Yes, writing down Sharia should have some effect, but what? I doubt the Koran is more specific than Deuteronomy 21:18-20, which vaguely talks about killing disobedient sons, but is pretty widely ignored.
I think the most useful part of the concept of memes is to separate belief from belief-in-belief.
My previous comment emphasized the public too much. I don't mean to dispute that people believe in the rightness of what they do. I'm not talking about peer pressure to change one's actions. I do mean that neighbors influence people's morals, but mainly I object to the claim that people actually believe auxiliary factual claims that are made in their morality. I don't believe Harris's claim the Taliban choose their morals based on beliefs about afterlife. Did you honor your mother and father in order to live long? Did you keep the covenant with Abraham so that your descendents would be as numerous as the stars?
First, it's not just the uncle - it's the father, too.
Yes. Why do you bring this up? Has anyone proposed a theory under which the father and uncle act differently?
First, it's not just the uncle - it's the father, too. Yes. Why do you bring this up? Has anyone proposed a theory under which the father and uncle act differently?
Yes, this theory is commonly called evolution.
My point is that it takes some pretty strong mental forces to overcome natural attachment of father for the daughter. Shame by itself does not seem to make the cut.
Sam Harris has a new book, The Moral Landscape, in which he makes a very simple argument, at least when you express it in the terms we tend to use on LW: he says that a reasonable definition of moral behavior can (theoretically) be derived from our utility functions. Essentially, he's promoting the idea of coherent extrapolated volition, but without all the talk of strong AI.
He also argues that, while there are all sorts of tricky corner cases where we disagree about what we want, those are less common than they seem. Human utility functions are actually pretty similar; the disagreements seem bigger because we think about them more. When France passes laws against wearing a burqa in public, it's news. When people form an orderly line at the grocery store, nobody notices how neatly our goals and behavior have aligned. No newspaper will publish headlines about how many people are enjoying the pleasant weather. We take it for granted that human utility functions mostly agree with each other.
What surprises me, though, is how much flak Sam Harris has drawn for just saying this. There are people who say that there can not, in principle, be any right answer to moral questions. There are heavily religious people who say that there's only one right answer to moral questions, and it's all laid out in their holy book of choice. What I haven't heard, yet, are any well-reasoned objections that address what Harris is actually saying.
So, what do you think? I'll post some links so you can see what the author himself says about it:
"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.
Frequently asked questions: Definitely helps clarify some things.
TED talk about his book: I think he devotes most of this talk to telling us what he's not claiming.