Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, August 26, 2005

Does Science Inform Ethics?

The ever-fabulous Robin Zebrowski asks an oldie-but-goodie over on her blog Hyper-Textual Ontology: "Does Science Inform Ethics?"

Actually, she loads it a bit by asking the question in the form, "How can science have no role to play in ethics?" but still, it's a good question to ponder.

Since I champion scientific inquiry not only as a pragmatically empowering practice but as a morally appealing one (see "Is Science Democratic?") this is a question that pushes warm-fuzzy buttons of mine. And since I abhor the ways in which some racists, misogynists, reductionists, elitists, and authoritarians will sometimes stealth in the form of what they call "apolitically scientific" or "consequentialist" statements what amount in fact to appallingly immoral statements that would otherwise get them rightly marginalized in a heartbeat this is a question that also pushes urge-to-kill-rising buttons of mine.

Here is my bland initial offering on the question:
Science cannot tell us what to value, but is usually indispensable in telling us how best to go about getting what we value. So, of course science "informs" ethics, just as ethical prejudices are likely to "inform" scientific inquiry by directing our attention certain places rather than others.

All the branches of philosophy reverberate into one another -- inquiry, morals, ethics, esthetics, politics -- but we still distinguish them and the modes of belief they differently warrant for good reasons. It is of course always possible and often tempting to reduce or rewrite one branch of philosophy (or even all of them) into the terms of another of its branches -- but this is never as simplifying, illuminating, or worthwhile a project over the long term as it initially seemed it would be.

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