Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 2:12 am
Take the case of
empathy which is one very critical element of morality.
I don't think that empathy has anything to do with morality. The critical element of morality is judgement about what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. This is applied to actions, happenings, events. Once you do something that is judged morally good, it doesn't matter if you did it with or without empathy. Even if science finds neurons of empathy, actually empathy can be radically criticised as a fundamental source of hypocrisy, because it causes selective choices that are deeply unjust. In the world of empathy those who are more successful in causing feelings of empathy get more help and resources, compared to those who are less clever in the art of raising empathy.
The essence of the question, as I said, is that nothing is scientifically good or bad, moral or immoral. On the contrary, science can destroy any concept of morality because it can reveal how morality is actually one of the many clever mechanisms of competition among living beings. Since competition is connected with self imposition, you are liable to be accused of trying to impose your culture, your framework, yourself, the moment you try to exploit science to find a ground to what is completely subjective, completely belonging to your personal subjective ideas.
It has already happened in history that, whenever science has been used to justify moral choices, it has been used to oppress people: we can think, for example, of the ancient idea that women have not soul, the idea of human races, some of them inferior to other ones. I can't recall any historical fact where science has been able to support morality. It can be used to deny the supposed scientific foundations of racist theories, but, once you have demolished them, you cannot go on doing the opposite, which is, using science to found a morality, otherwise you are going back again to make exactly the same mistake made by racists.
Even, for example, when science says that human races do not exist, or that there is no scientific ground to establish who has a soul and who doesn't, just because the idea of soul itself has nothing to do with science, this cannot and shouldn't be used positively to build a morality.
Science is able to destroy, to deny wrong theories, but it is completely unable to give the fundamental motivational ground for anything humanly positive. The fundamentals of science is Maths. The moment you try to say that 2+2=4 is morally good, you are trying to build your dictatorship.
You cannot even say that 2+2=4 is good and 2+2=5 is bad. Mathematically they are just true or false, but being true or false has nothing to do with being mathematically good or bad. It is us humans who establish that a non working machine based on 2+2=5 is not good. Scientifically it is just a non working machine, that scientifically has nothing worse than a working one.