Philosophy EE on Harris's Objective Morality

[ryansparx]

I've been reading Hume's Treatise of Human Nature as research for my EE. I'd basically like to discuss the Is-Ought problem and its implications. For the sake of relevance, I thought it might be interesting to contrast Is-Ought to Harris's objective morality. However, I'm well aware that The Moral Landscape is popular philosophy and is somewhat dumbed down for people who haven't read much philosophy. If I discussed Harris' objective morality along with Is-Ought would my EE lose credibility? Are their any other ethical systems that would be interesting when compared to Is-Ought? It seems that a large amount of secular systems are founded on something closely resembling moral relativism (which is advocated by Is-Ought). I really want to compare Hume to modern times.

Thanks!

[Award Winning Boss]

You can still talk about the problem in relation to modern times but I wouldn't recommend using Harris. Mainly because his work is widely regarded as being heavily mistaken with academic philosophy.

You're not really looking for moral systems for this question, you're looking at meta-ethics. If you want some modern philosophers then you can look into John Searle, Alasdair maclntyre, J. L Mackie, and a lot of moral work done in the 1900s.

'Modern' work in philosophy can go back to the 1950s really. So there should be a lot of stuff out there. You can also read the brief passage on the stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io

[ryansparx]

Cool, thanks a lot!