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I believe Harris said somewhere in the book that the intermediate concept of morality may be excess baggage - his point is that what is important is maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures, period.

For those who still question that there is a meaningful, objective notion of well-being, Harris provides vivid examples of two people living lives near opposite ends of the goodness spectrum. He admits up front that those who do not perceive a difference in these two persons' degree of well-being are not going to be convinced by the arguments in his book. (Having read his examples, I find it scarcely credible that anyone not seriously unhinged could be indifferent between the two, or consider for a moment consigning a loved one to the bad life if the good one were also an option).

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Haven't read Harris but based on your summary, the problem is circularity: "well-being" is defined by moral terms.

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"I want to start with the concepts where there is the least reason to doubt calling them good and well connected to reality, and want to try to go as far as I can with such concepts before adding in other less reliable concepts of good. It seems to me that giving people what they want is just about the least controversial element of good I can find,..."

It may well be the least controversial; but why is *that* your metric?

At the risk of over-hyping a book I just read, "The Moral Landscape" by Harris presents an alternative view on how to identify what is "...good and well connected to reality."

Harris's thesis is that moral questions are the most important questions humanity faces, that these questions admit of right and wrong answers, that these answers are based on maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures, that morality is therefore a question about the state of the world and the brains of conscious creatures, and that it is therefore crucially important that morality be thought of, and pursued as, an undeveloped branch of science.

(So, get cranking:-)

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"The beliefs that religions claim are good are mostly not very controversial."

Daublin, my religious scholarship is dismal but even I think I know of significant gaps between what is commonly accepted as good and what is presented as good in (e.g.) the Bible.

On the narrow topic of murdering children, for example: I recently read in "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris that the Bible states, in five specifically-cited verses, that parents should kill children who talk back. Also (based now on my own meager knowledge) there is the mass murder of innocent children in Exodus (committed by, er, God) which occurs in order to get Pharaoh's heart un-hardened on the question of letting the Jews exit Israel (said heart having been hardened, by the very same God). Oh, and then there's the Flood.

..so IMHO (and perhaps in yours too) it's not looking real good for God on the topic of murdering innocent children: Rather, His policy in this area is *hugely* misaligned with the moral principles I (and I think the vast majority of people) believe in and live by. And I think it's hard to argue that this gap is an insignificant one.

Though these examples touch on only one topic, and only one sacred text, they may motivate some to look more carefully before accepting the quoted assertion.

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"But these are mostly pressures to go along with whatever the local cultures says is good, not to push for a concept of good that will in fact benefit society."

Based on your previous logic, won't local cultures more accurately redefine the good as they discover the negative consequences of being incorrect? If their definition of the good is wildly inconsistent with what is actually beneficial for the people of that community, then they will face strong internal or external political pressures to change that definition. If so, then over time we should expect to see a convergence in what local cultures say is good and what is actually beneficial for them. This in turn would make individuals within that community more responsive to what actually is good as opposed to what people in the community erroneously tell them.

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"family check", rather.

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You're comparing apples and oranges. "Good" is about a set of propositions one professes in order to signal affiliation. The other examples, such as athletic ability and dominance, are personal attributes one displays to increase ones chances of being selected. They are totally different. If you want to compare apples and apples, try "character" instead of "good". A suitable mate might have good athletic ability, good status, and good character. Good character has nothing to do with propositional beliefs. Good character is a probabilistic assessment based on past behavior that (for example), "He probably won't beat me or cheat on me or gamble away the family psyche k, and he will sometimes do altruistic things in public as a costly signal of his dominance"

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Do you even need to talk about "good" and "ought"? Tell people you aim to help them get what they want, and that should be enough to get non-crazy buy-in.

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No. Supernatural beliefs all share very specific elements and they are a very small subset of the set of conceivable wrong beliefs.

I suggest the "Religion Explained" book for an anthropological analysis of the common elements and the differences between religions and an attempt at non-adaptive evolutionary explanation.

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"supernatural" just means "wrong."

No, that reduction clearly doesn't work. Theists often call themselves supernaturalists, and materialists usually distinguish supernatural beliefs from naturalistic beliefs even when the latter are utterly irrational or completely unscientific.

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There may be a finite number of ways to be good—to be exact, four. (See my "The habit theory of morality, moral influence, and moral evolution" — http://tinyurl.com/alsd4l6 — and the A.P. Fiske citations.) But the ways to be good conflict.

Regarding something else:how do the concepts of prestige and dominance relate to the concept of status? Expressions, aspects, causes, or separate concepts?

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"supernatural" just means "wrong." If we want a theory to explain which beliefs tend to be wrong, we'll have to refer to some other category. "don't really matter" is a start, but my proposal is a bit more refined than that.

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This post quietly mixes two kinds of religious beliefs: beliefs about what is good, and beliefs about the supernatural. The beliefs that religions claim are good are mostly not very controversial. The crazy ones are in the latter category.

The crazy beliefs are overwhelmingly things that really don't matter to individuals. As such, they make really good signals for who is a member of the group. Different religions will have different crazy claims, so you can figure out whether you're talking to an in person on an out person pretty quickly.

Stepping back, I will say that I have a hard time getting anything from your posts that involve religion, because they seem grounded in deep misconceptions about how real religions operate. As a motivating example, academics love to talk about evolution and the Big Bang, but they aren't such important issues for people who are attending a Wednesday church pot luck. For that matter, they also aren't that important to most academics, except when they gear themselves up to bash religions.

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Also, people within a group have strong incentives to mislead outsiders towards thinking that their allies (and thus them) are more impressive than other members of the group.

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As usual, I think that the evolutionary explanations are unnecessary here.I also think that it's relatively easy to evaluate dominance impressiveness within a subculture, such as among theoretical physicists or CEOs, and that it's relatively easy to identify which hand full of people are the most impressive/dominant within such a group with only moderate levels of error, but below the very top, it's difficult to measure impressiveness outside of your own group.

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"But these are mostly pressures to go along with whatever the local cultures says is good, not to push for a concept of good that will in fact benefit society."

Ah yes, morals vs. ethics.

Of course you are aware that most religions serve primarily to unite nations under one banner (the subjects gain "answers" about the afterlife in return), so what is "moral" according to the religion coincides with what is advantageous to the ruling class.

"what sort of policies are good for the nation, what sort of music or art is good for your soul, and so on.

Since this analysis justified a lot of skepticism on concepts of and related to goodness, I am drawn toward a very cautious skeptical attitude in constructing and using such concepts."

If you can decide on what is best for the nation you can decide on what is ethical. You can't say "well everything is relative because people don't really act for the good of the nation in practice", because if there is an objective measure of what is good for the nation that automatically means not everything is relative.

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