New book: Believing in moral absolutes is a scientific sin. A University of Oregon philosopher writes, human morality is contingent, experimental, a work in progress. Thus moral fundamentalism is not just incorrect, but a sin. Moral absolutism is immoral, he argues, in that it shuts down precisely the kind of empirically informed ethical inquiry we most need for our lives. In other words, keep pushing the moral boundaries because there are no absolutes. My comment: The language of empirically informed ethical inquiry comes from philosophical pragmatism. (From Total Truth) John Dewey wrote a famous essay called The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy in which he said Darwinism gives us a new logic to apply to mind and morals and life. In this new evolutionary logic, ideas are nothing more than mental tools for getting things done. We don’t decide if a tool is any good by judging it against a transcendent, eternal ideal; instead we test it by how successfully it does the job, how well it works in coping with the environment.... Dewey recast intellectual inquiry as a form of mental evolution, and said it should proceed on the same pattern as biological evolution: by posing problems and then letting students construct their own answers based on what works best—a kind of mental adaptation to the environment. Teachers are not instructors but “facilitators,” guiding students as they try out various pragmatic strategies to discover what works for them.... Does this sound familiar? Dewey is the source of much of today’s moral education, where all values are treated as equally valid and students simply clarify what they personally value most....Any value that students choose is deemed acceptable, whether or not it comports with accepted moral standards, as long as they have gone through the prescribed series of steps of ethical inquiry. newscientist/article/mg22229700.900-how-moral-fundamentalism-becomes-a-scientific-sin.html#.U4NCs9IU_Vg
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 14:56:54 +0000
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