The ethics of science/the science of ethics : moving beyond the dichotomy towards a Lutheran approach

Abstract

Over the past two centuries within the Western intellectual tradition, considerations of the relationship between science and ethics have moved in two distinct and largely opposite directions. This paper examines these two directions and poses ideas and questions in order to move Lutheran thinkers towards a new way of thinking about the intersection of science and ethics. On the one hand, accounts of moral sensibility and judgment in human communities are often examined from within the domain of scientific inquiry, most often within the discipline of evolutionary psychology and related fields. This way of explaining ethics as a natural phenomenon subject to scientific explanation is a relatively recent development in Western history. The treatment of ethics from this perspective tends to focus on the possible origins and subsequent emergence of moral impulses in human beings as the result of adaptive pressures arising within the environment. In this understanding, ethics is regarded as a category of scientific inquiry and is subject to various modes of scientific scrutiny that define and evaluate the role of ethics within human experience. In short, ethics has been “naturalized”; that is, how and why morality works the way it does can be fully explained by science."