Human Values and Ethics - What Science Cannot Discover, Mankind Cannot Know :: Philosophy Essays

Human Valuse and Ethics - What Science Cannot Discover, Mankind Cannot KnowThose who advance the insufficiency of science, as we have seen in the last two chapters, petition to the fact that science has nothing to say about values. This I contain but when it is inferred that ethics contains truths which cannot be proved or disproved by science, I disagree. The matter is one on which it is not altogether easy to imagine clearly, and my own views on it argon quite different from what they were thirty age ago. But it is necessary to be clear about it if we are to appreciate such arguments as those in support of Cosmic Purpose. As in that respect is no consensus of opinion about ethics, it must be understood that what follows is my personalized flavor, not the dictum of science. The study of ethics, traditionally, consists of two parts, one concerned with clean rules, the other with what is good on its own account. Rules of conduct, many of which have a ritual origin, play a b ang-up part in the lives of savages and crude(a) peoples. It is forbidden to eat out of the chiefs dish, or to seethe the kid in its mothers milk it is commanded to offer sacrifices to the gods, which, at a certain stage of development, are thought most acceptable if they are human beings. Other virtuous rules, such as the prohibition of murder and theft, have a more(prenominal) than obvious social utility, and survive the decay of the primitive theological systems with which they were in the beginning associated. But as men grow more reflective in that location is a tendency to lay less stress on rules and more on states of mind. This comes from two sources - philosophy and mystical religion. We are all beaten(prenominal) with passages in the prophets and the gospels, in which purity of heart is set above meticulous observance of the Law and St. Pauls famous praise of charity, or love, teaches the analogous principle. The same thing will be found in all great mystics, Chri stian and non-Christian what they values is a state of mind, out of which, as they hold, redress conduct must ensue rules seem to them external, and insufficiently adaptable to circumstances. genius of the ways in which the need of appealing to external rules of conduct has been avoided has been the belief in conscience, which has been especially important in Protestant ethics.