Science without morality reduces animals and plants to meaningless bundles of matter that can be "done better" using eugenics. The life and wellbeing of billions of animals and plants are at stake.

Without morality, meaningful experience of animals and plants is neglected.

This article provides a short case for the beyond science nature of morality.

A case for the beyond science nature of morality

Scientific evidence equals repeatability. Consequently, anything that science can potentially understand and explain must possess a repeatable nature.

Can there be more in the world than what is repeatable? And what does that more have to do with meaningful experience of animals and plants?

👨‍🚀 Astronauts seem to have an insight into this through their own meaningful experience. And because science cannot explain their experience, almosts nobody today knows about it, despite decades of attempts by astronauts to inform the public about it.

Astronauts report to experience an extreme transcendental experience of 'interconnected euphoria' when they view earth from space. It is called 'Overview effect on Earth'.

“Overview effect on Earth”

First we should understand why we don't already know of this profound experience, despite decades of astronaut reports.

Widely known in the space community as the Overview Effect, it is little known by the general public and poorly understood even by many space advocates. Phrases like "strange dreamlike experience", "reality was like a hallucination", and feeling like they had "come back from the future", occur time and again. Finally, many astronauts have emphasized that space images do not come close to the direct experience, and may even give us a false impression of the real nature of the Earth and space. "It is virtually impossible to describe... You can take people to see [IMAX's] The Dream Is Alive, but spectacular as it is, it's not the same as being there." - Astronaut and Senator Jake Garn.

(2022) The Case for Planetary Awareness Source: overview-effect.earth

Albert Einstein once wrote the following prophecy about the exploration of a world of meaning beyond the scope of science.

Perhaps... we must also give up, by principle, the space-time continuum,” he wrote. “It is not unimaginable that human ingenuity will some day find methods which will make it possible to proceed along such a path. At the present time, however, such a program looks like an attempt to breathe in empty space.

Within Western philosophy, the realm beyond space has traditionally been considered a realm beyond physics — the plane of God’s existence in Christian theology. In the early eighteenth century, philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s “monads” — which he imagined to be the primitive elements of the universe — existed, like God, outside space and time. His theory was a step toward emergent space-time, but it was still metaphysical, with only a vague connection to the world of concrete things.

Well known philosopher 🕮 Immanuel Kant once wrote the following about the fallacy that empirical motives (i.e. anything within the scope of science) can be a basis for morality.

Thus every empirical element is not only quite incapable of being an aid to the principle of morality, but is even highly prejudicial to the purity of morals, for the proper and inestimable worth of an absolutely good will consists just in this, that the principle of action is free from all influence of contingent grounds, which alone experience can furnish. We cannot too much or too often repeat our warning against this lax and even mean habit of thought which seeks for its principle amongst empirical motives and laws; for human reason in its weariness is glad to rest on this pillow, and in a dream of sweet illusions (in which, instead of Juno, it embraces a cloud) it substitutes for morality a bastard patched up from limbs of various derivation, which looks like anything one chooses to see in it, only not like virtue to one who has once beheld her in her true form.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/

Science and morality

Science considers itself capable of being morally neutral and it considers morality as a relic of religions and superstition that is to be abolished.

(2018) Immoral advances: Is science out of control? To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy. Source: New Scientist

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars) shared the following perspective on the evolution of science.

The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime – which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.

Science has attempted to rid itself of morality and to become the master of itself, i.e. to 'advance immorally' on behalf of the the greater good of science.

The nature of morality

When it concerns morality, a good way to view it is that morality can only be neglected and principally it is never possible to know in advance what moral is. Morality always involves the question “what is good?” in any given situation.

Greek philosopher Aristotle considered a state of philosophical contemplation, which he named eudaimonia, the greatest virtue or highest human good. It is an eternal strive to serve life: the pursuit of good from which value follows.

That is what morality is: an intellectual pursuit of good.

Science is therefor a moral practice. It is a pursuit of a qualitative truth that is part of the good.

The moral good is simply more than just the qualitative truth of science and that explains the idea of morality beyond science.

American philosopher William James once said the following about it:

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

Morality in practice

Morality can be seen as an intellectual capacity that is dependent on the potential for moral consideration and that potential needs to be facilitated in some way, which is done through culture.

While one might cite the common wisdom “ignorance is bliss” by which morality can be neglected, a lack of moral consideration can become unjust when the potential for it in an individual can be made evident, by which it can be demanded on behalf of human dignity.

In practice, a cultural demand is a very strong demand.

American philosopher Henry David Thoreau once wrote the following about the natural evolution of morality in human culture.

Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual moral improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

He was right. Millennials (Gen Y) have been driving a global shift away from eating animals for moral consideration and Gen Z is accelerating a shift to veganism.

Morality vs ethics: what is the difference?

The use of morality to write rules is called ethics which belongs to politics.

While it is good to create ethical rules, it is not possible to become moral by mere ethical rules. Ethical rules can only be used to serve morality, it cannot provide the foundation for it.

Ethics is an attempt to fixate morality on behalf of authenticity and can be dangerous and result in violence.

British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote the following in an essay that he called “Philosophers and 🐖 Pigs”

“It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions.” Russell’s suggestion is that ethical notions offer little more than self-serving argument to justify violence. (2020) The politics of logic - Philosophy at war ‘The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany … it is in its essence neutral’ Source: Aeon.co

Simplified:

“What once has been perceived as good, is put in front of the charier, and that is where the war begins...”

Morality is found in the question “what is good?” and not in the answer provided, which is ethics, but in the quest itself.

Morality and GMO

GMO is an unguided (dumb) practice driven primarily by the short term financial self-interest of companies.

A special about GMO in The Economist in 2019 wrote the following:

Reprogramming nature (synthetic biology) is extremely convoluted, having evolved with no intention or guidance.

The Economist (Redesigning Life, April 6th, 2019)

(2018) Immoral advances: Is science out of control? To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy. Source: New Scientist

Science without morality reduces animals and plants to meaningless bundles of matter that can be "done better" using eugenics. The life and wellbeing of billions of animals and plants are at stake.

GMO is corruption of nature from the perspective of nature. GMO is eugenics that resides on the essence of inbreeding which is known to cause fatal problems.

Cows provide an example of why eugenics is harmful.

 Cows and eugenics

Cows critically endangered by eugenics While there are 9 million cows in the USA, from a genetic perspective there are just 50 cows alive due to the nature of eugenics that resides on the essence of inbreeding

Renowned author and professor of history Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and CEO of CNN, stated the following in an interview with Harvard Business Review:

It is going to be a life sciences (GMO) century. People who are able to harness the technologies of the life sciences and to connect it to our moral understanding and our humanities, those will be the people that will dominate the twentyfirst century, and I am hoping a grand figure will come along who will represent that.

A better (new to be discovered) method for morality is urgently required to protect nature.