The Moral Landscape is a well-written and thoughtful exercise in secular moral realism, but it attempts to do something far more ambitious—it purports to give us the basis for a science of morality. While the subtitle of Harris' book insists otherwise, science cannot determine human values—it can do no more than tell us how to best implement the values we already have.

In sum, Harris's fight against relativism, his desire to inform morality with the sciences, and his quest to bring philosophical and scientific topics to those outside the academic world are all praiseworthy goals and should be mimicked by Christian thinkers. However, Harris's tendancy [sic.] to write as if there are simply no other arguments around besides his own, certainly no rival ethical (much less scientific) theories, is nothing less than astonishing. It relieves him of any epistemic obligation to answer serious objections to his ethical theory.

In the end, it’s odd that one can share so many of Harris’s views and yet find his project largely unsuccessful. I certainly share his vision of the well-being of conscious creatures as a sensible end for ethics. And I agree that science can and should help us to attain this end. And I certainly agree that religion has no monopoly on morals. The problem—and it’s one that Harris never faces up to—is that one can agree with all these things and yet not think that morality should be “considered an undeveloped branch of science.”

Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it, and a real contribution to the old project of a “naturalized ethics” would have required a fuller engagement with its contradictions and complications. Instead, the landscape that the book calls to mind is that of a city a few days after a snowstorm. A marvelously clear avenue stretches before us, but the looming banks to either side betray how much has been unceremoniously swept aside.