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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?
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.
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!
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.
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, [...]
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.
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.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.