion in the Name of “Science” dated March 29, 2010. One of Sam’s important points, I think, is that just because a large number of people believe something to be true does not necessarily mean it is true:

“The deeper issue, however, is that truth has nothing, in principle, to do with consensus: It is, after all, quite possible for everyone to be wrong, or for one lone person to be right. Consensus is surely a guide to discovering what is going on in the world, but that is all that it is. Its presence or absence in no way constrains what may or may not be true.”

Sam rightly, in my view, challenges the concept of moral and cultural relativism: “Moral relativism should be no more tempting than physical, biological, mathematical, or logical relativism.” Some human behavior is wrong, period, regardless of any cultural context: “As I asked at TED, how have we convinced ourselves that on the subject of morality, all views must count equally?” He says further,

“The fact that it might be difficult to decide exactly how to balance individual rights against collective good, or that there might be a thousand equivalent ways of doing this, does not mean that we must hesitate to condemn the morality of the Taliban, or the Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan — not just personally, but from the point of view of science. As I said at TED, the moment we admit that there is anything to know about human well-being, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures might not know it. . . . There are women and girls getting their faces burned off with acid at this moment for daring to learn to read, or for not consenting to marry men they have never met, or even for the crime of getting raped. Look into their eyes, and tell me that what has been done to them is the product of an alternative moral code every bit as authentic and philosophically justifiable as your own. . . . The most basic facts about human flourishing must transcend culture, just as most other facts do.”

Ultimately, Sam found it necessary to respond even more fully to his critics in another Huffington Post article on May 7: Toward a Science of Morality. — And why should we care about all of this? Here’s why, according to Sam:

“The consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science’s failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science.”