Ethics is a Science (domain of knowledge)

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=coberst]
The hang-up comes because we use the word ‘science’ in a popular fashion that is not related to this meaning of ‘science’.
[/QUOTE]
Fair enough, although I would say that, as a result of the increasingly technological world in which we live, the definition of science as that which embraces the scientific method has become the dominant one.

But if you’re taking science to mean the acquisition of knowledge through study and experience, then I’m afraid there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about suggesting we apply this to ethics.

22

There’s another issue here, I think, which is related to the criticisms of objectivity raised so far, but not exactly the same. The worry with reducing ethics to a set of scientific principles, I think, is that once you’ve evolved these, say, 47 principles, you might think that’s the whole of morality – or to use a less begging-the-question term, the whole of “being good.” So the problem this leads to, I think, is that once you’ve got your principles, they act as a safe harbor for conduct that a more amorphous moral system would recognize as wrong. To use a silly example, imagine the excuse one of Moses’ followers might have had after pissing off his grandfather. “Hey! It says honor they father and they mother, not my grandfather!”

–Cliffy

23

I don’t think ethics can be called a science, but it can be inquired into in a systematic way, which has many of the same advantages. My favorite example of such an approach is John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice. Defintely worth a read by anyone interested in the subject.

24

[QUOTE=PBear42]
I don’t think ethics can be called a science, but it can be inquired into in a systematic way, which has many of the same advantages. My favorite example of such an approach is John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice. Defintely worth a read by anyone interested in the subject.
[/QUOTE]

Rawls’ work is interesting, and it reinvigourated modern political philohosphy… certainly worth reading.

However, Rawls falls victim to exactly the same cultural relativism as all the other attempts to define universal moral absolutes.

If you look at the “universal” human goods that Rawls lists, they pretty much all apply only in the context of a modern industrial society. The “right to work”, for example, need not apply either to a marxist society, nor to a primitive hunter-gatherer society (nor to anyone so rich they don’t need to work)… and is therefore not a minimum, universal social good, but one tailored to an industrial state.

Many of the other “goods” he lists are also a product of later 20th-century Western experience… so one would certainly be able to build a “moral” society and still omit many of them.

25

[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
(Blatantly off-topic)

FRDE, I’m noticing lately that you have some interesting things to say, but your posting style—sort of an “e. e. cummings meets Microsoft Word Outline View”—distracting, to put it charitably. Any chance you could knock it off?
[/QUOTE]

e. e. cummings was noted for her lack of capitalization.

I intensely dislike long paragraphs, and make an effort to break things up.

Sorry if it irritates you, but I’ve learnt that white space is often more important than the text itself

  • the medium can obscure the message.

@E-Logic et al

Rawl’s relativeness is an interesting example

  • a suitable set of values for a specific society
  • totally unsuitable for other societies

I vaguely remember him coming up with ‘Justice as Fairness’

  • since ‘fairness’ is highly subjective, he would have been a lot more accurate if he had said: ‘Justice as what people reckon is right’

I believe it is worth examining our own ethics, eg: beliefs, and checking that they are internally consistent. Also the ethics of past ages, and other current societies.

However the trap turns up, when we judge other societies by our values, and things get distinctly dangerous when we try to impose our values on other societies.

One example is the West’s condemnation of the Shah and SAVAK, which led to his downfall and the emergence of a thoroughly unpleasant state.

A current example is the West lecturing China on ‘uman rites’.
Given another 20 years the Chinese system will resemble our own, but right now it is in a very fragile state - the peasants outnumber the slightly educated.

I am not concerned whether or not ‘we have the right to impose our values on another society’ - to me the use of ‘right’ is idiotic, it is like trying to enforce small print in a contract on someone who has never agreed to the contract, and never even heard of it.

What does concern me is the probable outcome of imposing alien values.

As a rule of thumb, I would compare the body count, of interfering.

For example, the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was an invasion of another sovereign state, but it overthrew a throughly unpleasant regime, and was both militarily successful and saved a lot of lives.

I don’t think I need to mention some other current examples.

26

[QUOTE=FRDE]
I vaguely remember him coming up with ‘Justice as Fairness’

  • since ‘fairness’ is highly subjective, he would have been a lot more accurate if he had said: ‘Justice as what people reckon is right’.
    [/QUOTE]
    This is pretty much what Rawls advocated… his principle of “reflective equilibrium” requires balancing proposed ethical norms against an internal sense of “what seems fair”. If enough people do this over a long enough period of time, the consensus that emerges should produce ethical norms that meet the requirement to be “just/fair”.

Rawls thought that “justice” was achieved when the ethical norms arrived at through this consideration were viewed by society as authoritative and able to be complied with.

Clearly, different societies will (and have) be willing to comply with widely differing sets of ethical norms… change the society, and you change the norms that will viewed as “fair”.

However, this obviously moves those norms away from universality and marks them out as necessarily contingent. Meaning we’re back to where we came in. :slight_smile:

27

The OP is apparently confusing the study of a thing with the thing itself.

28

My suspicion is that ethics will turn out to something like language. The specifics may be culturally contingent, but there’s probably some kind of “deep structure” that’s hard wired into us.

In any event I absolutely reject the facile dismissal of ethics as arbitrary or inherently subjective. The fact that ethics is variable among individuals and cultures does not imply that it’s random or resistant to systematization or rational inquiry. Almost by definition ethics cannot be purely subjective, it must be a shared understanding among individuals otherwise it would be useless to the species. There’s no point in holding to an ethical principle that has meaning only to oneself.
There is one fundamental reason I’d resist calling ethics a body of knowledge (or science). Knowledge (and science) are purely descriptive activities. In order to have an ethical system you must attach a value or preference to at least one state of affairs. And while I reject the idea that attaching value is an arbitrary process, it’s seems to me that whatever it is, it doesn’t fall under the domain of “knowledge gathering.”

I think I like **der trihs’s ** analysis the best, that ethical systems can (and should) certainly be systematically analyzed for internal consistency, effectiveness in achieving stated goals, and in relation to other systems.

29

[QUOTE=uglybeech]
In any event I absolutely reject the facile dismissal of ethics as arbitrary or inherently subjective. The fact that ethics is variable among individuals and cultures does not imply that it’s random or resistant to systematization or rational inquiry. Almost by definition ethics cannot be purely subjective, it must be a shared understanding among individuals otherwise it would be useless to the species. There’s no point in holding to an ethical principle that has meaning only to oneself.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think that’s what anyone meant. Ethics is descibed above as subjective by contrast to objective(having tangible reality). Ethics arises internally, from the minds of humans, not from some hard-and-fast discoverable, external law of physics.
All it takes to refute this is one example of a discoverable external law of ethics.

And who said anything about it being random? That’s just ridiculous.

30

“Science” implies a lot of things, like peer review and replicable data, that really can’t be applied to ethics. Equal and opposite reactions, the speed of light, and the displacement of water by an immersed body all work the same pretty much everywhere, but the ethics of moneylending, selling body parts, and eating pork on Friday vary greatly from locality to locality and are purely societal constructs. I guess it could be a social science, but that marginalizes the usefuleness of any accumulated data.

Astrology is a “domain of knowledge,” as is phrenology. That doesn’t make the knowledge accurate or useful. Put it this way: If there’s no math involved, how scientific can it really be?

31

I always take the principles of verification and falsifiability to be integral to “the scientific method”.

I’m not sure that ethics meets these criteria? The study of how individuals interpret ethics may be scientific, but that’s sociology / psychology rather than “ethics” as it’s usually understood.

32

[QUOTE=coberst]

Here are a few principles laid out in the 30 articles of the declaration:

  • All humans are equal in dignity and rights.
  • All humans have the rights of life, liberty, and security.
  • No human shall be enslaved.
  • No human shall be tortured.
  • All humans have a right to an adequate standard of living.
  • All humans have a right to education.
  • All humans have a right to peacefully assemble.
  • All humans are equal under the law.
    [/QUOTE]

I can think of exceptions to most of these, in a way that I can’t think of exceptions to Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. A science has hard-and-fast laws, but these ethical principles are more like ideals or articles of faith. Does a member of the Crips, recruiting seventh-graders in your son’s school, have an inviolable right to an education? Does an able-bodied idler have a right to an adequate standard of living? Should his salary come out of your paycheck? Is someone who traffics in slavery or torture (and they are more numerous than you’d think) equal in dignity–and as deserving of liberty–as someone who doesn’t? See, some of your laws run into one another here.

33

[QUOTE=uglybeech]
In any event I absolutely reject the facile dismissal of ethics as arbitrary or inherently subjective. The fact that ethics is variable among individuals and cultures does not imply that it’s random or resistant to systematization or rational inquiry.
[/QUOTE]

I would venture to state that ethics are anything /but/ arbitrary.

I reckon that they develop and evolve according to the environment.

However, they are inherently subjective as they are views or opinions.

Systemization is fine, nothing wrong with examining what we consider ‘right’ and what we consider ‘wrong’, it is interesting examining why we hold those views, also why such views evolved.

The danger creeps in when people try to define absolute ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, at that point ethics start mutating into ‘morals’.

Complicating something that is essentially simple is very dangerous, the fewer people that can understand it, the more likely it is to get abused by the minority who know the jargon. The Law is an example.

34

[QUOTE=Krokodil]
“Science” implies a lot of things, like peer review and replicable data, that really can’t be applied to ethics.
[/QUOTE]

The study of it can certainly be done in a scientific manner, as is done with languages.

35

[QUOTE=FRDE]

The danger creeps in when people try to define absolute ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, at that point ethics start mutating into ‘morals’.
[/QUOTE]

How do you differentiate between ethics and morals?

I participated in a thread last year and I drew the line at their source: Ethics are secular in origin, morals are religious. An ethical lapse offends your fellow man; a moral lapse is an affront to God. Nearly everybody disagreed with me, including a self-described “professional ethicist,” but I cited my sources and stand by that distinction. The dictionary uses the terms interchangeably.

Where do you make the distinction?

36

[QUOTE=Monty]
The study of it can certainly be done in a scientific manner, as is done with languages.
[/QUOTE]

I wonder if empirical might be a better word than scientific.

37

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
I don’t think that’s what anyone meant. Ethics is descibed above as subjective by contrast to objective(having tangible reality). Ethics arises internally, from the minds of humans, not from some hard-and-fast discoverable, external law of physics.
All it takes to refute this is one example of a discoverable external law of ethics.

And who said anything about it being random? That’s just ridiculous.
[/QUOTE]

OK, well maybe I’m reading in more dismissal than was there, but specifically I was responding to these statements:

[QUOTE=Priceguy]
Exactly. When it comes right down to it, ethics is based on arbitrary values and opinions.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
it just means that the whole set of individuals under consideration happens to agree on the same arbitrary principle.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=e-logic]
Ultimately, ethics is totally contingent on an individual’s point-of-view.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=e-logic]
Ethics is simply our “boo” or “hooray” to certain situations -
[/QUOTE]

etc.

[QUOTE=FRDE]
However, they are inherently subjective as they are views or opinions.
[/QUOTE]
OK, I think this depends on which definition of subjective we’re talking about. If we are saying subjective as in this is a value we attach to objective reality, fine. If we’re saying subjective in the sense of purely a matter of individual perception, then I think that’s going too far.

38

[QUOTE=Krokodil]
How do you differentiate between ethics and morals?

I participated in a thread last year and I drew the line at their source: Ethics are secular in origin, morals are religious. An ethical lapse offends your fellow man; a moral lapse is an affront to God. Nearly everybody disagreed with me, including a self-described “professional ethicist,” but I cited my sources and stand by that distinction. The dictionary uses the terms interchangeably.

Where do you make the distinction?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think that’s a bad definition; ethics definitely seems to concentrate on behaviour that affects other people, whereas a lot of morality addresses things that don’t necessarily affect anyone else (diet, masturbation, jealousy, etc).

39

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
I wonder if empirical might be a better word than scientific.
[/QUOTE]

Let’s consider that for a moment.

Looks to me like one may study a human phenomenon (such as Society) in a scientific manner. Why should the study of human ethical systems be different?

40

Voyager

I think that ethics like any other science (domain of knowledge) has a set of principles and concepts. In addition there is a history of how various nations and communities deal with this matter. And perhaps most importantly there are assumptions that form its foundation.

I suspect all of us develop a set of principles and understand a set of concepts in our childhood and these are often the same set that we die with many years later. Few people, in my opinion, ever give ‘due consideration’ to these ideas that essentially guide our life in a more or less unconscious manner.

Most Western nations have a tradition of ethics that have been determined by the Catholic Church during the ages from the fall of Rome to the eighteenth century. Only as a result of the Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, have many people consider that ethics as a consideration for reason as opposed to being a result of theology.

I think that only in the last few decades have our public schools and colleges given serious effort to focus on teaching the rudiments of rationally determined ethics. This teaching is only beginning and it is contained in what is labeled as CT (Critical Thinking). I am not close enough to public education to say to what extent this effort is being actualized.