(August 15, 2019 at 7:53 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(August 15, 2019 at 10:06 am)Grandizer Wrote: Doesn't change the fact, though, that humans have learned to help each other out due mainly to the favorability of cooperation for continued survival. And this is good (helping people is a good thing after all). What's also good is that the species has thus a basic foundation upon which to further develop good.
OK, we evolved to do some things that you believe are good.
But that doesn't mean that the preferences evolution gave us are necessarily good. That would be the appeal to nature fallacy.
There is nothing in evolution, or any other science, which can prove that "helping each other out" is good. That is a preference, and one that we probably have (to a very limited extent) thanks to natural selection.
There is something about the act itself that does in an axiomatic sense indicate good. Can you make sense of the contrary: that cooperation and promoting others well-being is morally bad? Sometimes it may not be practical, if we have limited resources which we do, but impractical does not mean not morally good.
Evolution doesn't decide what's good or bad. It just so happens that we have evolved in a way that can align with morally good behavior, not perfectly of course, but enough to explain why it is many of us are committed to do good [conditionally at least].
