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Originally Posted by peter12
It's funny that people say science has no moral stance on anything and act like its some neutral entity. Up until a few years ago, homosexuality was considered a mental illness!
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Did they consider it a mental illness based on science? Or did they consider it so based on how they were raised and start from that point?
And how does having an inaccurate conclusion based on bad data, incomplete data, poor premise, etc mean its a moral stance? Seems like equivocation to me.
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Originally Posted by peter12
It has everything to do with morality. It changes the way we view the world and the people that inhabit the world.
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Of course it changes the way we view the world, more knowledge is more knowledge. But it is morally neutral knowledge; how people respond to new knowledge isn't dictated by the science.
It changes the landscape, how we respond to the changing landscape isn't dictated by science. That's what's meant by morally neutral.
That's like saying geography isn't morally neutral because people upon finding the volcano sacrificed virgins to it to appease it. Or like saying mapmaking isn't morally neutral because maps can lead someone to where the schools are to abduct children.
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Originally Posted by peter12
I personally find this (not so) new detached view of science being a rational and unbiased way of viewing the world to be terrifying. Very "Brave New World," which if you haven't read, I would certainly recommend.
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The scientific process is rational and unbaised, individual scientists are not. And if the premise is flawed so is the conclusion, science or no science.
Really rather than all this vagueness and references to novels, what's a specific example of something where scientific knowledge is causing society to fall into a dystopia. Something specific. Knowledge of gravity? The weak atomic force? DNA? Plate tectonics? What?
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Originally Posted by fatso
Even if 'science' was a wholly neutral or apolitical endeavour, its deployment - practice, pursuit, realization - is by people, who are inherently political by nature. After all, even claiming to be apolitical is still, ultimately, a political stance.
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That's like blaming the cartographer to locate the river to drown the bag of cats in.
A cartographer may have made the map to drown cats, but the act of cartography itself isn't political. The process of science is netural, the knowledge gained is neutral, how its used isn't because that impacts real people.