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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."
Was the PyCon case where a poor woman was raped when two guys made a dirt joke near her?
Right. Depends on whose "ethics."
Not to go Godwin, but Germany, for the time, was pretty advanced educationally. Soviets didn't do too bad for themselves. I'm sure the Gulag Archipelago testifies otherwise.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The article's title raises the issue of ethics, but the summary talks about moral norms, these are not the same thing. Ethics and morals, while somewhat related, deal with different view points as they relate to behaviour. If we're going to be scientific about judging someone's actions we first have to make sure everyone agrees on the definitions of ethical and moral, something society in general has trouble doing.
And I'm still trying to figure out how the fuck magnets work!
Where did you get your fuck magnets from? I had no idea it was so high-tech!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
As opposed to the uneducated people who were clearly up in arms over the whole thing...
It's not like an idiot about to rape somebody will change his mind after thinking of science...
A recent scientific study just came out saying that scientists are better endowed and make better lovers then non-scientists.
There, that should put things in our favor when we go out to the nightclubs.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
It is very much possible the more ethical types gravitate towards science rather than scientific literacy made them more ethical. Most likely a whole combination of behaviors and attitudes occur together, being ethical, liking science, etc are all possibly triggered by a deeper primary cause. All these attitudes could be just the external symptoms.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"The most unethical people through history has been highly educated."
cherry picking aka anecdotal evidence aka "any number of examples" do not prove any theory. On the other hand 1 example is enough to disprove such ridiculous claims:
Einstein
p.s. i can point an equally number of unethical people with really low education: Attila the hun anyone ? timur lang ?
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!
I'm pretty sure we can say that morals aren't purely subjective. For example, practically everyone would agree that extreme torture to another human for 'just a laff' would be at least morally dubious.
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If scientific literacy made people more ethical, us mad scientists would be regarded as weirdos. So, thank Cthulu that's not the case.
practically everyone
That is not, by any means, a measure of objective truth.
What makes those who would disagree about torture for fun objectively wrong?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It seems like we can only conclude that scientific literacy helps one to more consistently categorize ethical/unethical behavior. Whether actions follow, especially in times of desperation where ethics are most needed and least cared for, is an entirely different matter altogether. Knowing right is not the same as doing right.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
>> And I'm still trying to figure out how the fuck magnets work!
> Where did you get your fuck magnets from? I had no idea it was so high-tech!
It is a sort of babe magnet, dont you see?
On a more serious note... Ethics and science have little to do with one and other.
Einstein left was a terrible husband, left his first child (who some claim was mentally ill) and her mother to themselves. In his consecutive marriages he cheated as if the nuclear holocaust was due next day.
Plenty of physicians conducted horrendous medical experiments on inmates in the name of science during the WW2 both on Japanese as on German side. Some of these experiments were controversial or unscientific at that moment, but the WERE university educated physicians nevertheless.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Syphilis experiments in Guatemala were also conducted by doctors.
In Sweden (until the 70's) there was a government program to exterminate the 'socially weak' by rendering the women infertile without consent or even informing them.
Most corrupt politicians went, just like non-corrupt politicians, to university (Angela Merkel is a quantum physicist if I remember correctly, go to Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or Cyprus to ask what people think of her moral codes).
In short, scientific literacy doesn't necessarily mean one will become more ethical inclined.
Troll's: Don't even think of starting a chemtrail/illuminati/cold fusion/other pseudo-science thread. We are talking real ethics here...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
And I'm still trying to figure out how the fuck magnets work!
Where did you get your fuck magnets from? I had no idea it was so high-tech!
Wrong question. "Where can I get fuck magnets???" is the correct one. I'm assuming you wanna get laid like the rest of us?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The meaning of their tests is simpler than that, actually. They used no controls. It would be just as valid to say "science makes people think in more absolute terms," which surprises no one, and fits the data perfectly well. Too bad that isn't headline-grabbing, or they might have conducted a responsible study. Whoever reviewed this thing should slap themselves; it's complete garbage.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Kant showed why such things are objectively wrong almost 200 years ago. It's just that very few people have the patience to read the first and second critiques, the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals, so most people are ignorant of this advancement in ethics.
In particular look at the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative in the Groundwork. A morally-correct maxim necessarily assumes a respect for other people's autonomy. Torturing someone for fun completely undermines any such respect.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not kill "millions" of people. Hiroshima killed about 80,000 people on impact, and probably a few hundred thousand more afterward from reduced life-span due to radiation exposure. The population of the city was 340,000 - 350,000 at the time of bombing. Nagasaki was slightly less killed, and better stats on injured. Population 263,000.
Those are the only two uses of nuclear weapons for aggression in human history. The firebombing - with conventional warheads and napalm - of Tokyo killed more people.
Perhaps more importantly: ethical compared to what? Not suggesting it to Truman, letting another nation get there first and risking the use of it against the United States before a deterrent could be developed? How about in prolonging the war, and the estimated 1 million US servicemen who would've been killed in the land invasion of Japan, not to mention the Japanese soldiers and civilians who would've gone down.
Or the fact the atomic bomb did finally make Alfred Nobel's ideas about TNT as a weapon a reality: we finally created a weapon that makes large-scale conflict between superpowers irrelevant. Proxy wars may happen, but the atomic bomb almost certainly directly prevented a third war in Europe between the Soviets and NATO, the former of which would've had no reason not to try expanding in that direction as opposed to stuffing around in Afgahnistan.
Critical thinking carries over to ethics. Who would have guessed?
Scientific literacy is not equivalent to critical thinking. The Nazi's were highly scientific and cutting edge in their technology.
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.
To Godwin or not to Godwin?
It would be nice to have slashdot automatically mark all these intellectually lazy Godwin comments -1.
All of these comments are relevant and none of them fall under Godwin's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics or racial superiority, nor, more debatably, to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies, if that was the explicit topic of conversation, since a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate, [...]
You say 'You can't be called a moral guy just because...', so you believe that whether or not you rare a 'moral guy' has nothing to do with what you do.
You claim that scientific literacy along with general education gives the potential to choose to be moral, but then effectively say that if that your education depends upon the beliefs and ideas of cultures 2-3 millennia ago then that does't count. This despite the origins of western philosophy and mathematics coming from works of that period.
Then you end with the footnote that morality and ethics are purely subjective.
Your position just doesn't make sense.
John_Chalisque
1. Narrow study group.
2. Highly questionable conclusions.
3. Suspected publication bias.
All in all -1 Overrated story.
Psychology is hard. Even if you are interpreting your subjects' behaviour correctly (a very big "if"), the idea that they are representative of "humans" in general is probably wrong.I think this article was mentioned on Slashdot a while back - http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
"...The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.
Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?..."
One of the popular mistakes people make when quoting philosophy is to forget that any logical argument necessarily begins with assumptions. Kant showed why some things are universally wrong, given his assumptions. If you don't accept his assumptions, stated or otherwise, his argument is meaningless. The value of respect for autonomy, for example, is not some kind of physical law. It is itself a potentially relative moral value, one that may be considerably weaker in other cultures.
There ARE excellent arguments for why things like murder and torture are morally wrong, if you assume that survival is beneficial. Murder is something that most species have evolved to control, and it can be particularly damaging in species that depend on cooperation.
I just wish more people would take it that one step further and realize art and music can also have an intrinsic 'goodness' value on a sliding scale from bad to good too.
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In addition to the valid points of the other respondents noting that a few exceptions to the average do not disprove the average, do any of your examples actually show scientists being less ethically minded than their less-scientific colleagues? The truth is a *lot* of people are/were terrible husbands, racist fucks, and hypocritical greedy bastards. Proving that lots of scientists are/were terrible husbands, racist fucks, and hypocritical greedy bastards doesn't mean they don't measure up well compared to the extremely low moral standard set by the broader non-scientific population.
Are you kidding me? In virtually every field the Nazis were backwards and intentionally antagonistic to a proper implementation of the scientific method. They rejected Einstein's relativity as "Jewish physics" because of its philosophical implications and the religion of its early researchers. The NSDAP's stance on education was that no subject could be divorced from "racial" truths, hence you had physics replaced with "German physics", biology and anthropology replaced with "Rassenwissenschaft" (racial science), and even maths corrupted with racist, imperialist, overtones.
They were able to pull off some amazing short term work in applied physics and engineering, especially in aerospace and chemistry, but they were handicapped by a worldview that was absolutely hostile to empirical evidenced based research and education. If anything those advancements were in spite of the educational climate, and largely attributed to scientists who were trained in pre-Nazi institutions. If the Germans had won, the next generation of scientists and researchers would have been a dismal lot indeed; muddled, confused, indoctrinated, unable to think critically, and infused with a racist mentality that would poison and retard their ability to make meaningful advancements. After a few generations they'd have nothing but pseudoscientists and mystics.
And don't get me started on the Soviets. Lamarckism, in the form of Lysenkoism, was the official doctrine of the state well into the 20th century.
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In the Judea-Christian tradition, they have "Thou shalt not kill" But as a moral statement, that is pretty subjective, at least in practice. Is it always wrong to kill? What about self-defense? What about in war? What about to protect not life, but property? Obviously, killing and the prohibition against it cannot be objectively held as wrong as sometimes it is permissable.
No, they don't have that. The Hebrew is quite clear, and it means murder, not kill.
Not that long ago, we used a the classical education system. This was based on the Trivium (Rhetoric, Basic Math, Language) followed later by the Quadrivium which was Philosophy, Astrology (Later Science replaced this), Art, and Music. The advanced education (Quadrivium) still included the Trivium with more advanced subjects. When we educated this way we not only learned science and math, but people learned ethics, morals, and more importantly how to think. The classical education system was disbanded back in the 1930/40s, when we moved to the Marxist industrial education system. This system is designed to train people to perform jobs, and not to think.
Ethics and looking out for the greater good of society is something requires reinforcement and training, just like mathematics. Problems and Solutions are not made by people that never consider the full implications of their actions. I have long been an advocate of disbanding the Marxist education system that has taken hold in the US and other parts of Europe. Germany adopted our education system in the 1970s, and it's had a horrible effect.
Unfortunately, a large percentage of the population is not aware of how bad our education system is. They believe it's normal not to memorize times tables, and not understand the math concept of multiplication. Many teachers don't want to teach what the Government forces them to teach. They realize it does not teach kids to think but to perform robotic tasks. Their hands are tied by the Government mandated system.
It was because of how poor our education system is, that my kid went to private school.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I think you're only disproving a straw-man version of the "theory" that does not follow (in any sense that a scientifically minded person would interpret) from the statement "scientific literacy makes people more ethical." Your "disproved" version of the statement appears to be "scientifically literate people are more ethical than non-scientifically literate people," which is not the same. A still "overly strong" interpretation of the statement is that scientific literacy would make any one person more ethical than if they weren't scientifically literate (but they might still be less ethical than someone else who started at a higher level). This interpretation of the statement requires different examples to disprove: you need to find a person with a measured level of "ethicality" before and after becoming scientifically literate, then show they were worse after. Of course, the "obvious" meaning implied by the statement is in some average sense, since only a dysfunctionally pedantic person would fail to supply that expected context.
Yes, it does. Sometimes those assumptions masquerade as "definitions", which may be confusing you here.
(Putting aside for the moment that the "argument" provided makes no sense, and that you probably meant something like "If X then Y, if Y then Z, therefore if X then Z"...)
In order to reach a conclusion -- anything after a "therefore" -- you need to assume a rule of inference in some fashion. In order to make a logical argument, you must define a logical system -- that process of definition is one of assumption. If you like, you are perfectly free to define a logical system whereby you can take the strings "p -> q" and "p" and infer "!q". It's unlikely to be a useful system -- but then, folks used to think that about non-Euclidean geometry, so who knows?
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
This is something we learn in the first weeks of calculus: "if X then X" does NOT assume that X exists. In the most retentive case it simply says "if X exists as an assumption, then X must be an assumption".
More frequently used in the context of mathematics is: "if X is a true assumption, then X is a true assumption", which is just a relative expression and doesn't even say if X is possible. ..." and you get "if Y then Y".
Now the mutable part is something completely different. Then I must say "if X between times t0 and t1, then X between times t2 and t3" (most often t0=t2, t1=t3, depending on what you want to say). Now set Y = "X between
In mathematics, most claims are time-independent (an even number stays even), so that part is rarely useful.
That's the key to logic: don't make bold steps, but small ones that hold up to scrutiny. We have no idea what happens outside of the time interval in the mutable form, thus we sure aren't going to claim anything about it.
You are absolutely correct. Some might point out that pretty much all post WW2 rocketry, (both in the West and Soviet bloc) was based on German work, and indeed workers, but as you say, these technically-excellent scientists and engineers had extensive pre-nazi academic experience, and for the most part did not buy into their bullshit philosophy.
Whether or not they were morally right to work for such an appalling regime, including accepting the use of slave labour, is of course another question.
1. Deduction A implies that X is true.
2. Deduction A is sound.
3. If X, then torture is wrong.
Therefore, 4. Torture is wrong.
There is no assumption X is true. QED: There is an absolute conclusion of "torture is wrong", while having a condition "if", and no assumption that X is true.
All you've managed here is moved the assumption from "X is true" to "A is true, A=>X". How the heck do you call this an argument without assumptions, when you're assuming "Deduction A is sound" (where did you get that from? How do you know it on pure logical grounds?), and also "A => X"? Example: A="The moon is made of cheese," X="The sky is falling". Would you say "The moon is made of cheese, this is true, and implies the sky is falling (which means torture is wrong)" and say that's a sound argument requiring no assumptions but pure logic?
"Its pretty easy to demonstrate they are independent of one another."
Um, sorry to have to tell you this, but individual instances "demonstrate" exactly nothing.
Except when proving an overly broad statement to be false.
Maybe you need to work on your critical thinking skills?
While studying such things I seem to recall being told that the person resorting to ad hominem attacks just identified themselves as the loser of the argument.