The claims in the moral landscape seem incoherent to me. I believe there are actually two claims:
- Morally good means maximizing happiness and reducing suffering, and science can help in this goal
This is just Utilitarianism. This is not new, and the first part, “morally good means maximizing happiness and reducing suffering” is an unscientific axiom.
The other claim seems to be:
- Other sciences, say physics or medicine, rely on unproven axioms, so it is okay for morality, which rely on unproven axioms to be considered scientific.
This does not follow. Every philosopher of science knows that any science is motivated by unproven axioms. No one claims that that the axioms required to do physics (e.g. the logic system I choose, or the axiom of Uniformitarianism) is scientific. Further, while this trait is something that both physics and morality have in common, this similarity does not mean that they are both sciences.
Also, the axiomatic statements that underlies science leaves open the conclusion of science to be determined by the scientific process. Harris’ moral landscape on the other hand already assumes axiomatically the conclusion that Utilitarianism is correct. An easy counterargument to the moral landscape is imposing the exact same argument of Harris, but swapping utilitarianism with deontological ethic.
Finally, I think it is important to point out:
This is extremely dubious. Sam Harris I believe only ever produce ~3 papers in neuroscience, the last of which is in 2011. His PhD is funded through his own anti-religious think-tank to support a very biased experiment. Not only that, he did not do his own experiments for his PhD thesis!
You can ask @swamidass whether he would graduate a grad student who did not do their own experiment (or in @swamidass’s case numerical simulations) for their own thesis.
You can read more about criticism of his neuroscientific credentials here:
Here is a more in depth review of his PhD paper by a statistician: