While continuing the reasoned polemic against dogmatic religious belief that he began in The End of Faith, Harris moves to a new level of discourse in The Moral Landscape by offering a positive vision for the role of science in the domain of human values. Echoing a Buddhist conception of the good, Harris argues that the well-being of sentient beings is what counts an the source of moral value. While the scientific tools currently offered by the disciplines of psychology and neurology may still be primitive, this source of value is at least in principle addressable by scientific inquiry, opening a path to discover an objective basis for moral judgment. While I did not find The Moral Landscape as compelling as The End of Faith, I still think that it makes an important contribution to the the field of ethics and establishes critical beachhead in the culture wars, securing a proper role for evidence and reason in our judgment of right and wrong.
