So much of our conventional wisdom maintains that our morals have been formed by Christian-Judeo principles (peace to the American devotees of other religions).  Atheist Sam Harris blogged about his new book at Huffpo last week, in which he claims it's high time that science begins to help the discussion about morality. 

His contention is that the purpose of morality is to enhance human happiness, and avoid misery in the world.  For the sake of this discussion, I'd suggest we could also use the terms contentment or well-being, happiness sounding like such a shallow term (my bias), and toward that end, science could in principle provide markers in various areas such as institutions, sociology, child-rearing, war, economics, neurobiology, and presumably education.

He asks and attempts to answer twelve questions in the short article, I'm just hitting a few points here, assuming only half of you will read the article.  ;-) 

The most intriguing section for me concerned religion.  His theme is that religions often focus on the wrong issues, such as the Catholic Church focusing on anti-contraceptive, anti-homosexual themes, rather than policing deviant priests, or a more concerted effort to end war.  He points to more atheistic nations such as Sweden and Denmark as evidence, though he fails to say how their citizens' lives are better or happier; I guess we just accept it on spec.  Pearls of wisdom occur in all holy texts, and so do barbarities that really aren't helpful moral lessons, he says, and often we choose which precepts to live by, and ignore the rest.

When discussing the ways in which different cultures or religious-based groups can be in opposition to more universally accepted precepts of morality, he asks us to think about how most people's lives fare in those societies.  In the case of the Taliban, he concludes, of course: not well, in terms of education, prosperity, health, etc., understanding that they see their adherence to Sharia law as promising contentment in the afterlife.

His mission seems to be to find ways to quantify happiness/contentment factors, graph them, and look at the peaks (good) and valleys (bad, suffering) from a distance.  He call this idea the moral landscape; then proposes that there are ways to effect changes that would provide more peaks than valleys. 

He wades briefly into the taboo of science involving itself in moral choices or values, and cites patterns of ethno-centrism and 'political correctness' as reasons; but we all remember The Bell Curve...and other such books and studies. 

He provides these reasons for 'admitting' there are right and wrong moral answers:

What I've tried to do in my book is give a framework in which we can think about human values in universal terms. Currently, the most important questions in human life -- questions about what constitutes a good life, which wars we should fight or not fight, which diseases should be cured first, etc. -- are thought to lie outside the purview of science, in principle. Therefore, we have divorced the most important questions in human life from the context in which our most rigorous and intellectually honest thinking gets done.

Moral truth entirely depends on actual and potential changes in the well-being of conscious creatures. As such, there are things to be discovered about it through careful observation and honest reasoning. It seems to me that the only way we are going to build a global civilization based on shared values -- allowing us to converge on the same political, economic, and environmental goals -- is to admit that questions about right and wrong and good and evil have answers, in the same way the questions about human health do.

I'd read a bit about the great Joseph Stiglitz working with the French to develop new ways to measure the economic condition of a people, given that GDP is failing in that regard.  They've been working on ways to factor in what they call The Happiness Factor, which is worth an entire blog on its own.  Pretty interesting, and this reminded me a bit of that attempt to find more universal measurements of human well-being.

I'd love to know what you think.  I'm agnostic here, just interested; so don't hold back!