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I think it can very well fit ethics. A lot of ethics argues that acting in such and such "ethical" way will result is some outcome, like more happiness, less harm to the environment, less harm to workers, less injustice, etc. It would be great to test those assertions empirically as well. If it is true, devise an experiment, implement your ethical framework, measure outcomes, validate it, prove that it does improve on your claimed metrics. Just to be clear, there is a place for thinking through first principles in science, that's part of the hypothesis phase. In that phase you can use inductive and abductive reasoning to guide yourself to a likely hypothesis. But science will want you to go further and test the hypothesis, to ascertain more strongly that it is a likely hypothesis. The only part which isn't really applicable to science is deductive reasoning, because it relies on assuming truths and perfect formal logical rules of derivation. These can hold within a total imaginary setting, mathematics does this all the time for example, and so does a lot of philosophy, but when applied practically (which is where science comes in), you need to show that those assumptions hold in the real world and its current setting, and that the deduction rules do as well, and that brings you back to inductive and abductive reasoning, because you no longer control the range of the domain, it is now dictated by reality or our perception of it. |