Lesson 5

Human Flourishing in Terms of

Science and Technology

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Introduction
The ancient idea that happiness or flourishing should be the end of human action, and that
the nature of this end can be objectively derived from claims about human nature or function,
stands opposed to some commonly held views in contemporary moral theory. Many
contemporary theorists believe, for example, that happiness is a subjective matter, varying from
individual to individual, that morality is chiefly other-regarding, and that the pursuit of one's own
good, far from being the purpose of moral action, is often in conflict with morality. Yet in recent
years a number of theorists have sought to revive or adapt classical notions of human flourishing
in order to give a more satisfactory account of the ends of human action and the relationship
between virtue and self-interest.

Lesson Objectives:
At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
1. identify different conceptions of human flourishing;
2. determine the development of the scientific method and validity of science; and
3. critic human flourishing vis-à-vis progress of science and technology to be able to define
for themselves the meaning of good life.

Duration : 3 hours

Lesson Proper
Eudaimonia also spelled eudaemonia, in Aristotelian ethics, the condition of human
flourishing or of living well. The conventional English translation of the ancient Greek term,
“happiness,” is unfortunate because eudaimonia, as Aristotle and most other ancient philosophers
understood it, does not consist of a state of mind or a feeling of pleasure or contentment, as
“happiness” (as it is commonly used) implies. For Aristotle, eudaimonia is the highest human
good, the only human good that is desirable for its own sake (as an end in itself) rather than for
the sake of something else (as a means toward some other end).
According to Aristotle, every living or human-made thing, including its parts, has a
unique or characteristic function or activity that distinguishes it from all other things. The highest
good of a thing consists of the good performance of its characteristic function, and the virtue or
excellence of a thing consists of whatever traits or qualities enable it to perform that function
well. (Thus, the virtue or excellence of a knife is whatever enables the good performance of
cutting, that of an eye whatever enables the good performance of seeing, and so on.) It follows
that eudaimonia consists of the good performance of the characteristic function of human beings,
whatever that may be, and human virtue or excellence is that combination of traits or qualities
that enables humans to perform that function well. Aristotle believes that the characteristic
function of human beings, that which distinguishes them from all other things, is their ability
to reason. Accordingly, “if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a
rational principle,” and if the human good is the good performance of that function, then the
“human good turns out to be [rational] activity of soul in accordance with virtue,” or rational
activity performed virtuously or excellently (Nichomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 7).
In each of his two ethical treatises, the Nichomachean Ethics and the (presumably
earlier) Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle proposed a more specific answer to the question “What is
eudaimonia?,” or “What is the highest good for humans?” The two answers, however, appear to
differ significantly from each other, and it remains a matter of debate whether they really are
different and, in any case, how they are related. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle held that
eudaimonia consists of philosophical or scientific contemplation in accordance with
the intellectual virtues of (theoretical) wisdom and understanding, but he also allowed that action
in the political sphere, in accordance with (practical) wisdom and the moral virtues, such
as justice and temperance, is eudaimon (“happy”) in a “secondary degree” (Book X, chapter 8).
In the Eudemian Ethics, he maintained that eudaimonia consists of activity of the soul in
accordance with “perfect” or “complete” virtue, by which he meant (according to some
interpretations) all the virtues, both intellectual and moral (Eudemian Ethics, Book II, chapter 1).
According to both answers, it should be noted, eudaimonia is an activity (or a range of activities)
rather than a state, and it necessarily involves the exercise of reason. Moreover, the intellectual
and moral virtues or excellences of which it is constituted are not innate talents or quickly
acquired forms of knowledge but rather are abiding traits that arise only through long
habituation, reflection, and the benefits of appropriate social experiences and circumstances
(including material circumstances). For that reason, eudaimonia must be the achievement of a
“complete life,” or at least much of a life: “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does
one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy”
(Nichomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 7).
In the mid-20th century, eudaemonism, or the philosophical theory of human well-being,
and virtue ethics were revived as sophisticated and psychologically more realistic alternatives to
action-based ethical theories such as deontology and consequentialism (see also utilitarianism),
each of which seemed to entail counterintuitive conclusions despite complicated theoretical
modifications over the course of two centuries.

Science, Technology, and Human Flourishing

Human flourishing involves the rational use of one’s individual human potentialities,
including talents, abilities, and virtues in the pursuit of his freely and rationally chosen values
and goals. Science and Technology must be treated as part of human life that needs reflective
and meditative thinking.
Human flourishing is defined as an effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment
within the context of a larger community of individuals, each with the right to pursue his or her
own such efforts. The nurse helps the individual to reclaim or develop new pathways toward
human flourishing.

Science As Method and Results

When conducting research, scientists use the scientific method to collect
measurable, empirical evidence in an experiment related to a hypothesis (often in the form of an
if/then statement), the results aiming to support or contradict a theory.
The steps of the scientific method go something like this:
1. Make an observation or observations.
2. Ask questions about the observations and gather information.
3. Form a hypothesis — a tentative description of what's been observed, and make
predictions based on that hypothesis.
4. Test the hypothesis and predictions in an experiment that can be reproduced.
 5. Analyze the data and draw conclusions; accept or reject the hypothesis or modify the
hypothesis if necessary.
6. Reproduce the experiment until there are no discrepancies between observations and
theory.

Verification Theory
The verification theory of meaning aims to characterize what it is for a sentence to be
meaningful and also what kind of abstract object the meaning of a sentence is. A brief outline is
given by Rudolph Carnap, one of the theory's most prominent defenders:
If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true, then we would know what its
meaning is. [...] thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we
determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is
possible. [4: 420]
In short, the verification theory of meaning claims that the meaning of a sentence is the
method of its verification.
Verificationism can only be fully appreciated in the larger context of the philosophical
credo it emerged from, namely 20th century logical empiricism (also known as logical
positivism). An empiricist subscribes at least to the following doctrine: no oracle, intuition, pure
reasoning, etc., can reveal what the world is like. All factual knowledge has its sole source in
sense experience. For example, if you want to understand how the human brain works there is no
other way to knowledge than via observation, especially via empirical experiments. This
epistemic doctrine (see epistemology) about the nature and source of factual knowledge had
already been put forward by the classical empiricists in the 17th and 18th century. The novelty of
20th century logical empiricism is a shift in focus from this doctrine about knowledge to a
doctrine about (scientific) language. More exactly, the logical empiricists tried to underpin the
validity of the doctrine about factual knowledge with a doctrine about sentence meaning. This is
where the verification theory of meaning has its place. Suppose we stipulate that the
meaning of a statement (a sentence, a proposition) is given by the actions performed to find out if
it is true. Or stronger, that a sentence has to be discarded as meaningless unless one can offer a
description of what fact or state of affairs has to be observable so that this sentence can be said to
be true or false. That is precisely what the verification theory of meaning demands: "The
meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification." [10: 148] Suppose furthermore that
all factual knowledge is expressed in meaningful sentences. Then, together with the verification
theory of meaning, we arrive back at the epistemic doctrine from above: factual knowledge has
its justification in observation. Thus, verificationism is a linguistic counterpart of the empiricists'
doctrine about knowledge. Both logical empiricism and the verification theory of meaning are,
however, outdated theories. This is not because the general idea behind them—that empirical
knowledge depends on sense experience—has been given up by philosophers. Rather,
verificationism faced a few unsolvable technical difficulties. A closer look at the verification
theory of meaning as well as applications of the theory will unveil some of these problems

Falsification Theory
In field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of
science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle. This is because an
experimental result is not a simple fact obtained directly from nature. Identifying and dating
Haldane's bone involves using many other theories from diverse fields, including physics,
chemistry and geology. Similarly, a theoretical prediction is never the product of a single theory
but also requires using many other theories. When a “theoretical” prediction disagrees with
“experimental” data, what this tells us is that that there is a disagreement between two sets of
theories, so we cannot say that any particular theory is falsified.
Fortunately, falsification—or any other philosophy of science—is not necessary for the
actual practice of science. The physicist Paul Dirac was right when he said, "Philosophy will
never lead to important discoveries. It is just a way of talking about discoveries which have
already been made.” Actual scientific history reveals that scientists break all the rules all the
time, including falsification. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noted, Newton's laws were
retained despite the fact that they were contradicted for decades by the motions of the perihelion
of Mercury and the perigee of the moon. It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that
gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and
should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment
dictates and adopt whatever works.
Unfortunately, some scientists have disparaged the entire field of science studies,
claiming that it was undermining public confidence in science by denying that scientific theories
were objectively true. This is a mistake since science studies play vital roles in two areas. The
first is that it gives scientists a much richer understanding of their discipline. As Einstein said:
"So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has
seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and
philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation
from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is
—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker
after truth." The actual story of how science evolves results in inspiring more confidence in
science, not less.
The second is that this knowledge equips people to better argue against anti- science
forces that use the same strategy over and over again, whether it is about the dangers of tobacco,
climate change, vaccinations or evolution. Their goal is to exploit the slivers of doubt and
discrepant results that always exist in science in order to challenge the consensus views of
scientific experts. They fund and report their own results that go counter to the scientific
consensus in this or that narrow area and then argue that they have falsified the consensus. In
their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway say that for these
groups “[t]he goal was to fight science with science—or at least with the gaps and uncertainties
in existing science, and with scientific research that could be used to deflect attention from the
main event.”
Science studies provide supporters of science with better arguments to combat these
critics, by showing that the strength of scientific conclusions arises because credible experts use
comprehensive bodies of evidence to arrive at consensus judgments about whether a theory
should be retained or rejected in favor of a new one. These consensus judgments are what have
enabled the astounding levels of success that have revolutionized our lives for the better. It is
the preponderance of evidence that is relevant in making such judgments, not one or even a few
results.
So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that
result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless
statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case,
and they have not done so.
 Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific
progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As
Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore
and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after “explaining” how the theory of
quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a
“physicist’s history of physics,” which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of
conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell their students, and those students tell their
students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really
know!"
But if you propagate a “myth-story” enough times and it gets passed on from generation
to generation, it can congeal into a fact, and falsification is one such myth-story.

Science As Social Endeavor

Science can't exist without interactions between people. There are some fields of science
where you can be successful with pure thought. Einstein was largely working on his own, based
on conversations with other people, obviously. But, in general, science these days is intensely
social, and particularly in the work that I do, I meet hundreds of people per week and talk to an
awful lot of people about scientific endeavours.
And one of the great things about science is that, to understand it, you have to understand
the kinds of personalities that are driving the science. I think, again, people think that science is
absolutely dispassionate, and that we only chase the thing that is true. We know from a lot of
philosophical studies that the definition of truth is problematic, and in science, we recognise that
many of the things that we say are absolutely true today are not absolutely true tomorrow. In
modern science, we don't tend to talk about whether something is true, we talk about whether
something fits a model or gives us the capacity to move forward with a particular therapy.

Science And Results

When a scientist announces his study’s results, he’s telling the world the most important
findings in his study. When he mentions these results, he often glosses over insignificant or
unimportant results of his study in favor of data underlying the conclusions that are most
important. Generally, the important results of a study are answers to the specific questions that
study set out to find: the reply to the specific, but not necessarily the overarching, question the
study asked. For example, a scientist who set out to research the relationship between waist size
and diabetes might find that men with waist sizes over 36 inches have a higher risk of diabetes.
This is an important result because it sheds light on the relationship between waist size and
diabetes. So, a scientist would call this “a result.” However, this does not address the larger
question of whether being overweight causes diabetes; that is an implication of the results and
would therefore be found in the Discussion section of a scientific report.
Many non-scientists -- and even inexperienced scientists -- confuse results with
implications. A scientific result must always be objective; it must be stated as a derived fact,
untainted by the personal opinion of the scientist reporting it. For example, in the Results section
of a scientific report, a study that finds men with waist sizes over 36 inches being at high risk for
diabetes should state merely that. The implication that men with big waists should lose weight to
prevent diabetes is not a result but a suggestion based on the result. Such suggestions can be
discussed in the Discussion section of a scientific report. Science is objective by nature, and the
results of science hold true to that objectivity.
If you’ve ever attended a science fair or heard the explanation of an amazing experiment,
you know that science can sometimes seem like a story. A scientific experiment has a beginning
and an end. The results are simply the end of the scientific experiment: What you found in your
study. For many people, the details of the hypothesis creation, the theorizing of methods to prove
the hypothesis and the technical gobbledygook of performing the experiment are a grand
adventure; for others, they’re needless details that get in the way of the important question: “So
how did the story end?” The results give that answer in a succinct way, without forcing you to
listen to the process of the experiment.
In the hardcore world of science, results are often incomplete without statistics. Statistics
not only help show that the results are objectively -- as opposed to subjectively -- important, but
they also help scientists test their hypotheses. Some statisticians would even say that the results
are statistics. Even without understanding the statistics behind the science, a student of science
can often know whether a result is important by asking a scientist, “Was the result statistically
significant?” This question asks the scientist whether the result was more likely due to a true
phenomenon than to randomness. For instance, if a scientist found that bigger waist sizes being
related to higher prevalence rates of diabetes were a statistically significant result, she’s usually
saying that the probability that her study arrived at its results simply by chance is significantly
low -- usually around 5 percent. Indeed, no science is perfect, but statistics allow a scientist to
show how close to perfect she can get.

Science as Education
Science is the study of phenomena and events around us through systematic observation
and experimentation. Science education cultivates students' curiosity about the world and
enhances scientific thinking. Through the inquiry process, students will recognise the nature of
science and develop scientific knowledge and science process skills to help them evaluate the
impacts of scientific and technological development. This will prepare students to
participate in public discourse in science-related issues and enable them to become life-long
learners in science and technology.
The emphasis of science education is to enhance students' scientific literacy through
investigative activities that involve planning, measuring, observing, analysing data, designing
and evaluating procedures, and examining evidence. Learning science will enable our students to
lead a fulfilling and responsible life by encouraging them to learn independently, deal with new
situations, reason critically, think creatively, make informed decisions and solve problems.
Through science activities, students should develop an interest in science and thus they
will be motivated to become active learners in science. Students should also develop an
understanding of the interrelationship between science, technology, society and environment
(STSE), and strengthen the ability to integrate and apply knowledge and skills across disciplines.
They should be able to meet the changes and challenges in the ever-developing society and
contribute towards the scientific and technological world.
Students with high ability or a strong interest in science need more challenging learning
programmes. These programmes should stretch the students' science capabilities and offer
opportunities for students to develop their potential to the full.