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During the enlightenment period, people began to look political, economical, and moral aspects in a more scientific way (i.e., eliminate bias imposed by church on these understandings, use scientific reasoning to reach conclusions...) and therefore, I was wondering whether it occurred that such method of reasoning helped develop people's capacity for feeling of what is right and what is wrong and also helped in changing centuries old church laws.

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Historically people were widely thought to be 'born criminal', ie defined by lineage. Science was first put to justifying that, through phrenology, and facial analysis of 'criminal types'. But then doctors are thought to have been killing more people than they saved until the 1890s when hand washing and germ theories were grudgingly accepted.

'Blank slate' theories of the mind, discredited now, helped establish the importance of nurture at least as addition to nature.

You could go down a history-of-science rabbithole, but there are just too many examples to consider. Why do you ask the question? I'd say religious and philosophical ideas have been far more important, and many of the influential scientific ideas were wrong.

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  • The purpose of such question is that I admired how Nicolas De Cariat was astonished of how the way we look politics and economics and even history and analyze them the same path used to prove a scientific/mathematical theorem. So even historical arguments were now tackled using this new approach and so I wondered if this also helped influence people in expanding their emotional capacity to distinguish between right and wrong as if its the basis of morality
    – SPARSE
    Commented May 15, 2021 at 23:08
  • I've read some about what Kant might have said about this but Kant believes that only pure reasoning without the use of emotions could establish a pure morality...
    – SPARSE
    Commented May 15, 2021 at 23:08

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