A Scientific Morality? Exploring the Possibility in the Thought of Jose Ortega y Gasset and John Dewey

   Here's the introduction to my latest paper which gets into the possibility of a scientific morality in the thought of two 20th Century thinkers, John Dewey and Jose Ortega y Gasset. If you'd like to read more, send me a message or email!

It is a truth that the more familiar one becomes with the surroundings of one’s life, the more one begins not to notice them, to even forget that they are there. This is seen not just on a personal level, but as a society as well. The ideas and worldview that inform the structures that make up one’s political, cultural, and (a)religious lives can themselves become so familiar that one can begin to think that they have always been this way, or not remember that things were different in the past. This is the case in today’s day and age which surrounded by the domination of science and technology. New technology becomes normalized so quickly that one can forget what life was like even a few years before. Many may not realize that the 19th and 20th Centuries were a time of ideological upheaval. The Christian belief structures that informed the makeup of society in the West were overthrown in the name of a view of the world that denied the transcendent and only considered the material, tangible, and temporal. While it is possible for science to flourish within this new Materialist worldview, there is a difficult problem of understanding the realm of specifically human moral values. The goal of this paper is to contrast two early 20th

Century thinkers, Jose Ortega y Gasset and John Dewey, who represent the two opinions on the possibility of a scientifically based morality for human beings. The case will be made that a scientific morality like the one proposed by Dewey is impossible: By showing that material science cannot engage with higher complex human values, that science does not exist on its own but is nested within a framework of values, and that all frameworks are posited on some level of philosophy and faith. At the end, a connection will be made with this debate today as it has been continued in the interactions between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris."