-3 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
What are you asking for?
I'm asking if there has since the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, ever occured to any clairvoyant individual with at minimum a passing interest in moral philosophy that the same process is also responsible for the emergence of morality.
I'm really struggling here to see how that can not have been the case and I find it utterly bizarre that a lot of people who are phenomenally well read and often feature prominently in discussions on evolution, morality and how they relate to each other in specific domains (Dawkins, Harris, Peterson etc) **all** accept Hume's guillotine and never question it.
I feel like I'm fucking taking crazy pills, they should all know better.
Jaak Panksepp discovered through his research clear evidence that morality is an emergent feature of evolution. Peterson can't stop talking about the man but somehow cannot see the conclusions to his own logic.
Moral behaviour is that which generates iterative success over generations.
Comment by justanediblefriend at 06/01/2020 at 00:36 UTC*
13 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Woah okay, there's a lot of misconceptions going on here at once, I don't know if I can get all of it in one comment. Please understand that the following comment is not a comprehensive correction of the state you're in right now. For that, you'll need to actually start engaging with the metaethical literature rather than just reddit comments from people familiar with the topic.
First, none of the three people you listed are well-read on these topics. In fact, they are actually famous among philosophers for being incredibly poorly read, incredibly poor thinkers with respect to these subjects, and perhaps the ~~worse~~ worst sin of all, being intentionally *misleading* on these topics. I'm actually really (pleasantly) surprised you're asking this here, because Harris et al. very notoriously and pervasively use some rather nasty rhetorical tricks in order to discourage people from engaging with the literature on these topics (for fear that their paying audience will realize their being crackpot con men).
They *do NOT* know what they are talking about with respect to these topics, and furthermore, understanding these debates via them will leave you *incredibly* confused. I would drop them like Scottie drops Judy.
Next, you're confused altogether about what the concern over the autonomy of ethics is even a concern about. The gap between descriptive and moral (and, usually, normative altogether) statements isn't about moral behavior or moral beliefs, but about moral facts. The question is whether moral facts are autonomous from other facts.
In other words, you seem to think the question is something like this: **"Are our moral beliefs due to something beyond the non-normative facts, or are they due to non-normative facts?"** Here, the answer seems to obviously be yes! All of our faculties come from our evolutionary history! While the cognitive faculties and physiological components that allow me to know that <2+2=4> is true, that there is a laptop in front of me, and so on undeniably provide me with genuine facts about the world, they are of course also faculties and components which came about via my evolutionary history!
But *this is not at all what the interest in the autonomy of ethics is about.* Rather, it's about what I described above, which is a question akin to the following: **"Are moral (as well as normative altogether) *facts* autonomous (in the various senses I alluded to) from the non-normative facts, or are they non-autonomous?"**
And here, it's demonstrably false that Jaak Panksepp found anything, this is an altogether separate issue.
Anyway, there's a bunch of other ways to interpret a few things you said, and they're indicative of wildly different confusions, so it's hard to even say very much other than that you *are* conflating things in this topic. The best cure, of course, is simply education. Maybe take a class, or read one of the books in the FAQ that seem interesting to you, or ask for recommendations based on your interests.
Comment by Dora_Bowl at 06/01/2020 at 00:49 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Morality is that which is selected for.
It might be true that our some of our moral beliefs were selected for by Darwinian forces, but this does not really grasp at what moral realists are looking for. Take an evaluative attitude such as:
It is entirely plausible that we believe this because it would have been, from the standpoint of survival, beneficial. But then take another commonly held belief:
Again, it might be useful to believe this because incestuous sex can produce offspring with genetic defects, and that offspring will have a lower chance of survival. But we can actually kind of undermine this belief. What we think is objectionable about murder is that it is an unjustified killing, most people seem to think there are circumstances in which killing is justifiable, but in almost no circumstances do people think it is morally permissible to kill for fun or because you just hated the person. Now take incest; imagine a brother and sister want to have sex with each other. There is no power-imbalance in this relationship, they are both able-bodied, mentally healthy adults who are going to use protection and take measures against pregnancy, what is wrong about this? It seems we can attempt to undermine these types of moral claims.
There is actually a problem in moral epistemology related to this, how we can have moral knowledge