Posted by jay on March 10, 2005, at 20:28:13
In reply to Re: Another go..., posted by alexandra_k on March 10, 2005, at 2:44:01
> Ok. The point of this is that most people (these days) seem to want to be subjectivists about ethics. 'It is all relative' people want to say. There is no fact of the matter. Ethics is a matter of personal choice or a matter of what a society or culture deems to be acceptable and unacceptable. Who are we to judge others ethical beliefs?
>
> This position undermines ethics completely.
> So, I shall attempt to refute it.
>
> Consider the following claims:
>
> 1) The earth is not flat
> 2) There is life on Mars
> 3) Vanilla ice cream is nicer than chocolate ice cream
> 4) Abortion is wrong
> 5) Torturing babies for fun is wrong
>
> 1) Is a fact. It is true. If people believe that it is false (like they used to) then these people were simply wrong. Believing it did not make it true - nobody literally fell of the end of the earth.
> 2) We don't yet know whether this is true or false. But there is a fact of the matter. We just have yet to discover what it is.
> 3) Is not a fact. It is neither true nor false in itself. It is the wrong kind of thing to be a fact. This statement is a matter of personal taste or opinion, it is relative to the person making the claim.
>
> Are 4) and 5) facts like 1) and 2) - or are they more like 3)? Is there a fact about whether they are true or false (like there are facts about 1) and 2) - or is it just a matter of personal preference or opinion?
>
> Consider such things as torturing innocent babies or genocide. Are these things morally wrong, or are they acceptable so long as an individual / culture condones them?
>
> If you think there is a fact about these then well done, you are a moral realist.
>
> :-)OK...first off...I am not the sharpest of the bunch when it comes to social quantitative data....but I really do love social scientific research. I love the outcome, but I hate going through the stages. I have pulled some of this stuff out from text's, just because I really think you bring up good examples, and allow me to prove my hypothesis:-)A good physical/social scientist knows the place to start is with the scientific method. And you know what that means..it scientific method involves the following steps: doing research, identifying the problem, stating a hypothesis, conducting project experimentation, and reaching a conclusion.
A good scientist is observant and notices thing in the world around him/herself. (S)he sees, hears, or in some other way notices what’s going on in the world and becomes curious about what’s happening. This can and does include reading and studying what others have done in the past because scientific knowledge is cumulative. In physics, when Newton came up with his Theory of Motion, he based his hypothesis on the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo as well as his own, newer observations. Darwin not only observed and took notes during his voyage, but he also studied the practice of artificial selection and read the works of other naturalists to form his Theory of Evolution.
For centuries, people based their beliefs on their interpretations of what they saw going on in the world around them without testing their ideas to determine the validity of these theories — in other words, they didn’t use the scientific method to arrive at answers to their questions. Rather, their conclusions were based on untested observations.
Among these ideas, since at least the time of Aristotle (4th Century BC), people (including scientists) believed that simple living organisms could come into being by spontaneous generation. This was the idea that non-living objects can give rise to living organisms. It was common “knowledge” that simple organisms like worms, beetles, frogs, amd salamanders could come from dust, mud, etc., and food left out, quickly “swarmed” with life.
OK..torturing innocent babies.
From my vantage point I am going to guess that people torture baby's due to a childhood of abuse that the now-adult abuser is mirroring. (There is my Hypothesis) My knowledge on this topic comes from my experience of being a social worker for 15 years. (And I could list some references..da da..da..you get the idea.)
First off, I wanted to identify the Independent Variable as being "abusive" meaning there where signs of physical abuse done to the parent who has "abused" their child.(Or whoever.) The dependent variable is the end-product, whether or not abused kids become abusive parent.
Do, I go to Children's Aid Society, and I look up 500 cases where the children/child has been harmed. I copy the parents (or whomever) abusers names down. I then look into the history of the parent (which most CAS's have), and use access to databases of all levels of police, legal and various other institutions at all levels across the country.(Presuming the parent/abuser was born and raised in that country...but CAS's do have international access to databases.
After collecting information on the abuser, and this includes abusers I could not find info on, , I find about 120 cases in which the abuser was themselves abused.
Then I look into 500 cases where the abuser seems to have come from a fairly functional family. (I will define that as being non-abused, but this degrades the research because like above, the abuser or innocent parent/guardian may not be widely represented in the research..limiting it in scope, which obviously could miss data on abusers and non-abusive parents.
So, of the abusers who have not come from an abusive environment (or have never been reported), I came up with 200 cases of what appears to be a non-abusive environment.
My conclusion might be that there seems not to be a strong co-relation between abusive people
and their latter turning to being abusive. So, no, my hypothesis is proven wrong. I go to replicate it. Same results. No, I am not going to graph it all..and blah blah (I am working on a school project...and this post took a bit.)It may not be the most sound example, but there is plenty you can find out using the scientific method in both social and hard science.
Again, this example really wouldn't be good..lacking validity because of it's lack of sample size and I also didn't use a control.Again, I just say the scientific experiment is really a great tool. That is all I wanted to show (mechanism wise...because hyothesis that don't gel to your conclusion can lead into interesting scientific experiments as well.)
Jay
poster:jay
thread:468601
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050305/msgs/469442.html