I get it, experimental verification is a powerful tool.
(To some degree, I’m an empiricist.)
The point is that I agree.
But this assumes everything is observable, assumes that your observation leads to valid conclusions, and that our conclusions have moral foundations to which to begin.
- Black swan fallacy.
- Maybe your brain is in a warm vat.
- EX: And why are forced experiments on humans or animals wrong anyway?
See it?
Again, positivism.
This is about induction vs deduction.
It is in the ability to seek and find truth in the moral sphere, Hutchins argues, that true human flourishing occurs. But “are we prepared to defend these principles? Of course not. For forty years and more our intellectual leaders have been telling us they are not true. They have been telling us in fact that nothing is true which cannot be subjected to experimental verification.” Hutchins perceives that the moral world is endangered by a kind of intellectual pincer movement: positivism in the sciences (where all legitimate questions must be subject to “experimental verification”) and pragmatism in the great world beyond the “laboratory.”
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
