The Ethical Basis of Stupidity
Volume 5 - Issue 3
James F Welles*
- Department of psychology and Social Anthropology, USA
Received:July 08, 2021 Published:July 16, 2021
Corresponding author:James F Welles, Department of psychology and Social Anthropology, USA
DOI: 10.32474/SJPBS.2021.05.000212
Abstract
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Abstract
An arbitrarily based indifference if not hostility to those with good ideas underlines our pervasive stupidity in social relations.
By contrast, the basis for our undeniable successes in matters technical become all the more obvious. If we could but apply scientific
objectivity to the social domain, we might undercut our proclivity for individual and collective maladaptive behavior. This is well
worth considering, if indeed our faith in science is justified and if the application of scientific analysis to human behavior would
lead to a reduction in stupidity. Science, in the form of the social sciences, has already proved successful in helping people learn
about themselves and their interactions with their institutions. It has also proved useless in providing any sort of ethic to direct
the application of knowledge gained to any clear-cut, long-range benefit to humanity. Science is especially good in the narrow,
immediate sense of gathering information about a specific problem or set of conditions, and the more specific the context, the better.
How those data and possible solutions to problems relate to society in general is another problem in itself and beyond the scope of
true science. All science can legitimately contribute to the application of knowledge to problem solving is projections of likely future
results and sometimes sample test case studies of how things went in the past. As previously noted, one of the major shifts in our
mental world in the past few hundred years is that we tend more and more to believe in human institutions with a fervor previously
reserved for presumed supernatural forces. Thus, although the influence of established churches may have waned during this
period [1], religious belief is still as powerful as ever as a factor shaping human behavior. All the horrors and cruelties which used
to be the province of the devoutly sectarian (as evidenced by their witch hunts and inquisitions) have been extended and expanded
upon by the devotees of secular (i.e., political, economic and cultural) in- stitutions. It is expecting too much of science, which in its
pure form is morally neutral, to combat such forms of socially induced subjectivity. Scientists can be objec-tive and may make us
more knowledgeable, but they will not make us better.
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