"While Born evidently realised that our extended order no longer gratified primitive instincts, he too failed to examine closely the structures that create and maintain this order, or to see that our instinctual morals have over the past five thousand years or more gradually been replaced or restrained. Thus, although perceiving that 'science and technology have destroyed the ethical basis of civilisation, perhaps irreparably', he imagines that they have done so by the facts they have uncovered rather than by their having systematically discredited beliefs that fail to satisfy certain 'standards of acceptability' demanded by constructivist rationalism (see below). While admitting that `no one has yet devised a means of keeping society together without traditional ethical principles', Born yet hopes that these can be replaced 'by means of the traditional method used in science'. He too fails to see that what lies between instinct and reason cannot be replaced by 'the traditional method used in science'."
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Academics from GermanyPhysicists from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyNobel laureates in PhysicsPhysicists from Germany
Original Language: English
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Sources
Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988), Ch. 4: The Revolt of Instinct and Reason
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Born
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