MichaelVassar comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PhilGoetz 20 March 2009 08:33PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 21 March 2009 04:20:32AM 5 points [-]

I don't understand -- are you claiming that scientists are people and therefore they're as much experts on ethics as anyone?

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.

Current bioethicists may suck, but the idea of having some people specialize at bioethics seems sound.

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.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 21 March 2009 04:51:02AM 6 points [-]

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.