Tuesday, October 15, 2013

E.O. Wilson's Contradictions ...

Wilson is at once a moralist (“The time has come,” he says in The Social Conquest of Earth, for an ethic that “places value on the whole of diversity ... instead of using it to justify prejudice and conflict”) and a moral determinist, holding that moral decisions are causal and impulse-driven rather than rational and free. He cannot resist trying to have it both ways: we are free and determined; rational and instinctual; autonomous and mechanistic.

As we learned here though, science in the form of particle physics -- i.e., the foundational science about the nature of matter --  is not and cannot be mechanistic.

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