ABSTRACT
Some people find ethical subjectivism an attractive philosophical position because they think ethics and science are fundamentally different. Philosophers frequently evaluate a general moral theory by seeing what it implies about specific examples. This is what Gilbert Harman did when he used his moral judgment about the example of organ harvesting to argue that the general principle is false. Thought experiments differ from empirical experiments in that thought experiments don’t involve actually making observations. Hume’s distinction between is-statements and ought-statements often leads people to think that science is value-free. This seems to follow from the idea that science aims to establish what is the case and takes no stand on any ethical issue. According to Harman, there is a striking difference between ethics and science. Scientific facts are needed to explain why people have the scientific beliefs they do, but ethical facts are not needed to explain why people have the ethical beliefs they do.
