From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 07:22:33 MST
Dan Fabulich <daniel.fabulich@yale.edu> wrote:
>the sociobiologist's move to make ethics a science ... The problem with it
>is ... no empirical facts by themselves can establish that an action is right.
I responded:
>[In principle, science] 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.
Dan replied:
>True enough, but we'll never HAVE a magic wand like this. The prediction
>would surely affect my way of thinking about ethics, so the prediction
>would have to not only model my thoughts on the matter but its own effects
>on my thoughts on the matter.
[The conversation continued for two more posts, but let me return to here.]
It seems you have granted that your first statement was wrong. Everything
we can know about ethics *is* in principle learnable via science. You
might claim that progress in this science will be terribly slow, or that
it will stop at some fundamental limit to scientific progress. But I
dispute this skepticism if it is mainly based on the possibility that
people will react to learning the theories that describe them. This is
the standard situation in cognitive and social sciences, and yet these
sciences are making great progress.
Of course you could flip this argument around. You could accept that ethics
is subsumed by science, and yet argue that traditional approaches to ethics
are a faster route to progress in this area than traditional approaches in
other sciences. Maybe the fastest way to find out what you will think is to
just think. But in principle, it isn't the only way.
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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