experimental ethics (part 3 in a continuing series)

so i’ve been doing my little ‘experiment‘ with yoga for a week now (well, more or less…). And though i don’t have any yogic substance to contribute to the blogosphere* (yet?) i would nevertheless like to make a remark about the practice of experimental ethics itself:

Despite the fact that i might never come to any solid conclusions regarding my yoga practice, i nevertheless feel that there could be a great value to people discussing their moral/ethical/religious practices out in the open and with one another. By nature, ethics is normative and not descriptive so that we shouldn’t expect to hit upon any experimentally verifiable ‘laws’. Nor will we necessarily be able to formulate any new and interesting ‘ought’ ideas. However, we might well manage to help each other along a bit more quickly than were we only randomly hitting upon better ways on our own.

The ‘moral sciences’ might not be quite able to take over a full-fledged experimental apparatus from the harder, natural and social sciences, but they certainly should be able to adopt some version of the ’scientific community’ – the one that discusses and discusses. And i do not think this is already happening:

True, philosophers and ethicists have academic communities and journals that enable them to discuss, but they are trying to come up with theories of what we ought to do, i.e. their output is not ‘good practices’ but ‘true sentences’. I am looking for the former. Moreover, with the advent of internet, scientific journals are a most outdated and inadequate form of communication, when we have blogs and social websites that are much, much quicker at disseminating and discussing information and ideas.

So all in all, even if i don’t come to any conclusions regarding my yoga practices, i hope that discussing them might encourage others to do likewise so that we might learn and improve together. Here’s to hoping!