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Why Knowledge Alone Won’t Make The World A Better Place
Exploring Hume’s Law.
We often assume that knowledge makes the world a better place.
It’s a simple argument. If we only knew more, we would stop getting into trouble. For example:
- Experts can tell us how to handle the pandemic
- Education would solve most social issues
- If we make one more documentary about animal cruelty everyone will become vegan
The idea is that we use a fact to induce action. If we know how the world is we know how it should be.
But once we think it one step further it would mean that facts can tell us what to do. That facts are the basis for moral, ethical, or just general normative arguments.
David Hume had a problem with that. As a philosopher of the Scottish enlightenment, he became one of the most influential figures for modern moral philosophy.
In his Treatise of Human Nature, he observed that treating facts as a justification for decisions and moral actions is a problem. He wrote:
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning … when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that…
