Moral and Epistemic Relativism

[Kobi]

I might see what you are driving at. Then again I might not LOL.

Your field of expertise seems to be in the physical sciences and emperical data. My expertise is in the social sciences and quantifing things isnt quite as exact or easy.

You look at probability and in assigning it a value, proceed according to where on your scale something fits i.e. if there is a high probability, you can go with it. If there is a low probability, you might be more hesitant.

I look at possibility and try not to assign it a value judgement because in doing so, I limit its potential expressions. Any value judgement I give something automatically skews the results and pushes something in the direction of my value judgement.

Are we on the same page or am I still not understanding your perspective?

To answer your illustration of the history of slavery and how to quanitfy this historically....from my perspective.....I wouldnt want to give it any value that implies judgement for in doing so I am denying the potential process that may have been evolving during that time. For example, I would wonder if slave owners had any dealing with persons of other races before they had an economic need for laborers. I would want to know if they had preconceived notions and where they might have come from. Or, perhaps, did the slave traders introduce the idea that the people they were enslaving in Africa perpetuate the idea of savages and subhuman concepts in order to bolster and find support for their business - i.e. weird marketing technique.

Seeing I wasnt around back then and racism as a concept hadnt yet been developed, it behooves me to describe the process in its economic context rather than give it a value judgement based on current understandings.

I presume it might be easier to say were people inherently racist, even tho the concept didnt exist then, or was their behavior the result of something else.

I guess I am trying not to ignore the evolutionary aspects of the human experience by judging things based on an understanding that was not available at the time.

Am I making sense?

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

That's not *exactly* what I'm saying. I always hold out the possibility that, for instance, the laws of thermodynamics could be overturned although I think that's vanishingly improbable. I like to use a scale from 0 - 1 with 0 being "certainly untrue" and 1 being "certainly true". Very large swaths of physics, for instance, I think are in the .7 to .9 range. It's *possible* but extraordinarily improbable that we're wrong. There are other areas, string theory for instance, where I have moved from the .4 - .5 range (probably true) to the .1 - .3 range (almost certainly not true). I'm never absolutely certain because of one of the sayings that I keep on the wall of my study: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

That said, I think that most of the time we can proceed as-if some matter were settled until Nature, which always has the last word, says otherwise. Now, there are some areas that I'm pretty close to certain. The atomic model, the quantum mechanical model, the Einstein model of gravity and space-time and, on this planet, evolution are all .8 or .9 certainties for me. If any of those are wrong then not only are their respective domains irreparably broken but we, all 6 billion of us, are living in a very elaborate collective hallucination. What I mean by this is that, for instance, if the atomic and quantum mechanical models are wrong then you aren't reading this and I'm not typing this because computers don't work. If evolution is wrong then Nature has a lot to answer for because there's all kinds of genetic evidence that makes no sense except in the light of evolution. If thermodynamics is wrong then, again, Nature needs to explain why the flat tire I had on my bike a couple of weeks ago will never spontaneously inflate itself and why the coffee cup one of my cats broke will never spontaneously reform itself. (I would put the 2nd law in the .01 certainty range because of the kinds of examples above.)

There are no areas of science that I think are settled in that there's no more work to be done in them. If you think that's what I'm saying then that's entirely not what I’m saying. However, I AM saying that, barring contradicting evidence, I can proceed in my field of bioinformatics *as if* the chemistry underlying biology was a, more or less, settled matter at least in the broad outline and that the physics underlying the chemistry is also a settled matter, again at least in the broad outline.

I'm curious about something. How do you deal with past false truths? The reason I'm asking is because the examples I use to play with these ideas in my head all, generally, orbit around either the physical sciences or questions related to things that people believed in the past. For example, what kind of truth value would you give to the 19th century belief that I, as a black woman, was not quite really human. Was it true then but not true now? Was it false then and false now? The reason I ask is NOT--and I want to make this clear--because I think your'e racist but because it's a tough question. If we want to grant 19th century people that their worldview was consistent, valid and *true* and we are going to grant their beliefs the dignity of saying "well, it was true then" it begs the question of when racial bigotry became an injustice.

For example, no one ever complains that it is unjust that 18 months old infants aren't allowed to drive cars or fly jumbo jets. Everyone recognizes that 18 month olds lack the physical or mental abilities to do so and so, forbidding them from those activities isn't an injustice. Even if there were some extraordinarily precocious 18 month old who could it still wouldn't be an injustice since the *average* behavior of children of that age completely justified society forbidding kids from doing those things. So quite a bit turns on how we treat false beliefs from the past. If we grant those beliefs that were based in bigotry the dignity of calling them truths--even if we do not believe them ourselves--then what grounds do we have to claim that an injustice was being perpetrated? If blacks really WERE not-quite-human in the 19th century then on what grounds can we say that slavery was actually an evil? Is it an evil to keep a pet dog? Is it an evil to keep a cow? Slavery is an evil because it is wrong to use or treat humans as mere instruments but we draw a line between humans and other, less neurologically gifted, animals.

Do you see what I'm driving at?