There is a difference. Science tests its hypotheses through experimentation, and no notion is worth anything unless it's confirmed this way. This is why I have learned more about Galen on this website (due to its devotion to history) than in medical school. It's also why no chemistry course will teach you the ins and outs of alchemy.
But philosophy works in the same way. The difference is one of degree, not kind. In both science and philosophy, you can't just make up some idea and wiffle about it vaguely until you've forced everyone to agree out of pure boredom (well, maybe in Continental philosophy, but we won't go there). You have to support it with arguments. In the natural sciences these arguments are based on experiments; and they are so strong that normally you don't bother articulating the arguments themselves, you just do the experiments and report the results, and draw conclusions directly from them. The scientific method is really just a form of philosophical argument, one which uses the results of experiments as its premises, and it is so powerful because premises that are based upon experiment are so strong. Philosophy is the same, except that you don't have experiments and their results in the same way. If you did, it would be called science. In philosophy, your claims must be supported by arguments. In the absence of the experimental method, these arguments are necessarily going to be weaker than most scientific ones, and that is why philosophical conclusions are that much less certain than scientific ones. It's also why philosophers tend to spend more time examining each other's arguments, and finding faults with them, than scientists do. Of course this happens in science too, to some extent: a scientist may claim that another scientist's hypothesis is ill founded, either because the results of her experiments do not support it, or because her experiments themselves are flawed in some way. The process is the same, it's just the methods that are different.
It may as well, because it consists of contrived scenarios that may or may not actually occur, and purports a way to solve them based on some guiding principles. The only thing it's lacking is divine retribution.
You've got it completely backwards. Philosophical ethics doesn't consist of making up arbitrary principles and then "solving" fantasy scenarios on that basis. On the contrary, the contrived scenarios - when they are used - are there to establish the principles.
It's exactly the same as in science. In science you observe some phenomena and concoct a hypothesis to explain those phenomena. Then you perform some experiments to test the hypothesis. If the experiments confirm the hypothesis, then it is stronger, and you might try some new experiments to test it in a different way. If they do not confirm the hypothesis you either modify it or think up a new one, and so it starts again.
In philosophy too, you see phenomena which you seek to explain. In the case of ethics the basic phenomena are our ethical intuitions - our beliefs that certain things are right and others are wrong. Ethicists try to come up with theories about what makes some things right and some things wrong that fit these intuitions. For example, utilitarians believe that what makes an action right or wrong is its consequences. An action is good insofar as it brings about good consequences, and bad insofar as it brings about bad ones; and in any situation, the thing you
ought to do is the one that will do the most good. (That's a simple form of act utilitarianism.) So that's the hypothesis. It seems roughly to match our intuitions: we
do think that actions that do good are themselves right to do, and that actions that do harm are themselves wrong to do. Then one tests this hypothesis by imagining "test" situations.
For example, there's the situation that was put to Kant (who held a non-utilitarian theory, in which actions are right or wrong irrespective of their consequences). A murderer asks you where your friend is hiding, so he can go and kill him. Do you tell the murderer the truth? Kant said you do, because it is always wrong to lie. But this conflicts with most people's intuitions. Most people think it would be wrong to tell the truth to the murderer, and that you should lie to him, because the consequences of telling the truth would be so much worse than the consequences of lying. So that "thought experiment"
confirms the utilitarian hypothesis and contradicts the Kantian hypothesis. It is of value not because we are particularly interested in what to do when accosted by murderers, but because thinking about how we would react in such a situation sheds light on our ethical principles. Another "thought experiment" is the story of the doctor in a mountain shack, who has five people all about to die for want of organ transplants. A healthy man walks in, so the doctor kills him and uses his organs to save the others. Assuming that the operations were guaranteed to succeed, and that there was definitely no other way of saving the patients, did the doctor do the right thing or not? Here most people would say that he did not. And this suggests that there's something wrong with utilitarianism, at least in the form I just described it, because the doctor did what was right according to utilitarianism: if he hadn't acted, five people would have died, but because of his actions, only one person died. It seems, then, that he chose the action with the best possible consequences. And yet we think he did the wrong thing. So that is a "thought experiment" that suggests that utilitarianism is wrong. Again, it is of interest not because we care about this implausible situation, but because our reactions to that implausible situation shed light on our everyday ethical intuitions. It is literally an experiment to test a hypothesis, although the experiment consists only of imagining a situation.
To say that these thought experiments are valueless because they are contrived and don't reflect real life is like saying that scientific experiments are valueless for the same reason. If somebody said that scientific experiments are a waste of time because all they tell is is what happens in laboratories, and we don't care about that, then it would be obvious that they had misunderstood the point of scientific experiments and how they are constructed carefully to test hypotheses about the real world. It's the same thing with thought experiments in philosophy.
Anyway, I have to say it's increasingly clear that you really haven't read any philosophical ethics. Perhaps you should test the hypothesis that it's all valueless preachifyin' by conducting the experiment of reading some, and seeing if it confirms the hypothesis or not.
Also, I should point out that philosophical ethics is an enormous and very popular field, not just within philosophy. I'd say that about three quarters of the jobs currently being advertised in philosophy are for ethics specialists. Not only that, but a great number of these are for people who can teach applied ethics - business ethics, bio-ethics, legal ethics, and political ethics especially - in university courses for non-philosophers. Education providers and students alike recognise that practical ethics is a vital component of subjects such as business, medicine, law, and politics, and they want people to teach it. How can you explain this demand on the assumption that philosophical ethics is just a load of airy-fairy moralising and made-up sermons? Why would business teachers or law professors want that their students to be exposed to that?
The reason I have so little confidence in ethics is because it changes depending on the prevailing times. As recently as a generation ago, for example, it was socially acceptable to be openly bigotted. And until just 150 years ago, it was perfectly acceptable to own slaves and believe it was for their own good as much as yours. Until the 20th century, it was acceptable to beat your wife. These were the customs of their times, and those behaviors were considered ethical and moral. (To me, these terms are one and the same, and the differences are purely semantic.) Does this mean that people in the 21st century are more ethical than in the past? I doubt it, because those people were behaving in a manner consistent with prevailing expectations, just as people do today. And if ethics has so long been a part of philosophy, why has there been, for so long, such depravity?
Of course people's ethical views change, but what's this got to do with philosophy? In fact you might be surprised at how much philosophical ethics has often gone against the grain of society's views; witness, for example, Jeremy Bentham's views on the ethical treatment of animals (which are far more like our own than those that were prevalent in his day), or Bertrand Russell's on sexual morality. They were more enlightened than most of their contemporaries for the simple reason that they thought about these things in an objective, careful, and undogmatic way. Of course philosophers are human like anyone else and they often let their prejudices get in the way; an example is Hume's (brief but toxic) defence of racist principles. But the point of being a philosopher is that you are trained to try to minimise this and to think about things carefully and rationally. I think that in the field of ethics philosophers have succeeded in doing so more often than they have failed. If there has always been, continues to be, and no doubt always will be, such depravity in society, then that's because most people aren't philosophers and aren't willing to try to think beyond their prejudices. You can't blame philosophy for that!
I would have to be denser than a singularity to not notice what society expects of me. And so I recognize what is considered ethical.
But you overlook the fact that even within society there are disagreements over what is ethical. You surely have noticed that there are rather big disagreements over, for example, gay rights, abortion, euthanasia, the treatment of prisoners, the treatment of prisoners of war, war itself, fox hunting, health care, the preservation of the environment, contraception, bankers' bonuses, politicians' perks, and innumerable other things. So what
is ethical behaviour? Just looking at society won't tell you, because society itself can't agree! Should these things be decided by who can shout the loudest? Isn't it better to think rationally about them?
Observation suggests that people will act in a manner most advantageous to them, not necessarily what is just and fair. And then they will publically behave in a manner consistent with what is expected of them, wherever their ethics might be in deficit with such action.
I don't think this is true at all. If a good friend of yours came to you for help, being in some kind of difficulty, would your decision whether or not to help her be based
solely upon whether such an action would (a) help you, and (b) be in accordance with what society expects? Wouldn't you have any thought at all for (c) your friend herself? Wouldn't you care in the slightest about her and her wellbeing, and only think about yourself and society? Of course you'd care about her - that's what friends do. So that would be a moral consideration. A person who doesn't have that consideration at all would be a psychopath, and we apply that term not simply to express that we disapprove of the behaviour of such a person but to indicate that they are literally pathological in some way: they lack something that a normal person has, namely the ability to regard other people as valuable in themselves, and a sense of altruism or the worth of helping other people for their own sake and not simply for selfish reasons.
Not only would you take such a moral consideration into account in that situation, it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility that you might even help your friend
even though it didn't help you yourself and might even be disapproved of by society. People do do that sometimes. So I don't agree with your view. Common sense tells us that people do, in fact, act altruistically sometimes - perhaps even quite often. To suggest, as you imply, that people never face genuine moral choices, but merely walk through life guided by calculations about how to maximise their own benefit and fit in with society, is just as much at odds with observation as it is horrific.
I know; I assume that's why it is mentioned in the OP. (And if youd have followed my earlier What is philosophy? thread you might have noticed Ive referred to it myself .) I'd be more interested in your view on the particular course I linked to however which, by the way, is based on Russells The value of philosophy. (Perhaps an interesting read for Nanocyborgasm?)
I don't think I saw that thread - I don't habituate OT except when following links from elsewhere. I haven't had time to look at the course you mentioned but I'll try to do so.
On Russell, I like this short passage:
Bertrand Russell said:
In schools and universities information of all sorts is ladled out, but no one is taught to reason, or to consider what is evidence for what. To any person with even the vaguest idea of the nature of scientific evidence, such beliefs as those of astrologers are of course impossible. But so are most of the beliefs upon which governments are based, such as the peculiar merit of persons living in a certain area, or of persons whose income exceeds a certain sum. It would not do to teach people to reason correctly, since the result would be to undermine these beliefs. If these beliefs were to fade, mankind might escape disaster, but politicians could not. At all costs, therefore, we must be kept stupid.
And that, of course, is why even the impractical areas of philosophy are really practical after all.
. Not that philosophers are exclusive to this domain. You can find plenty of crackpot theories in psychology which are still taken seriously today, such as psychoanalysis.
