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."
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 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.
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