Hello there. I'm Chris Anderson, the head of TED. This is a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily back from 2010. It features the philosopher and author Sam Harris. After the talk, if you'd like to dive a little deeper into his ideas, subscribe to our new show, The TED Interview. This week, I sit down with Sam to discuss in further detail his argument that science and reason can give answers to moral questions

and to explore the many, many controversies that emerge from that claim.

Please join me for the TED interview wherever you listen.

I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality, questions of good and evil and right and wrong,

are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value,

but it can never tell us what we ought to value.

And consequently most people, I think most people probably here,

think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life.

Questions like what is worth living for, what is worth dying for,

what constitutes a good life.

So I'm going to argue that this is an illusion.

The separation between science and human values is an illusion,

and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

Now it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation

for morality and human values because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to

belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world

is that can tell us how the world ought to be.

But I think this is quite clearly untrue.

But values are a certain kind of fact.

They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks?

It's because we don't think rocks can suffer.

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