“Sam Harris: Science Can Answer Moral Questions”
Critique Paper

Sam Harris began his argument by saying, “The separation between science and human values is an illusion,” adding “facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. This is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of facts. They are facts about the well beings of conscious creatures.” What is he trying to convey? Based on what he said, values are also facts about how people like us try to live a good life. If he considered values as facts, does it mean our moral values were created based on science facts? Or do scientific facts are based on moral values? We cannot say that a belief to be objectively true can be considered as a fact. He even pointed our ethical obligations towards the rock or insects. First of all, ethics concern is the morality of social beings. Since when can we talk to a rock and hurt it? He then justified that, “If culture changes us, it changes us by changing our brains. And therefore whatever cultural variation there is in the way human beings flourish can at least in principle be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind…” I probably I agree with him in this one. People change because the people around change. But does it make it scientific? That our brains control our ethical actions? Brain controls our actions and we reason out using our brain but acting according to our ethics what make us morally right or wrong. We live our lives base on our ethics and use our brain to absorb how to decide. He also gave example, which connects with moral relativism, that Muslim women cover their body completely so as not to offend their alleged god and then telling his audience that living in a different culture, we cannot avoid judging their wellbeing because they do such practice. If we let empirical study to be the basis of what is right or wrong, scientific