What Science Is and Isn't

How do we answer the question "what is a happy life" or "what is good and just"?

A common response might involve deferral to religious authority; either scripture or institution. However, discernibly, many religious texts, while being in some places enlightened, are also riddled with hateful, ignorant, divisive, or inciting comments. If we want to live in a peaceful, non-discriminatory society, we must disregard much of scripture.

Religious institutions, in the same sense, sometimes make enlightened pronouncements, but frequently are responsible for great moral malaise. You need look no further than the current controversy that the Catholic Church has found itself embroiled in as ample evidence of the fallibility of religious institutions.

So, how do we answer moral questions if we disregard religious institutions and scripture?

The two main branches of knowledge, namely, a priori (non-experimental, or derived beforehand) and a posteriori (experimental, or discovered afterward) knowledge give us general guidelines. Personally, I find rationality to be a supreme way of generating real moral insight without deferring to religious authority. I utilize a method of rationalism, drawing upon previous knowledge, to formulate moral positions.

But, could it be somehow possible to utilize the epistemological rigor of scientific method (an a posteriori knowledge structure) to derive moral knowledge? I regard scientific knowledge to be the most sound form of knowledge - and deservedly so. The scientific method has derived descriptions, claims, and understandings of the universe that have proven fantastically reliable in myriad cases. Furthermore, any knowledge that is to be deemed 'scientific' must pass the ultimate test, whereby fact can be separated from fiction, and genuine truth can be derived. The Method realizes this rigor by living up to the qualifier of empiricism. More simply, any knowledge that scientific method produces must match up with reality. And, coupled with the principle of re-validation, scientific knowledge must not only accurately describe reality, but also must do it for everyone, everywhere.

Despite the fantastic merits of science, it is generally understood that the methods we use to generate scientific knowledge cannot be transfigured to generate moral knowledge. For example, it is generally accepted that we cannot use scientific method to answer the question "what is justice," or find out what a "moral" life consists of, as opposed to a "immoral" one.

The difficulty here was originally elaborated by David Hume, and is referred to as the 'is-ought problem'. Hume elaborates that there is a distinction between simply describing how the world is, and describing how the world ought to be. For example, the Method is extremely good at describing reality, such as the laws of gravitation, but not at telling us other things, such as what we should eat for dinner, or whether there should be a death penalty.

However, developments in science and scientific method are slowly pushing the envelope on what kind of knoweldge can be considered scientific, including, in some cases, moral knowledge.

More later...