Reply to Steven Abrams

Submitted by Peter J. Herz (Taiwan), Apr 13, 2005 at 05:58

"Superstitious and anti-scientific"--is this a value judgment I hear?

Give me a scientific reason why we should not cheat and lie to advance our careers, keep our hands out of others' pockets if we're unlikely to get caught, or value altruistic over selfish behavior. Wilson and a few others have tried manfully; but they still haven't gotten around the observation of Waisman, Schaechter, and Schlick (_Ethics and the Will_) to get from the empirical "is" to the ethical "ought". Yes, those Wiener Kreis gentlemen tried hard to ground everything in empirical and logical proof--and ended up crying like babies for a new "Scoratic Man" (after the guy who's only answer to the assertion that "the tyrant is the happiest of men" was to affirm a judgment after death) as the specter of the Anschluss loomed.

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