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Peter Saunders on Weber and ethics

There is a bit of a debate about higher education happening in the Australian blogoshpere. See here and here for the contributions from Catallaxy; see here for Troppo Armadillo and for public opinion.

What I want to raise here is the comments by Peter Saunders made on this post. Saunders says that Max Weber said it all a century ago in his essay on 'Science as a vocation':

"Science today is a 'vocation' organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.

And if Tolstoi's question recurs to you: as science does not, who is to answer the question 'What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?'--- Then one can say that only a prophet or a savior can give the answers. If there is no such man, or if his message is no longer believed in, then you will certainly not compel him to appear on this earth by having thousands of professors, as privileged hirelings of the state, attempt as petty prophets in their lecture-rooms to take over his role."

Ethics is radically separated science as are values from facts. The consequence is that an ethics concerned about the good life is reduced to the voice of the prophet or a savior, when it is actually a part of our comportment in everyday life.

Now Saunders recognizes this.

He says that the Weber is concerned about the dangers in the growth of instrumental rationality, and he warns against the 'cult of the expert' in the modern world and argues in favour of a radical separation of facts and values, science and politics. He says:

"Sometimes his [Weber's] concern [have] been interpreted as wanting to preserve science from value judgements, but he is much more concerned to preserve ethical debate from contamination by spurious claims to expertise. Weber wants us to recognise that we have to make our own ethical choices from among the 'warring gods' of ultimate values, and that nobody can resolve these ethical dilemmas for us. He thinks there is a real danger of academic experts trying to subvert or pre-empt this moral world by telling us what to think."

The implication of Weber's positivism is that a moral vacuum arising from an emotivist conception of ethics (it's merely personal preferences) which allows academics posing as experts to decide the ethical choices.

We can refuse the emotivism that is accepted by Saunders.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 29, 2005 12:01 AM | TrackBack