Being fully rational requires taking stock of the whole. To focus exclusively on good (or bad) is to make a partial judgment. To deny the Enlightenment's responsibility for anything bad after, say, 1750 while giving it credit for everything good thereafter is a double standard.
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1/ That brings us round to the original topic of the thread: whether empirical science can offer sound prescriptions in addition to sound descriptions. If by “Enlightenment” you mean empirical science (already a slippery association), we have to be careful.
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Yes, we wrote 10,000 words on this where we avoided using 'Enlightenment' but spoke of the general intellectual and cultural shifts and developments of the modern period - science, reason, secularism, liberal democracy - under umbrella of 'modernity.'
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But even the ideas that are attributed to the Enlightenment are much more ancient than the Enlightenment itself. Philosophically and historically, it doesn't make any sense to place their origins at that point.
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Don't then? I don't think anyone claims this, do they? This was why we needed 10,000 words. It's well known that the Enlightenment closely connected to the Renaissance which was heavily informed by Ancient Greece. This might be of interest academically but is not really point.
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Why not? It's extremely important in tracing the basis to our moral values.
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Go for it. I am also interested in this. The Renaissance is my period of study. However, the history of ideas found in the Enlightenment need not inform our every moral decision now.
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Yes, but if you say that things like reason, individualism, progress, science, and so on, inform our current values, then what I answer is that those ideas are much more ancient than the Enlightenment.
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OK, you can answer that if you think it adds anything. Then we can continue discussing the claim that things like reason, individualism, progress, science, and so on, inform our current values?
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And who tried to negate that? It's just that it's very important to keep a strong moral sense, and there are scientists that believe too much that science can do that by itself.
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Well, lots of people negate it, obv. They focus on the fact that bad things happened during and following the Enlightenment & argue that it was a bad development. They ignore fact that it's a project of self-correction and improvement.
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Possibly there are scientists who believe science can replace the discussion and development of ethics but if so, they're few and far between. The Enlightenment project - what Rauch calls 'liberal science' - focuses strongly on the free exchange of ideas for moral advancement.
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Yeah, but the discussion here was precisely around that. Some people here defended that science by itself can determine what are the correct moral values to hold.
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OK, fair enough. Fortunately, they're widely recognised as loons and most people recognise that the universe doesn't care if we torture each other to extinction. We have to decide what matters tho empathy, compassion, justice etc are innate & guide this.
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We already covered empathy here. Empathy doesn't allow you to expand a more principle to people who don't belong to your group. Paul Bloom covered that in his recent book, Against Empathy.
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There can certainly be many limitations on empathy but this doesn't change that we have an innate sense of it & it informs our moral sense. 'Don't do things to other people that you wouldn't like done to you' comes up over & over again in various cultures as a moral premise.
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3/ And it can’t make sense of itself, by answering questions like “what is truth,” “what is knowledge,” “what is being,” and so on. To make sense of her science—as such, let alone in the scheme of wider life—the scientist must go beyond science. As we’re doing here.
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Just wanted to add that even if there could be an objective definition of "wellbeing" it would not imply, in and of itself, that we are obligated to care about other people's.
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No, you'd need to add some neuroscience to show that we can't help that if neurologically typical. It's part of being a social species. It doesn't matter on a broader scale what we do. Humanity generally only matters to humanity. And maybe dogs. ;-)
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Heh. We certainly care about those close to us. But caring about people people we have never met is a very modern and far from universal trend.
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Yes, this doesn't detract from the fact that empathy strongly informs Y drives our moral sense as social mammals. Those who don't have empathy, eg psychopaths, very often don't have morality or have difficulty with it.
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Sure, I agree. My point (which I perhaps could have made better earlier) is that universalist ethics defy human nature and demand moral arguments that transcend scientific facts.
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This is still part of the response to the hypothetical scientist who doesn't know this? It seems like everyone in the conversation knows this.
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