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Originally Posted by photon
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.
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.
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?
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.
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I seriously do not understand whether rationalists consciously revert to this rhetorical tactic reflexively or if they are really that naive. That is, science can be responsible for having profound impacts upon the human experience in one instance, but when criticized, either teleologically or ontologically, rationalists science automatically revert science to some sort of neutral thing like its just being practiced routinely in the high school chemistry classroom.
Skepticism is great. Science practices skepticism upon everything but its own practices, using the rather weak excuse that since false hypotheses are eventually discarded, science is inevitably morally neutral in the long run.
Science's reliance upon progressivism, is in my view, one of its greatest and most destructive weaknesses. Truth be told, the price we pay for progress is far too high. We split the atom, we get the atom bomb, we unravel the genome, we get transhumanism.
What is worse, all of this is done without an understanding of humanity's history of ideas, that is, the best moral arguments kept alive by our history of philosophy and literature. It's science's naivete and blindness to the impact it causes becauses of its neutrality that is the real problem.