Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 29 May 2016 5:29:23pm
Dr Harris asks, "Is it unscientific to value health [?]"

Yes, it's unscientific.

Reason / reasoned enquiry / science, of itself, has no purposes or values. It's simply a tool. The user of the tool provides all the purposes and values involved in the enquiry.

Humans, like most animals, have evolved to prefer health to ill-health, absence of pain to pain, capacity to incapacity.

Science doesn't come into it at all unless and until someone asks questions such as 'Do humans value health? Why?' - and decides to use the tool 'reasoned enquiry' to find the answer.

Dr Harris also says, "Is it unscientific to [...] seek to maximize it [health] within the context of medicine?"

For the same reasons, the answer again is Yes, it's unscientific.

The question means something like : "If your purpose is to seek to maximize X, is it consistent with that purpose if you seek to maximise X?"

The answer is Yes, whether X is 'health' or anything else. But the answer is innate in the question - it's not something added by science.