Hey I had a fence to paint.
I’ve never heard the term “bad science” used except in regard to improperly done or bogus science. I’ve never heard it used to mean immoral science. Which is a thing, for sure, but I haven’t noticed confusion about this before.
I’m glad this discussion made you think, because you have certainly made me think about my positions.
~Max
Is not sterilization both scientific and a policy? What is unscientific about my hypothesis? You can’t say this form of eugenics is unscientific because it has not been tested while claiming it should not be tested because it is unscientific.
Assuming the abortion of a percentage of fetuses is more ethical than sterilization of diseased adults, which seems quite reasonable on instinct, I agree with you on the basis of pragmatism. But that is beside the point.
If I sterilize everybody who is diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and screen their immediate family members, then over time the number of people with Huntington’s disease will decrease. This is falsifiable, logical, and based on facts. What more do you ask for?
~Max
I will cut to the chase. Do think unethical science is bad science because it is unethical?
~Max
If you say, let’s pass a law requiring sterilization, that’s policy not science. If you say, let’s take a sample of people diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and sterilize them, and take a control sample and not sterilize them, that is an experiment. An impractical one, since it would take years to conduct, and one that would never pass an Experimental Subject Review Board. One can obviously dream up immoral experiments, which is why these boards exist.
I’m not qualified to judge whether or not the experiment would be bad science.
And even if sterilization did reduce the number of cases, that does not mean we need to pass a law. That’s still a moral judgement.
A less blatant example I offer is the call by anti-vaxx people to conduct an experiment where vaccines are withheld from a portion of the population, and their health is compared to a group who are vaccinated. This is improper since our best knowledge shows that vaccines work, so you are putting the group at risk. If they put themselves at risk, it is okay to compare them with a vaccinated group. Which has been done.
But I’m not sure what the point is. The experiment would be good science, just not moral science.
No. Proposals rejected by review boards may be good science but unethical science.
You can have good ethical science (most of it,) bad ethical science, good unethical science, and bad unethical science. The concepts are orthogonal. You might have seen people attacking science they consider unethical as bad. I think some of the attacks on fetal stem cell research were along these lines.
The experiment isn’t really necessary because the science behind sterilization and the science behind the genetic nature of Huntington’s disease is already well established. We already know that 9 out of 10 instances of Huntington’s disease is due to inherited genes. The genetic mechanism is known so this is a case of causation. We already know that sterilizing people quite literally prevents them from procreating. If you do not procreate, you do not pass down a heritable disease to your children. The proposed policy, though not necessarily moral or ethical, follows logically from science. Science supports the conclusion that selective sterilization will cause a decrease in births with that disease.
A quick aside.
You don’t actually have to sterilize people to prove the hypothesis, you just need to screen for Huntington’s disease and adjust the data as if the policy were in effect. Have every person in the sample agree to be screened, have their children born within a certain timeframe screened, and attempt to have the other parent screened too. Then divide the data for original participants into two random groups (keeping couples together), group A and group B. Count the number of children born to group A who tested positive for Huntington’s whose parents did not test positive for Huntington’s. Compare with the number of children born to group B who tested positive for Huntington’s. Repeat for different groupings of A and B.
John Hopkins Medicine says the test costs about $355[1]. The National Library of Medicine says Huntington disease affects (prevalence of) 3 to 7 per 100,000 people of European ancestry[2]. The Census Bureau says about 72.4% of Americans identify their race as White, which includes European, Middle Eastern, and North African[3]. Making quite a few assumptions and using the formula n=(Z[SUP]2[/SUP]P(1-P))/d[SUP]2[/SUP] I get a sample size of just under 42,500 people[4][5]. That’s a cost of about $30 million before incentives and overhead, assuming each person in the original sample requires 2 tests (assuming a fertility rate of 2 and a sex ratio of .5). Add an extra $10 million for incentives to participate and the final price tag is around $40 million.
[1] Huntington Disease Test. (n.d.). John Hopkins Medicine. Retrieved from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/dnadiagnostic/tests/tests/huntington-disease-test on June 26, 2019.
[2] Huntington disease. (n.d.). U.S. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from Huntington's disease: MedlinePlus Genetics on June 26, 2019.
[3] Humes, K. R., Jones, N. A., & Ramirez, R. R. (2011). Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010. United States Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf
[4] Naing, L., Winn, T., & Rusli, B. N. (2006). Practical Issues in Calculating the Sample Size for Prevalence Studies. Archives of Orofacial Sciences, 1, 9-14. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.504.2129&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[5] Z=1.96, P=.00005*.724=.0000362, d=.025; n=1.96^2*.0000362(1-.0000362)/.0000181^2=424471 (rounded up)
Very well, then do you agree that public policy should be properly based on morals rather than mere scientific validity?
~Max
Sigh. That’s my point. Scientific results do not in general directly lead to policy decisions, but are an input to them. My original point was that we should use valid, not invalid, scientific results as this input.
I’d say ethical instead of moral, but not many scientists would argue there needs to be an ethical component.
The above shows that we can put at least one form of eugenics into the category of “unethical but good science”. This contradicts what you said about eugenics before:
I think we are agreed that some pronouncements on morals are unfalsifiable, specifically the ones that come from direct personal revelation. I say those pronouncements are neither good nor bad science, because being unfalsifiable they are not science at all. On the other hand, the person who experienced the revelation can draw upon their personal experience as evidence, and from their perspective the moral implications might be quite rational.
So then we have at least the possibility that some people take moral views quite contrary to yours for what they think are good reasons.
Now let’s ask what determines society’s moral framework. If we reject universal morality, I think the answer is kraterocracy - force ultimately determines what is moral, because the dissidents could be killed. In our case the various kraterocrats coexist somewhat peacefully due to a truce which calls for democracy.
If the democracy calls for mandatory sterilization of people with Huntington’s disease, then unless the kraterocrats successfully abandon the truce (revolt), that form of eugenics becomes a moral policy for society as a whole. That is my view of things, what do you think?
~Max
Here is the definition of eugenics from Google:
While the definition says science, we can see it is really a policy, with the science in support of the policy. I was referring more to the policy. Selective breeding is hardly bad science. It’s application to humans is the issue.
I agree, they aren’t science at all. Neither are they reasons for anyone except the person thinking he has the revelation for doing anything. If I told you that a pixie told me that you should vote for candidate X, are you going to take my pixie into account when making your decision? (I hope not.)
On the other hand ethical (or moral if you wish) arguments, perhaps based on personal experience, can be laid out for others to examine. No problem there at all. My dispute was moral arguments based on unjustified axioms. If my pixie told me that red-headed women were evil, I could make a moral argument on forcibly dyeing their hair based on this. One which I trust you wouldn’t accept.
I’ve never disputed this, and have explicitly said that there are positions I disagree with which are nonetheless based on valid axioms.
We’ve had plenty of examples in the last century of what I think we’d agree were immoral policies enforced through force. Would you call Nazi policy a moral policy? They had the guns and they might even had a majority. Closer to home, Jim Crow laws had force and votes behind them. Were they moral?
Do you think morals and ethics are decided by votes or worse, force? Policies are, sure, but not ethics.
For the Nazi society, I think Nazi policy was moral. There were cases where it was not democratic, because the population at large was decieved by propaganda, and the actual policy decision making was not democratic, but in general I believe Nazi policy was generally supported by the German public. That being said, the policies were moral from the perspective of Nazi society because the strength of Nazi society supported those policies.
Please don’t confuse my opinion on what was moral from the perspective of a society with my opinion on what is moral to me personally.
For the same reason I would say yes, Jim Crow laws were moral from the perspective of various southern states which enacted them. I can’t definitively say Jim Crow laws were immoral to American society at large until at least the 1950s, when the force of the federal government was aligned against those laws.
I’m not sure whether to reject universal morality (or universal ethics). As we discussed before, by universal morality (or ethics) I mean that there is one system of morals (or ethics) that should apply to all of society; not necessarily absolutism, but that the same set of moral (or ethical) rules should apply to every person. If I accept universal morality (or ethics), the question then becomes “which set of morals (or ethics) is right, mine or theirs?”
But if I reject universal morality, then yes, I do believe a society’s morals (or ethics) are determined by force. The reason I use force instead of voting is because the use of force can quite literally force the vote.
~Max
That about wraps it up for me then. Thanks for being so clear. I understand that these things are not your personal morals, but if any kind of murderous set of rules can be moral, then morality has no meaning at all. I don’t think it is worth continuing this discussion.
Or maybe that’s exactly why to continue this discussion. Perhaps people need to understand that any kind of murderous set of rules cannot be regarded as moral. A twisted sense of morality should not be a universal common denominator.
I second the Biffster, since I am in no way at ease with my own conclusions. That being said, rejecting every form of universal morals is quite nihilistic to begin with.
~Max
I said I would bow out of the debate; I didn’t say I would not continue following it or thinking about the ideas expressed by you, Max. They intrigue me. Not in a good way.
I think I understand your surface intentions here, which is to argue that morality is relative (not absolute) and, as you’ve said over and over, largely dictated by those in power, or in the majority if it’s a democratic society. Neither of which guarantees a just set of ethics, which again, completely subjective in terms of the very imprecise definitions of “right” and “wrong”. I could go on but I hope I’ve got the main idea of your position on morality and ethics.
Having distanced yourself, over and over, from endorsing the obviously less desirable moral and ethical frameworks, you continue to insist that facts, laid bare, are that there is no objective* right *and wrong, only the power to say and enforce one and the other. You are ‘uncomfortable’ with those conclusions, but there they are. Indeed.
As a contemplative exercise, I might be persuaded to accept your point. But I suspect there is more to your efforts than to simply illustrate the lack of a truly universal moral framework. Because if that is all there was to it, you would not have continued to press that line of argument as vehemently as you have. Your arguments and methods are at best overly simplistic to anyone who has spent any time thinking about morality and its origins. I hope you give people who have taken part in this discussion sufficient credit for having taken the time to have done that much. At worst, however, yours is position is that which results in the rise of, ‘the banality of evil’. You’re well informed so I’m sure that’s not an idea unfamiliar to you and it fits well with your examples of accepted social norms in Nazi Germany and segregation in America.
In arguing for the absence of universal morality, you’ve diminished the ideas of good and evil to being relative terms and having no meaning at all when encapsulated by absolute signs, i.e. |good|=|evil|; who’s to say, eh Max?
It might seem clever, even insightful to you to cloud moral positions with equivocation. On closer examination, it isn’t. On closer inspection it’s actually insidiously evil, in my opinion. What your attempted rhetorical slide of hand does is excuse, even promote, anarchy, chaos and nihilism. All the while merely paying lip service to having a preference for justice over injustice (in the way that is most commonly accepted in free society).
In summary, I question your motives.
*Some people just want to watch the world burn. *
J’accuse, Max. J’accuse.
ETA: ‘sleight of hand’ :smack:
Okay then. Maybe you should think about why you are uneasy about your conclusions. I suspect it might be because your own ethical system, which is well supported, disagrees with these things. Why is yours better? I would say because your axioms are better. If you force yourself to grant repugnant axioms special power, you are going to wind up considering things you consider immoral as moral to others.
Jim Crow laws are based on the same axiom as slavery - that black people are inferior to white people, and therefore do not have to be given equal rights. The inferiority was intellectual inferiority. Laws against slaves being taught to read were partially at least to avoid the embarrassing situation where axiomatically intellectually inferior people could outreason the superior whites.
Since you know as well as I that this axiom is factually incorrect, you should agree that a moral system built on it is incorrect also. Which you do at heart. All you have to do is to intellectually agree, and your problem goes away.
Actually, I press that line of argument because it seems to contradict the exclusion of religion from public policy debate. Right?
I might not believe a religious argument regarding morality. I certainly have no evidence for it. But if enough people support it, for whatever reason, that makes it moral for society. Unless the argument is fallacious given the premises, who am I to demand its exclusion from public policy debate? To claim that right would be as self-righteous and narcicistic as Stalin or Mao, except I don’t have the wish or the means to kill dissidents. So by all accounts it would be wrong of me to support such a ban.
I am young and most likely quite ignorant, and I do appreciate the effort everyone puts up against my rambling. Here, in the Dualism thread, in the thermodynamics thread, in the abortion thread(s), everywhere really. I am incredibly humbled.
I wouldn’t say they are equal, but that comparing two nonexistent values such as that is a category mistake, like dividing by zero. I haven’t fully rejected universal morality but as this thread has progressed I find myself drifting more and more away from that position. If there is a system, what is it, and why? Why that system instead of a religion?
I’m not trying to be clever and my lip service isn’t lip service. I really don’t have a developed foundation for morals besides the largely religious one bestowed upon me by misplaced authority. It has glaring flaws, to say the least. So when you make a pronouncement about morals, although I may agree with you, I don’t know the rationale. When I search for the reason, the answer always comes up with some sort of universal moral system; our morals are better than their morals just because.
~Max
I don’t have an objective way to measure how good my axioms are; that is a problem of epistemology which I think about every night.
I know “in my heart”, but in my head the concepts are as baseless as the authorities which instilled them.
~Max
You don’t have a scale to measure axiom quality, but you can tell of some are better than others. Ones that are falsifiable and which have been supported by evidence are better than unfalsifiable ones and certainly better than ones which have evidence against them.
Considering voting rights for women. (I just read an extensive review of a book on this.) A major argument against - or rather the axiom leading to people not supporting this - was that women were not intellectually capable of making the decisions necessary to vote. Of course the opponents of suffrage never bothered to verify this axiom, and probably treated the many, many counterexamples as special cases or covered their eyes.
Eliminating bad axioms might still result in the same conclusion. Saying killing the enemy in war is right because they are somehow not human (the theme of much propaganda) is a bad axiom. Saying killing the enemy is necessary because we are defending our lives and have no choice is a much better one.Just war, obviously.