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From: ellis@chips.sri.com (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Moral blindness
Message-ID: <8165@unix.SRI.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 18:36:53 GMT
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Reply-To: ellis@chips.sri.com.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
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> Peter Nelson

>  While physical science demonstrably progresses, philosophers 
>  and religionists continue to waste their time shouting at each
>  other, "Is not!", "Is too!", "Is not!"  "Is too!" and getting
>  precisely nowhere, as they have for centuries.  

    That's because science is easy, ethics hard.

    Now in one sense, there is progress in ethics. Enlightenment
    ethics in certain ways genuinely goes beyond that of Aristotle.
    And sometimes philosophy's experiments fail miserably, as Marx
    provides an example. Such philosophical experiments take decades
    or even centuries, and progress is necessarily painful and slow.
    Maybe the enlightenment thinkers actually got it right (just like
    the O'ists have been saying now for decades, BTW).

    In another sense, there really is no progress in ethics. Most of
    the low level stuff, the micropractices that underlie any possible
    human culture (we might call this intractable mass "human
    nature") really don't change. It is extraordinarily difficult
    disclose a new chunk which is of practical utility to the
    individual person. Consequently, first rate ethics written by the
    ancients is every bit valid as anything written in the past
    century.
    
-michael