For most of the Ancients, freedom was freedom from our natural desires and material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of self-control, restraint, and education into virtue.
Andrew Sullivan
Virtue and Capital
The primary virtue of capitalism is the way it holds you accountable for your actions. Do something stupid or bad, and people stop buying from you. Do something remarkable and good, and people buy more from you. That’s the idea anyway.
The problem with headlong deregulation of the industry over the past twenty years, combined with the moral hazard of “too big to fail” is that we have boosted rewards while removing accountability. We are, then, in danger of stripping capitalism of whatever moral legitimacy it may have attained since Teddy Roosevelt began building barriers to rampant exploitation.
Take away the accountability, and you remove the virtue. Experience has shown that self-regulation is inadequate.
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The Other Side of the Coin
Religion is at its core a philosophy designed to answer questions that science cannot. Science is a methodology to describe what and how. Any effort by scientists to disprove religion takes them into territory wherein they don’t belong, just as any effort by theologians to disprove science takes THEM into territory wherein they don’t belong.
Virtue and Knowledge
Contrary to postmodern relativists, the growth of human knowledge is a fact. But that fact does not make human beings any more likely to be virtuous, or rational. However fast and far science may advance the dilemmas that beset us, ethics will remain as problematic as before. Indeed, since the increase in knowledge enlarges the power to do evil, these dilemmas may be more formidable.
John Gray | Review: Mr. Brooks’s Miracle Elixir | The National Interest.
The Scientific Jihad
In a review of Stephen Hawking’s book The Grand Design, Professor Christopher Norris of Cardiff University offers a riposte to Hawking’s contention that science makes philosophy redundant and philosophers a waste of space. Norris’ barbs strike deepest when he notes that Hawking takes up the tools of philosophy when the tools of science fail him.
Indeed, there is a sense in which the scientific enterprise stands or falls on the validity of counterfactual-conditional reasoning, that is to say, reasoning from what necessarily would be the case should certain conditions obtain or certain hypotheses hold. In its negative guise, this kind of thinking involves reasoning to what would have been the outcome if certain causally or materially relevant factors had not been operative in some given instance. Hawking constantly relies on such philosophical principles in order to present and justify his claims about the current and likely future course of developments in physics. Of course he is very welcome to them but he might do better to acknowledge their source in ways of thinking and protocols of valid argumentation that involve distinctly philosophical as well as scientific grounds.
Hawking and his fellow physicists declare philosophy dead, but in so doing have become philosophers, straying into a realm where science ceases to be a discipline, becoming instead systemic speculation detached from it’s own empirical foundations. The proposition has ceased to be hypothesis, and has become credo.
Hawking, in this, makes science into religion, albeit one without a deity. I suspect that what the eminent physicist finds wrong with religion and philosophy is not so much irrelevance (especially as he adopts their methods), but competitors for the hearts and minds of man. This is apparently something Hawking is unwilling to suffer. In the service of his beliefs, convinced that the ends justify him, he endeavors to de-legitimize the competition.
There is a term for such behavior when practiced among religions: jihad. How else can one describe the effort of one religion to condemn or purge opposing creeds?
It is time we follow Professor Norris’ lead and show the high priests of science that they have become the very thing they condemn.
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Hebrew Hutong 