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 save the insufficiency of science, as we have seen in the last two chapters, call down to the fact that science has nothing to say about values. This I get hold of 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 retrieve clearly, and my own views on it are quite different from what they were thirty old age ago. But it is necessary to be clear about it if we are to evaluate such arguments as those in support of Cosmic Purpose. As in that location is no consensus of opinion about ethics, it must be understood that what follows is my personalized article of faith, not the dictum of science. The study of ethics, traditionally, consists of two parts, one concerned with virtuous rules, the other with what is good on its own account. Rules of conduct, many of which have a ritual origin, play a capacious part in the lives of savages and unmannerly 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 deterrent example rules, such as the prohibition of murder and theft, have a to a greater extent(prenominal) obvious social utility, and survive the decay of the primitive theological systems with which they were primitively associated. But as men grow more reflective there 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 well-known(prenominal) with passages in the prophets and the gospels, in which purity of heart is set above punctilious observance of the Law and St. Pauls famous praise of charity, or love, teaches the kindred principle. The same thing will be found in all great mystics, Christian and non-Christian what they values is a state of mind, out of which, as they hold, effective conduct must ensue rules seem to them external, and insufficiently adaptable to circumstances. unity 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.