Hi Jon and all,
JON
>I've never said there's anything inherently wrong with scientific
>objectivity. It has been responsible for some very high Quality stuff. It's
>the spill-over effect that the cold objectivity has had on our evaluations of
>Morality (particularly social-level) that I'm concerned with. And yes,
>certain things which seem immoral today could prove to be very moral later
>on, once we have the extremely valuable benefit of hindsight.
It looks as there is a very wide concensus here. I apologise if I appeared to
portray Jon's position otherwise.
We already know what a loaded word morality is. I think that we should
remember that we are really talking about Sanskrit "rta" - the concept of
rightness, order, quite simply the way things are supposed to be.
What it comes down to is that scientific rightness is not necessarily coherent
with the wider context. Thus, the Nazis' human experiments may have
occasionally been "good" science, but there are wider ethical issues about
whether it is "right" to use the data.
>And yes,
>certain things which seem immoral today could prove to be very moral later
>on, once we have the extremely valuable benefit of hindsight.
Not just hindsight - also foresight. What looks immoral to the child may look
very different to his more experienced parent.
Jonathan
Jonathan
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