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. Now in the days of Galileo there were great arguments about what makes a body fall, all kinds of arguments about the medium and the pushes and the pulls and so on. And what Galileo did was disregard all the arguments and decide if it fell and how fast it fell, and just describe that. On that everybody could agree. And keep on studying in that direction, on what everyone can agree, and never mind the machinery and the theory underneath, as long as possible. And then gradually, with the accumulation of experience, you find other theories underneath that are more satisfactory, perhaps. There were in the early days of science terrible arguments about, for instance, light. Newton did some experiments which showed that a light beam separated and spread with a prism would never get separated again. Why did he have to argue with Hooke? He had to argue with Hooke because of the theories of the day about what light was like and so on. He wasn't arguing whether the phenomenon was right. Hooke took a prism and saw that it was true.
So the question is whether it is possible to do something analogous (and work by analogy) with moral problems. I believe that it is not at all impossible that there be agreements on consequences, that we agree on the net result, but maybe not on the reason we do what we ought to do. That the argument that existed in the early days of the Christians as to, for instance, whether Jesus was of a substance like the Father or of the same substance as the Father, which when translated into the Greek became the argument between the Homoiousions and the Homoousians
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