Re: "Morality?" - Composite Reply

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Tue, 7 Oct 1997 21:18:31 -0700 (PDT)


> Science is the middle path between the harsh tyranny of unquestionable "truth"
> and the useless undisprovability of "subjective" reality. Science states that
> there exists an objective reality, but we do not know what it is. My ethical
> system makes the same statement with respect to morality.

A noble goal to be sure, but by what method can you test this morality
for its correspondence to the objective standard? I know how to
evaluate statements about reality: they must be meaningful, falsifiable
by observation, and must have wihstood many observations without such
a falsification. The standard of judgment is simple: my senses.

How does one falsify a moral hypothesis? How does one observe the
result of a moral experiment? How can others replicate my experiment?

And be clear what I mean here: I do not wish to test an action; the
results of an action /are/ easily testable against the outcome I
desire. I wish to test an hypothesis about which outcome I should
desire, independent of any action to achieve it.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC