MichaelVassar comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (33)
Yes. Actually, I would say scientists are better ethicists in their area of expertise, because
moral reasoning is reasoning, and smarter people are better at reasoning
they know what the heck they're talking about.
Can you specialize in ethics? Or is it like - to use the ever-popular reason-as-martial-arts metaphor - like specializing in kata? You sometimes see schools that strongly emphasize kata. IMHO their kata is weak, because they don't understand the purpose of their movements. To answer to this question, you need to ask whether moral reasoning within a domain is qualitatively different from any other kind of reasoning in a domain.
Perhaps if our debates on ethics used esoteric concepts from category theory and the writings of German philosophers, it would be of some benefit to specialize in ethics. But they have never risen to that level.
Scientific training is specifically training in reasoning to a much greater extent than is, say, political training. Smarter people are better than dumber people at reasoning on average, but the advantage of scientists over politicians is less that they are smarter (they are, but only modestly) than that they are selected for and trained in reasoning well while politicians are selected for and trained in reasoning poorly.