Ethics and Social Science are often pejoratively viewed as - TopicsExpress

Ethics and Social Science are often pejoratively viewed as subjective and soft sciences respectively. Inexact, unquantifiable, nonrigorous, a waste of time, energy, and money for up and coming grad students. Its hard to advance ideas that could be taken seriously. No universal field theories of ethics is forthcoming. Philosophy is dead. Consequentialism, Utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, Epicureanism, Aristotelian virtue ethics, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Robert Pirsigs Metaphysics of Quality, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, etc...we have all sorts of ethical philosophies, philosophers, and systems but they all seem to fall short upon rigorous criticism. No last words on the subject. No pinning the tails on the theoretical donkeys. But perhaps the problem is the search for an all encompassing universal theory. The Grand Narrative. But why are we looking for Grand Narratives? Why is no Universal theory of Ethics a problem? This suggests that when it comes to ethics, perhaps what we are dealing with is not something like the fundamental forces of physics that we can neatly tie together with hyperdimensional mathematics into a beautiful and elegant single line of equation. Were dealing with chaos. In the hard sciences, we already have a theory that deals with chaos. Its called Chaos Theory. Were dealing with meteorology, the stock market, and stochastic mathematics. Modern meteorology and Economic Forecasting (despite the 08 crash) are success stories of Chaos Theory. Weve come a long way in forecasting weather and stocks. Nate Silvers The Signal and the Noise is a good book on the subject. The main ideas Silver discussed is Bayesian probability and aggregation. Bayesian probability is all about constantly updating ones axioms upon discovering new information. Aggregation is about having multiple models of phenomena and combining them together to get a better overall model; which is how modern meteorology works. Quite simple. We have multiple meteorologic models and we just combine them together to get the best forecast. What is lacking in one model is made up for in all the other models. So lets apply Bayesianism and Aggregation to Ethical Philosophy. One can imagine it. Gedankenexperiment time. How should we judge someones behavior? Well as a consequentialist wed think this. But as a deontologist, wed think this. But lets keep going. Lets apply all the ethical models, virtue ethics, Pirsigianism, hell, even Ayn Rands Objectivism, to the behavior and aggregate the results. Whats the overall analysis? Does the majority of the ethical models say yay or nay on said behavior? One can even attach a quantifiable score to this. You got a score of 60%. Your behavior is in the gray zone, buddy. Wisdom of the Aggregate Crowds, so to speak.