Why does /r/badphilosophy dislike Sam so much?

people believe Kant can just say, "You cannot get an ought from an is" and that that's obviously correct

This isn't merely about piously taking a philosopher at their word. Such a claim on your behalf is not a sign that you're giving a fair-shake to disconfirming opinions, if all you do is portray philosophical consensus as 'believing Kant can just say' whatever. Nevertheless, I'll proceed, just because I want to share beneficial information with you, not because I assume you'll give it a fair-shake.

Anyway, as a deliberaly relaxing option for you, I'll point you to a very calm, civil clarification from Patricia Churchland to Sam when she was with Sam on a panel-discussion:

When you really pay very close attention, what [Hume] does seem to be saying is that you can't DERIVE a statement about what 'ought-to-be,' from statements about 'is.' But what does he mean, exactly, by 'derive?'

Well, if we take modern logic as our cue here, what he means is, that you can't construct a valid argument —where the conclusion ['ought'] ABSOLUTELY follows GIVEN the premises ['is']. Ok, so you can't derive it: there isn't a logical —that is, a deductively valid— argument that will do it for you.

But what about induction? What about inference to the best explanation? When you actually read Hume, he himself makes all kinds of inferences about what we ought to do, based on the facts. Now, they're not deductively valid inferences. But quite honestly, how one gets around the world most of the time has almost nothing to do with deduction, and has everything to do with other kinds of pragmatic inferences.

Most days, I make many decisions about what I ought to do that aren't necessarily social decisions. They are not derived, using logically valid argument. They're just inferences about what's a reasonable thing to do: I have a terrible toothache, I ought to go to the dentist! Given the background knowledge I have, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for me to do.

So we can condede Hume point that you can't derive an ought statement from is-statements, but I think all of the time, within both the physical world and the social domain, we make judgments about what we ought to do without resorting to a yet-deeper 'rule' that provides the normative basis. That seems to be borne-out by results in psychology.

In other words, Churchland says: ok, so Hume seems right. But for almost every practical concern in life, we don't need to pretend like we have air-tight moral reasoning on our sides. And Sam's claim that moral claims could be derived directly from science was wandering off into the unnecessarily deductive terrain, rather than the more useful and philosophically humble inductive-inference terrain (where we can stil say 'science indispensably informs our morality').

/r/samharris Thread Parent