Slashdot Mirror
Does Scientific Literacy Make People More Ethical?
New submitter alysion writes "Per research published in the online journal PLOS One, psychologists Christine Ma-Kellams of Harvard University and Jim Blascovich of the University of California, Santa Barbara report, 'Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms.' In one of the four supporting experiments, undergraduates considered an account of a date rape and were asked to judge behavior on a scale of 1 to 100. Science types, perhaps not surprisingly, proved to have a better grasp of reality, including the moral kind."
A refutation of your post seems unnecessary since you appear to be hard at work refuting yourself. On one hand you sweepingly dismissed as not truly moral those who do what is right out of fear of the sorts of spiritual repercussions that you don't believe in. And then on the other hand you said that there isn't any objective standard for morality or ethics, implying that your first point is wrong, since their idea of morality is just as good as yours. Lol!
And yet this science article says that it does. So are you saying that're not real scientists, or not talking about real ethics, or what? When the hypothesis is "being A is highly correlated with being B", simply stating "Ah, but here's an A that's not B, therefore WRONG" is not a valid argument. The entirety of your post is basically one large logical fallacy wrapped up in horrific acts to distract from the lack of substance, with a little bit of ad hominem on Angela Merkel to add topicality. What people think of her "moral codes" is completely irrelevant to both the issue at hand, and her actual ethical behavior. The fact that it's +4 Insightful is completely baffling.