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> All I argue is that science doesn't give you one at all. But I have given you examples of arriving at moral rules through arguments that are not based on rel
by eis 4y ago
> All I argue is that science doesn't give you one at all.
But I have given you examples of arriving at moral rules through arguments that are not based on religious thought.
> Proving this would take at least a whole book, maybe more, but such books have been written many times in the past when science vs religion was more topical. Most people don't demand such a book because "science can tell you how to do it but not whether you should" is a pretty uncontroversial position that's been taken by scientists themselves many times, it's pretty much the starting point of the debate over whether Nagasaki should have been nuked for example.
Why would it take a book? I just gave counter examples and have disproven your claim already. That you can find examples where science can not explain something does not mean it cannot explain anything in terms of "why". The whole point of science is to explain the "why". Why it happened, why it is that way and why it will happen.
You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked. That though would probably be a complex discussion but I can see a possibility that someone scientifically shows that there would have been better ways to solve the conflict.
> Obviously all this is totally unfalsifiable, it doesn't attempt to be rational in any way but it's a really useful set of beliefs and stories for creating a more peaceful society.
Only under the assumption that everyone in the society strictly follows the rule. As soon as one guy just turns into a tyrrant or if another group comes in order to suppress them the framework collapses and so it is unworkable in the real world where there are real threats.
> If you take only science as a starting point, how do you derive this sort of moral code and - just as importantly - make it stick?
We have laws that prohibit harming others and they don't need religious justification. Harming a member of society is against everyones interest because we are part of society and we optimize for a good quality of life of society as that optimizes our own. Take Sweden as an example. Very secular country. Are you claiming their society has weak morals? Are they full of revenge killings?
> In fact you'd struggle even with the far more basic task of deriving a moral code that bans murder. You can't start with evolution because animals kill each other all the time; there's nothing unnatural about murder. It's the prohibition against it that's unnatural, but science is just the study of the natural world, so that's no help. See for yourself, try it. Come up with a rational first-principles explanation of why murder is bad without invoking religion, and which doesn't simply boil down to tautologies, circular reasoning, appeal to authority or other logical fallacies. I've tried - it's hard!
I did it in other comments but here we go again: it's easy to argue that since we optimize the survival of our society we should not kill each other. A species that is happy to just randomly kill each other has real disadvantages that should be obvious. Your claim that animals kill each other all the time: killing within their own group is rare. Take two random animals from the same species and put them together in a room and see if they will kill each other. Do this with enough animals and different species. The vast majority will not kill each other. How come?
> Right, but nobody explicitly subscribes to scientism. We don't even have such a word as "scientismist" because it's pretty much the defacto default religion of the modern population.
I don't agree with that. You seriously claim that the majority just blindly believes in science but wouldn't admit it? Or is it maybe because people started to trust a system which they can at least partially verify and that can explain a lot of the real world?
> Scientism is perhaps the nastiest of all religions because it denies its own nature. Other religions accept what they are, but this one presents itself as pure rationalism even though it's not. It's very, very easy to accidentally become a follower of scientism which is why so many people are. All you have to do is use reasoning like this:
Blind belief is always bad. Which one is the worst is not a particularly interesting conversation to me.
We alreay agree that scientism (meaning religious corruption of science as you've shown) isn't good. Don't think we need to expand on that further.
- origin_path 4y agoI don't quite see where you provided examples before this comment, sorry, could you repeat them? I looked through the thread and see you asserting we don't need religions anymore, but not where you give concrete worked examples of moral questions and how to resolve them with science. "You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked" I'm not really sure how. It would be interesting to see an attempt. Note that doing this without relying on ambient moral principles like "killing people is bad" is probably impossible but those moral principles don't come from science, as I point out, hence why I don't see how to do it. "We have laws that prohibit harming others and they don't need religious justification." Yes I thought you might go there. It doesn't work. Those laws are derived from religious codes originally. Also, the law is not a moral code, the law is supposed to implement moral codes. If you believe morality flows from law as the original source, you have to believe that lawmakers are inherently more morally capable than the people they rule. Moreover you cannot have such a thing as a tyrant because the moment they achieve power and change the law, whatever they do becomes axiomatically moral and therefore they are not a tyrant. Are you really going to argue that? No way are most people going to go anywhere near a claim like that, quite the opposite, it is often argued that lawmakers are less moral than regular people! "Harming a member of society is against everyones interest because we are part of society and we optimize for a good quality of life of society as that optimizes our own" This isn't a logical argument from first principles. Harming someone else can very much be in your interest in all sorts of situations. For it to be considered immoral, there must be some higher justification that states that your clear self-interest in harming an enemy is subservient to some other principle. Claims like "we optimize for a good quality of life of society" don't mean anything concrete. It's just restating a belief that the original position is morally correct in different words. Every tyrant in history has always claimed to be acting for the betterment of society and how can you argue otherwise without some system deeper than "this is morally good because we say it's best for everyone therefore it is"? That's what I mean by it being difficult. All the obvious answers just lead you in circles. "Your claim that animals kill each other all the time: killing within their own group is rare. Take two random animals from the same species and put them together in a room and see if they will kill each other." So by analogy it's OK to kill other races but not your own? That's certainly a moral code that has existed in the past, but it's not one that is accepted today. But it's an odd argument because it's really common that animals will fight and injure each other within the same species, sometimes fatally. Usually fights over territory or mating dominance. Even in pack animals there are fights over who gets the mates. By coincidence I was at a zoo just two days ago and they had a few cages where there was only a single animal, with an explanation that they had to do this because if they put more than one animal of the same type in the same cage they would fight for dominance. It's normal e.g. the antlers on a deer are for fighting. One of them was a type of crane, and the explanation was that cranes pick a single mate for life and this one had picked "Man", so would fight with any other crane. Animal jealousy! "You serious claim that the majority just blindly believes in science but wouldn't admit it?" After what we saw in the last two years! Wow yes, absolutely I seriously claim that. The amount of pseudo-scientific garbage that the population swallowed about COVID is just incredible. Claims that fell apart the moment you read the papers or even just thought about them were routinely passed off and accepted by the population because they came from "experts". It is one of the major themes of our age.