Sam Harris Quotes About Well Being
-
Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.
→ -
Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
→ -
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
→ -
If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.
→ -
We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.
→ -
It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes.
→ -
Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.
→ -
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.
→
Related Authors
-
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Activist -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Maajid Nawaz Political activist -
Reza Aslan Writer -
PZ Myers Scientist -
Pat Condell Writer -
Bill Maher Comedian -
Jerry A. Coyne Professor -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
Ben Affleck Actor -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Joe Rogan Stand-up comedian -
Susan Harris Television writer -
Deepak Chopra Author -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Victor J. Stenger Physicist -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist -
Chris Hedges Author