Apparently Sam Harris is a good writer, but I can't believe that anybody in 2016 is seriously advocating for Utilitarianism in 2016.
Very intelligent review: Review of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, by Sam Harris:
To make his case, Harris must commit along the way what for many is intellectual heresy. It has long been the position of science that the descriptive and the prescriptive spring from entirely separate realms of human experience. The thinking is that science deals only with the descriptive—with facts. Science can tell us what the facts are, but it can never tell us what we ought to do in a moral sense. Rather, the latter is the exclusive domain of religious and philosophical discourse, a normative universe the morally indifferent instruments of science can never penetrate. This position is most associated with David Hume. Hume argued that statements of fact (“your mother gave birth to you”) can never lead to moral conclusions (“so you should be nice to your mother”). Yet against the cautions of Hume, Harris attempts to prove that it is in fact possible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’.
Harris is very clear about his mission. To use his own words: he is not merely saying that “science can help us get what we want out of life.” (p. 28) Harris is arguing that science can “help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want...” (p. 28) These are very different claims. The first is uncontroversial and rather obvious; the second is impossible. Harris is arguing for a “science of morality” (p. 27) that will provide humanity with the necessary toolkit to discover what is objectively right and wrong, and pinpoint a universal conception of human values. In advancing this science of morality, however, Harris takes enormous liberties in logic...
Science can tell me what I should want? What? Science is not my Mommy, and if my Mom had raised me scientifically I would probably be insane..
