When it comes to ethics there is a perception that no scientific yardstick exists from which to judge ethical decisions. The whole premise of this blog is that ethics are knowable and verifiable. As an individual you can bring basic ethical questions to any ethical dilemma. You can ask as many questions as needed – based on your own understanding of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity to help you derive a correct ethical conclusion. Once you have derived the right ethical conclusion you could test your conclusion by reviewing your questions and answers with others. If you are correct, your conclusions should match those of others when they review the same set of data you have.* Note: This assumes the others have a sufficient EQ & IQ and their personal frame is not considerably warped by some cultural meme that may warp their understanding of core ethical matters.
As noted prior, a knowledge of feeling both sensory and emotional, and the ability to know another’s pain (empathy) are required to be able to derive ethical truth. If you could program a computer to understand feeling as well as concepts of fairness/reciprocity and harm/care, input all the relevant information regarding an ethical dilemma, it may be possible in theory for it to derive the correct ethical answer.
Science fiction aside, the scientific method requires a hypothesis along with testable premises, which can be verified by others. Ethics can and should be held to these same standards. The only difficult part with regards to ethics is that the testing is done internally through introspection, not externally using matter. Our internal results can be externally tested through the use of others, who can follow our internal analysis by following our list of internal questions; adding and modifying the list as necessary to bring agreement to an ethical matters resolution.
The accuracy of your Ethical analysis will increase the more others outside of your culture agree with your analysis; diverse agreement provides stronger foundations. While large groups of people in a monolithic culture can agree and be wrong, it is harder for large diverse cultural groups to agree and be wrong.