From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 11:25:21 MST
Dan Fabulich wrote:
>Frankly, I think people in the "third culture" tend to lean too far
>towards logical positivism and sociobiological ethics. These people are,
>to be blunt, shallow thinkers. ... sociobiological ethics can't
>justify itself any better than competing theories; sociobiological ethics'
>only leg up on the competition lies in its ambitions to make ethics
>scientific, ... these people shouldn't be trying to do our ethics for us.)
>... the sociobiologist's move to make ethics a science ... The problem
>with it is this: Suppose I waved a magic wand and, all of a sudden, we knew
>everything about all of our future behaviors. (I want to stress that this
>wand is magical, and we will never have a wand like this.) We now try to
>ask, "given that So-and-so did such-and-such on such-and-such a day with
>such-and-such intentions, heck, even given that her action has
>such-and-such Total Consequences (tm) [now this is REALLY a magic wand!],
>was this action right or wrong?"
>It's not at all obvious what answer you'd give, if any, since no empirical
>facts by themselves can establish that an action is right. You could make
>a claim WITHIN ethical theory that "an action is right iff the following
>facts obtain ..." but that claim itself would not be verifiable.
With a similar magic wand you could find out everything that Dan Fabulich
would ever think about ethics under any circumstances. And isn't that
the closest Dan Fabulich could ever get to knowing what is ethical?
Sure there might be some things about right and wrong that Dan Fabulich
could never know. But no other approach to ethics could possibly reveal
more to Dan Fabulich than this.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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