Franktalk wrote:Darth J wrote:Accepting the modern scientific method as a valid way to explore the physical world doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with normative ethics.
Thank you, that is my point.
It doesn't make any sense for that to have been your point. If you acknowledge that normative ethics and empirical study of the physical universe
are two different things, then it wouldn't have occurred to you to wonder, "But if you accept evolution, why do you stop at a traffic light?!?!?" It wouldn't have occurred to you to pose that question because you would have realized it's a non sequitur to wonder how a person who accepts the scientific method could have a sense of ethics, since you would understand that their ethics come from a different kind of inquiry (rhymes with "philosophy") than scientific discovery.
Also, your proposed dilemma of how one decides to obey the law if one disagrees with it confuses positive law with morality.
So we can have Nazi scientist perform experiments on children and still be scientist. That is true.
Yeah, Nazi is just kind of the blanket label you're using for people whose value judgments you don't like. There's no reason in your immediate resort to Godwin's Law to think your example has anything to do with any particular familiarity with Nazi ideology. It turns out that
Nazism was indeed an ethos. It's just that they mostly had different ideas about ethics than you do, and the cartoonish idea that the Third Reich was nothing but amoral psychopaths is wrong. That's not an apologia for the Third Reich; that makes it scarier. It's scarier because hurting other people or violating their moral and legal rights when you're convinced morality is on your side has the force multiplier of commitment and self-justification.
You know, like the way you think Muslims and gay people shouldn't have the same rights you do.
But back to your tired reference to the Nazis as a synedoche for godless amoral science, the Nazi experiments on children you're alluding to were not done by a competent scientist at all. Josef Mengele did not follow any kind of coherent methodology, and his mutilation of children at Auschwitz yielded no meaningful data. So even if you want to contradict your "that's my point" by equating Nazi experiments on children with the supposed inherent amorality of science, it's factually wrong. Even on the coldest, most misanthropist utilitarian grounds, there was nothing scientific about "Nazi scientist perform[s] experiments on children and still be a scientist." Mengele wasn't acting as a scientist anymore than burning ants with a magnifying glass makes you an entomologist.
All of the above would be something you already knew if you had any curiosity about the world outside of the notions and assumptions in your own head. You would have known that because you would have read some books and stuff to find out if your ideas accurately reflect external reality. But your posting history makes it clear you are interested in nothing except asserting and confirming your pre-existing cherished beliefs.
So my questions are to find out if his moral rudder changed direction and if so what reasoning was used to establish his new rules to live by.
Yes, if only anyone in the last several thousand years had tried to explain how to come up with an ethical framework that doesn't rely on divine command theory.
