Oh yes , absolutely . That ' s what I meant when I said they don ' t have a strong quantitative foundation yet . They ' re mostly qualitative now , but that ' s also how the physical sciences started off , back when philosophers ruled . So yeah , like physical science did , I predict social science will also become a highly quantitative field in the future . And I think we ' ll be all the better for it . <| sep |> he makes it look so fucking hard <| sep |> Unfortunately if you want to get something good , you need to give up something good . <| sep |> It isn ' t just a single sentence . For instance , we have thisIn End of Faith , Harris writesAre intentions really the bottom line ? What are we to say , for instance , about those Christian missionaries in the New World who baptized Indian infants only to promptly kill them , thereby sending them to heaven ? Their intentions were apparently good . Were their actions ethical ? Yes , within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview . The medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying to help . He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the human body . Intentions matter , but they are not all that matters . Here , he says that the actions are ethical , which in this context means ethicallymorally good . Harris doesn ' t write about how society should react to the Christian missionaries or the medieval apothecary if he did , and taking for granted that the intentions actually were good , he would write something like even though the actions were morally bad , they were done not out of bad intent but out of ignorance . We can therefore assume that with correct information , they would have acted differently . He didn ' t write about that , he wrote about the morality of the actions theselves , and even here he stresses the importance of intentions . I ' m not having an easy time seeing how this is consequentialist . It isn ' t possible to interpret this as consequentalist . So , if Harris has said that he is a consequentalist which he has , the solution isn ' t to interpret everything he ' s ever said as consequentalist because that would be impossible but rather to conclude that he ' s contradicting himself .