I’m not sure why a non-publishing neuroscience PhD would be the best guide to moral philosophy, but it’s worth recording that there are some significant scientists who don’t buy Sam Harris’s approach to the matter.
Before looking out that link, however, I had already noted that you (on Harris’s behalf) have already taken consequentialist and utilitarian ethics as axiomatic - how would one determine scientifically that that is the right approach?
Once it is admitted, though, there would be a good case for saying that human zoos were part of a Eugenics project that sought the greatest well-being of the greatest number, by purifying the human race of degenerate lines. If that cost a few unhappy degenerates their freedom in educating the public about that greater good, then it’s quite hard to quantify the maths, but the ethics is exemplary.
My own contemporary example, though, is simpler. Leading relief charity organisers - previously lauded for their unique planning and administrative abilities in disaster relief - have been accused of using the bait of food-aid to procure sexual favours from poor disaster victims.
The scientific calculus seems simple in this case. The abilities of Aid Director X are the best hope for the survival hundreds of thousands of shattered lives. But if his sexual needs are not met by the exploitation of a few women, he will withdraw his labour and go elsewhere, at the cost of the well being, and indeed the very lives, of the entire population. The same unfortunate outcome will arise if he is involuntarily removed by disciplinary procedures.
Quite clearly, then, the moral thing to do is to turn a blind eye to his peccadillos in the interests of the greater good.
There seems to be some reason to suppose that the guilty parties in this scandal have made something like that kind of calculation. So what scientific metric would Harris envisage that would deal justly with the abuse of insignificant poor people by “indispensible” rich people?