Wednesday, September 6, 2023

The Irrelevance Of Scientific Correlations To Ethics

The scientific method can show that there is a correlation between a living being losing a certain amount of blood and dying and can help measure the approximate amount of blood loss a given organism can take before expiring.  It can reveal correlations that connect uses of brutal force with lasting bodily impairment, and it can show the physical consequences of things such as burns on the skin of humans or animals.  Is it immoral for a person to burn someone else or casually kill them, though?  If so, would either of these be universally evil or objectively wrong (in a moral sense) only in select circumstances?

Whether there is moral value to any being or any action is entirely beyond the scope of science.  On the level of subjective sensory correlations that can never even be proven to be strict causal relationships (almost everything about the nature of these is misunderstood by the irrationalistic masses), there are many things that can be shown to be physically harmful for biological creatures.  If I was to intentionally slice open my skin, I can feel pain, but this only shows, again, on a subjective plane unverifiable beyond that the perceptions are there, that one event can follow or be adjoined with another in a correlative sequence.

Some people see that one event follows another and desire to avoid the outcome, in the previously mentioned case, that outcome being the experience of pain.  This is not the same as pain of all or some kinds being morally wrong, as in what should and should not objectively be done if such a thing exists.  This is mere pragmatism, which is inherently amoral on its own and, if some things are good or evil, might be very much in violation of morality--for instance, if murder is immoral, it would still be morally wrong to murder someone who says they will commit an act of abduction before they actually carry it out.

What many are really appealing to when they pretend like science has anything to do with grounding or revealing moral obligations is conscience.  This subjective, irrelevant set of moral feelings is not shared by all people, and even among those who have a conscience, their moral feelings could vary so wildly that someone looking to social conversation for prompting instead of reason would still find that there is no such thing as a universal reaction based upon conscience.  If something is good or evil, however, it is good or evil no matter what people believe, wish, feel, or do.  What people's worldviews are is already beyond science; this is foundational metaphysics and epistemology, and their feelings such as those of conscience are a matter of introspective, individualistic psychology.

If anything at all is evil, it is not because of science, but because the nature of the uncaused cause is such that this is so.  There could be no other moral authority; either the uncaused cause has a moral nature and this is what makes something good (and deviation from this evil) or it is amoral and thus everything else is amoral as well.  It is not because of science that it can be known that if one thing is evil, an equivalent or subset of that thing is also by necessity evil, as this would be known (as well as metaphysically true in the first place) because of logic.  Science at most shows what happens or what seems to happen in the world of matter.  Moral value, rights, and obligations are all, if they exist, unable to be accessed by the senses entirely.

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