Somewhere during the 19th century, the European culture embarked on the project to construct a society based on scientific principles.
This project has failed for 2 fundamental reasons. The first is that science has no ethical component and so in itself cannot be used to make any decisions nor form a basis for agreement. The second is that this project of basing social organization on science was built within the pre-existing European project of basing social organization on a group of largely independent and self perpetuating institutions.
The Failure of Science
As we shall see in the second half of this chapter, science has little meaning outside the scientific institutions that decide who is and is not a scientist and what is and what is not scientific truth. However, to clarify the absence of any ethic within science let us consider the scientific method at the individual level and suppose that an individual, say lost an island, can observe their surroundings and come to a certain understanding about it and make predictions.
Though these predictions can be used to inform the decisions our lost islander makes, they do not in themselves resolve anything. For instance, through observation our islander may conclude that some plants are edible and other plants cause sickness, but this knowledge does not, and all similar knowledge cannot, resolve the question of whether it is better to be healthy or to be sick. If our islander decided it would be better to die