The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer has an article by Paul Kurtz which is very strange. For a long time is has been commonly held that use of reason and science cannot produce ethics; so that no amount of fact-gathering can demonstrate the truth of statements like: It is good to do X or It is bad to do Y.

Though, there are two limited ways in which reasoning or science can aid in formulating ethical judgments, despite the inability for it to construct them:

1. they can be used to detect internal logical inconsistencies;
2. they can be used to accurately discover whether a particular ethical claim has been correctly reasoned from;
3. they can be used to provide information which allows us to decide which ethical judgment applies in a given situation.

All of this Kurtz does not overtly dispute, but explicitly accepts. And he correctly sees that relativism leaves no useful foundation (if person A says something is very good for us to do, and person B says it is very bad for us to do, there is no way of resolving the situation outside of some kind of force).

Yet Kurtz is quite insistent that science and reason can be used profitably with ethical issues. Exactly by what means he proposes to achieve this can be detected at two particular points in his article. At one point he says:

We ought to consider our moral principles and values, like other beliefs, open to examination in the light of evidence and reason and hence amenable to modification.

And that is a self-exploding belief — a belief that directly undermines itself — as soon as we see that the claim is itself stated as a moral principle (because of the "ought"), so that it should be open to modification, which would end up contradicting itself (since a modified statement would say that moral principles should not be amenable to modification).

In short, his statement accomplishes no useful purpose.

Secondarily, where does Kurtz propose to get ethical principles from? They cannot come from science or reason, and he does not like relativism, so where does he see them coming from? He says:

I submit that there is a body of prescriptive ethical judgments that has been tested in practice and that constitutes normative knowledge

He simply declares them to exist. Yet he provides no method of getting any more, nor any procedure for deciding good norms from bad (whether for existing norms, or the newly proposed). So what made the testing he refers to good or bad?

He further says:

Ethical precepts need not be based upon transcendental grounds

but transcendental grounds are exactly what he has based his own arguments on. He claims that ethical norms must be amenable to modification (which is a statement not derivable from science or reason, and thus transcendental), and his ethical norms are derived from no stated place.

His article leaves me with the distinct feeling that I am the skeptical inquirer, and he is the one with beliefs not based on reason.