Re: moral relativism
Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2023 4:42 pm
Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
‘Spooky action at a distance’ works for moral judgements, too: as we saw, judging something as ‘bad’ instantly applies that same label to identical situations or behaviours, however far away they may be. So a judgement in one place has an instant impact on a twin situation even if it is a great distance away, and there is no direct connection between the two.
I am clearly missing the point here. What identical situations or behaviors? No two abortions are ever exactly the same. There are always going to be any number of variables that set them apart. Variables rooted in ever evolving historical and cultural contexts and in countless individual sets of circumstances. The part that remains the same in fact is that a woman is either able to obtain an abortion legally or she is forced to give birth. And how on Earth does this pertain to interactions in the quantum world? It seems rather ludicrous to link human morality to the interactions of subatomic particles.
Though, again, sure, I'm missing the point. And that point would be...what?
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
We'll need a context of course.Quantum Ethics
These five clues indicate that right and wrong are very odd things. Indeed, the Australian philosopher JL Mackie called moral values ‘queer’, and suggested they were so unusual it would be impossible to think of them as like anything else at all. But let’s look again at this list of how right and wrong operate in the world. We’ll see that, actually, they are much like something physicists have studied in thousands of experiments, two centuries after Newton.
Got that? Okay, here is how the author then connects this to morality...All these five clues about ethics come straight from the quantum world. ‘Spooky action at a distance’ is what Albert Einstein called a phenomenon more dryly referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’. Investigations have shown that, when a pair of already-related quantum entities, say, photons, are separated, the characteristics of one are determined (and not just known) when observations discover the matching characteristic of its partner, irrespective of the distance between them. This ‘non-locality’ effect goes against all our intuitions – much as it went against Einstein’s, who remained sceptical about it until his death. But repeated tests have proven that this is how sub-atomic particles actually do work. Indeed, the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, for finally proving this very thing.
‘Spooky action at a distance’ works for moral judgements, too: as we saw, judging something as ‘bad’ instantly applies that same label to identical situations or behaviours, however far away they may be. So a judgement in one place has an instant impact on a twin situation even if it is a great distance away, and there is no direct connection between the two.
I am clearly missing the point here. What identical situations or behaviors? No two abortions are ever exactly the same. There are always going to be any number of variables that set them apart. Variables rooted in ever evolving historical and cultural contexts and in countless individual sets of circumstances. The part that remains the same in fact is that a woman is either able to obtain an abortion legally or she is forced to give birth. And how on Earth does this pertain to interactions in the quantum world? It seems rather ludicrous to link human morality to the interactions of subatomic particles.
Though, again, sure, I'm missing the point. And that point would be...what?