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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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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Yes, but the problem is that, if we are to follow predicaments like the ones espoused by Sam Harris and others, that we can depend completely on science to inform our moral values, then it will simply don't work. We need more than that.
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We need a premise, yes. He set the one about focusing on the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Then there are facts to be known about how to improve this & decrease suffering. If your morality isn't predicated on the wellbeing of others, this is irrelevant.
End of conversation
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