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.
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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Yes, but I was not denying the fact that they do. Just that: 1 - It doesn't come all from scientific facts. Scientific facts by themselves don't create moral values. They can inform them, of course. 2 - Those ideas are much more ancient than the Enlightenment.
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OK. This is certainly something to tell people who claim that scientific facts by themselves create moral values and that ideas which became dominant during the Enlightenment never appeared before in any form anywhere. If that's all the convo is about, I will move on.
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1/ There was some of that. But the connection between the two is where the interesting part was. If you can’t get values from empirical facts about nature, where can we discover them? Modern philosophers tried to find them in passions (sympathy: Hume) or reason (Kant).
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But are we including our evolved brains as an empirical fact about nature? Because I think it's clear morality comes from them. If not, where? A soul? Remove the frontal lobe & morality is gone. I think I see why James was referencing magic now.
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No, not a soul. But let's say that through an iterative collective process, based on our biology (including our moral sentiments) morality develops as a part of human culture. And that's not the same as the moral sense itself or the facts.
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No, its a lot of moral senses and reason all working together.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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And, of course we can give the merit to the Enlightenment philosophers and scientists for having integrated these values, and superating previous problems that plagued humanity. That's not the problem here.
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I've not come across the problem you're seeing, that's all. But if you tell me you often encounter it, of course, I believe you.
End of conversation
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