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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Replying to @Plato4Now @disitinerant and
One of the good things about the Enlightenment was the process that began where we test things and recognise the bad as bad and weed it out. We'll never get things perfect but this is the only way to get better.
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Replying to @HPluckrose @Plato4Now and
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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Replying to @TheDissenterYT @Plato4Now and
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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Replying to @HPluckrose @TheDissenterYT and
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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Replying to @HPluckrose @Plato4Now and
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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Replying to @TheDissenterYT @Plato4Now and
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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Replying to @HPluckrose @Plato4Now and
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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