I found myself in a discussion about historical materialism where I ended up saying something along the lines of “scientific progress helps us to build more ethical societies because it enables us to see through the injustices of race, religion, and capitalism.” I was kind of firing from the hip, but I couldn’t think of anything better to say. My conversation partner asked me if I thought you could do a scientific experiment or analysis on a moral problem, and I was frankly stumped.
I know we aren’t supposed to think in moral categories, but I sense every one of us thinks, and correct me if I’m wrong, that capitalism is wrong and communism is right morally speaking. With that in mind, as contradictions are resolved per historical materialism and as different peoples have socialist revolutions within their societies, do these societies become more moral in any sense?
To try to stay within the words that you were using already, scientific progress of a community eliminates these injustices because it irons out contradictions, not because you can conduct experiments about morality. For example, here in the US, Black people, women, and fat people receive inferior healthcare. A scientific approach to improving healthcare outcomes would specifically target the healthcare they’re receiving to bring their outcomes in line with everyone else’s, not because it’s moral, but because it’s the easiest way to bring up the average healthcare outcome. When you approach problems within society in a scientific way, sooner or later, you must work on eliminating these injustices because they aren’t based on objective fact. If we were looking at healthcare outcomes between people with gunshot wounds vs people with a cold, we would expect a difference. It’s objective fact that for the vast majority of people, gunshot wounds cause far more trauma to the body than the cold does. We can measure it. We can show all the data for it. This is not the same for black people vs white people. In fact, we already know that it’s the treatment that makes the difference there. It just never gets addressed because there is no scientific approach to healthcare here.