In my previous essay, I began discussing our epistemological crisis. In brief, it is this: we base our current understanding of science on Hume's empiricism, but Hume's empiricism is too weak actually to support the most fundamental assumptions and goals of science: its belief in an external physical world, and its goal of mapping the causal structure of reality (laws of nature). Yet, we ignore this weakness while making a big deal of the fact that Hume's empiricism cannot support ethics, metaphysics, or religious knowledge. We believe strongly in science despite its weak foundation while relativizing ethics, regarding religion as superstition, and dismissing philosophical metaphysics as meaningless.
I promised in this essay to discuss further the consequences of our epistemological crisis.
Ethics Relativized
Neither Hume nor the logical positivists meant to relativize ethics. In fact, the ethical theory they developed is very interesting. Hume, being the thorough empiricist that he was, noticed that among our experiences are strong and fairly consistent emotional reactions to human actions, and from these emotional reactions we tend to form judgments: approval when our emotional reaction is positive, and disapproval when our emotional reaction is negative. Not all of our emotional reactions are shared, but many of them are. Most people tend to feel a strong sense of approval towards those who help others, for example, and a strong sense of disapproval towards those who harm others. The basic moral principles we all should follow are thus grounded in these shared emotional responses, according to Hume. The logical positivists accepted a similar understanding of morality.
This ethical theory derives general moral principles from collective human experience. Why then do I claim that ethics has become relativized? Even though Hume did not intend for his "theory of moral sentiments" to be interpreted individualistically, it is tempting to interpret it this way. Many people do now make moral judgments on the basis of their own gut feelings. But individualizing this moral theory also relativizes it. Because inquiring more deeply into moral questions requires mental effort as well as psychological difficulty in that it incurs the risk of changing one's mind and perhaps even having to change one's behavior, at the first sign of effort it is much easier to proclaim moral questions "unanswerable or "just a matter of opinion" and the relativizing is now complete.
Metaphysics Declared Meaningless
Kant recognized the challenge Hume raised for metaphysics, but it was the logical positivists who declared out loud that metaphysics is meaningless.
First, let's clarify what metaphysics is, since some of what flies under the banner of "metaphysics" today is not really the subfield long recognized as a branch of philosophy. The three major subfields of philosophy are ethics (or value theory more generally), epistemology, and metaphysics. Metaphysics is that branch devoted to an inquiry into the nature of reality.
Why would the logical positivists think it is meaningless to inquire into the nature of reality? In truth, they didn't actually regard all such inquiry as meaningless. They defined "meaningfulness" as only what is logically or empirically verifiable, which means that empirical inquiry into the nature of reality -- that is, science -- was acceptable. Other ways of pondering the nature of reality, such as questioning whether there is more to reality than meets the eye, were ruled out as meaningless. But at a deeper level, and going back to Hume, since empiricism alone cannot even determine that there is anything more to reality than me and my experience-as-experience, I cannot know that there is even a natural world to study. All I can study is my own experience. All philosophy collapses to epistemology. This is the deeper and more honest meaninglessness of metaphysics upheld by pure empiricism.
Religion Rendered Superstition
Finally, we come to religion. Without any real ethics besides my own gut feelings about things, and without any real reality which might possibly house (or more properly be created by) God, no claims to religious truth can find any foothold. Thus, religion becomes nothing more than superstition. Since religion is grounded in the belief that there is more to reality than physical reality, and logical empiricism only accepts physical reality at most (even though it cannot properly accept even that, as discussed above) then any possibility of religious knowledge is defined a priori as impossible.
Why Is All of This a Crisis?
All of this leaves us in crisis because not only is even science called into question (though this fact is hidden), we have so lost confidence that "truth" can apply to ethical or religious matters that it has become almost impossible to talk meaningfully about these.
When the stakes are not high, we honor the "tolerance" of letting each other have our own "opinions." What we fail to realize when we do this is that we may be infusing a similar-sounding language with wildly different meanings. For example, I have never met an atheist whose concept of God bore any resemblance to my own concept of God. The God the atheist does not believe in is nothing like the God I do believe in. So do we really disagree? Yet, when we try to zero in on the meanings of our terms, it is common for someone to become impatient, saying, "that's just semantics!" The conversation ends. We have lost the patience and courtesy to try to understand each other, and we have become unable to hold each other accountable to truth.
But sometimes the stakes are high, and we cannot just walk away from disagreements letting each other "agree to disagree." If persuasion fails people often try to bully each other into agreement. When divisiveness becomes entrenched, people may even skip the step of trying to persuade, sure that persuasion cannot work since we no longer believe in truth, which is what makes persuasion possible.
The crisis is serious, and we see it playing out all around us in our increasingly fracturing world. Yet I remain hopeful, and will discuss why in my next essay.