Good and Evil

[Pyrrho]

Objective and universal values are completely different. Read the Moral Landscape. Hume didn't get it right, values don't exist apart from the individuals who hold them.

With that comment, I see you do not understand Hume.  Hume did not say that values exist apart from beings that value things.  This is basic to his system of ethics, so if you don't have this right, you don't understand Hume's position at all.

There is no fact value distinction, scientists appeal to scientific values all the time when dealing with facts.

Scientists, being people, have feelings and make value judgements, like everyone else.  This does not mean that the values themselves are a part of science.  Though, of course, why people have values is something that can be studied by science.

Hume's fact value distinction isn't a law of the universe. Sam Harris got it right.

From an article by Sam Harris:

For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris...15742.html

Thus far, there is no disagreement with Hume.  But here Harris goes awry:

While the analogy may not be perfect, I maintain that it is good enough to obviate these three criticisms. Is there a Value Problem, with respect to health? Is it unscientific to value health and seek to maximize it within the context of medicine? No. Clearly there are scientific truths to be known about health -- and we can fail to know them, to our great detriment. This is a fact. And yet, it is possible for people to deny this fact, or to have perverse and even self-destructive ideas about how to live. Needless to say, it can be fruitless to argue with such people.

The valuing of health is certainly not a matter of science.  That people generally do value health is a matter of fact, but that they ought to so desire it is something quite different from a mere poll of what people value.  Here Mr. Harris is simply begging the question, and making a valuation while pretending that he isn't.

It is, as he says, "fruitless to argue with such people," because Harris lacks a proper argument for this point.

As for why this is not normally an issue, that is because people are such that they virtually all have basically the same feelings on such matters.  When a patient goes to a doctor with a broken leg, the patient almost always wants the leg to be mended, and that is what the doctor almost always wants as well.  It is that "wanting" that is important on this.  That "wanting" is a feeling, not something that one discovers out in the world about how things should be.


More Harris:

Again, the same can be said about medicine, or science as a whole. As I point out in my book, science in based on values that must be presupposed -- like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesn't share these values cannot do science.

Harris is confusing the motive to do science, with a principle of science.  The two are not the same at all.  The motive to do science is not a part of science (though, of course, one can study people's motives scientifically).

Yet more Harris:

There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it.

In other words, he has no problem with begging the question.  Thus his system is based on fallacious reasoning.

Harris appears to be letting his feelings guide him, without realizing that that is what he is doing.

Even if I (and Hume) are wrong that feelings are the root of morality, and that instead it is somehow based on reason, Harris' system isn't based on reason; it is based on a fallacy.


Edited to add:

Harris' position seems to be basically a retelling of John Stuart Mill's position, but with different terminology.  The biggest difference seems to be that in Mill's case, he was smart enough to realize he was the begging the question at a fundamental level, though, like Harris, Mill did not find that too problematic to be acceptable to him.  But it is what pretty much everyone who rejects his theory [rightfully] uses as a reason to reject the theory.