Sam Harris has argued that the physical and biologic facts of the human species can serve as an objective basis for a universal, scientifically-sound ethical system

Only after certain values like "happiness" or "optimal functioning" or "health" are nailed down.

For example one thing that trips me up is that I see ethics as "what I respect" and that is mainly aesthethical. I like acts of heroism, they are beautiful. Therefore I consider courage a moral virtue. It is irrelevant if it was necessary or not. If in a certain future everything risky is done by machines and humans would become extremely timid as a perfectly rational strategy, I would want to prevent that future, because that is ugly, disrespectable, repulsive, disgusting.

I know that it is all an evolved bias, a heuristic that makes me respect those virtues that used to be useful in an ancestral environment. Still. Why cannot I still make things we find instinctively beautiful and respectable into terminal values? Why should only happiness, functioning or health be terminal values?