Being in ‘good health’ is a different sense of the word ‘good’. Good health is taken to mean healthy and fit. That isn’t ‘the good’ or ‘right’ in a normative sense.
I didn’t say it isn’t good. And it might very well be good.
He has gold?
That’s the rub of the Is-Ought Problem. as I understand it There are at least two sorts of facts - naturalistic facts and normative facts. A naturalistic fact is the sort of thing that empirical investigation can speak on - how heavy something is, how bright something is, how a mechanical process works, etc. These are facts that tell us how a thing IS. When you propose a naturalistic fact, and someone challenges it, you can explain it by pointing to something in the world. “The bowling ball knocked down five pins!” you say. And you can demonstrate it by showing that a bowling ball was thrown and that it caused five pins to fall over when it hit the rack. The state of affairs gives credence to the fact, because if the state of affairs was different (like, if the bowling ball knocked over FOUR pins) then the claim would be false.
Taken to mean healthy and fit by whom, though? Who says that being in good health means to healthy and fit? And who says that being healthy and fit means (at the absolute minimum) to be alive? Who says a dead person can’t be healthy and fit? Obviously, definitions of these words don’t allow for dead people under their umbrella, but who created that definition? And why couldn’t I create my own that did include them?
All knowledge has to be organized into a framework we can use and understand. “Good health” and “healthy and fit” are coextensional. They both pick up the same idea, I would say, in general discourse. If interlocutors want to modify the framework of their discussion, they can by defining terms. When people use different frameworks is when we get people talking past one another.
I don’t know what units you might use, but you already decided it in 1. If 1 is correct then you can go straight to 3. There are no health benefits from smoking and only harm can come from it. It’s a very easy decision (although giving up is not an easy matter). It’s a scientific fact.
Harris argues (successfully, in my view) that values are a type of fact, and consequently, moral claims can be evaluated scientifically. I was attempting to break down the distinction you’ve drawn between moral claims and more conventionally scientific claims (like you’d find in the subject of human health). And to echo Bradski’s point - in both morality and medicine, the word “good” can viewed as synonymous with “beneficial” - another way the distinction is illusory.
It would be interesting to see how Harris (I don’t know him) successfully argues that values are a type of fact. Isn’t it supposed that a “fact” is accessible to everybody in the same way? But if besides saying that something is “good” or “beneficial”, we need to specify “to whom” it is so (because it is not so for some others), then, how can the qualification be a fact susceptible of “scientific” evaluation?
The distinction isn’t illusionary because the semantic content of the propositions “x is beneficial” and “x is morally good” are different. It very well might be the case that what is beneficial is morally good - but you can’t get there without a logical bridge. You need “if x is beneficial, the x is morally good” which is not a scientific fact. If it is a fact at all, it’s a normative fact. And such a fact certainly isn’t an a priori truth, and it’s not an analytic statement.
How do you decide whether children are better or worse off
It may be right in itself but what does it tell us about human rights?
How do you decide whether an act is evil in any respect?
A good point but are all negative effects evil?