Any Moral Relativists in the House?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

-bit like objecting to the notion of a spherical earth - saying that it's incoherent for not accounting for the corners.

When we think that something is wrong, we have a tendency to want to tack on incoherent like a chaser.

---

Exactly.  Descriptive moral relativism is a well established and easily demonstrable fact.  Moral realism simply posits that we're all doing it wrong when we very much do that.    

Not incoherent - babble and gibberish with no cogent angle to logically approach the problem from.  Wrong in point of fact, not the validity of the inference, but the soundness of the assertions.

---

Relativism is a cognitivist moral theory.  Moral assertions are reduced to a true property of your ingroup rather than a pure expression of your emotional states (or some other similar aspect of an individual).  

Relativist moralities can be and often are openly hostile to the natural preferences or natural character of their adherents.  They can tell us that what we think is yuck is good, what we think is yum is bad.  That our misery is for our own good, our happiness to be avoided.  That we deserve harm or should expect to be harmed if we step out of bounds even through full on hominid bumblefuckery.

---

Perhaps we misnamed ourselves?  Were not the doubly wise ape, we're the moralizing ape. 


What do you think of the idea that morality is an expression of successful behaviors rooted in genetics?  Biological, rather than cultural relativism.  That we're apprehending something about ourselves and reproductive success, conflict/competition fitness....not something about a thing out in the world or even in our cultures.  That, broadly speaking, any organism with our genetics and in our situations will arrive at ideations about moral properties similar to our own?

I don't think evolution is always genetics. Evolution is also interaction and cooperation, fight or flight, along with environmental factors. Genetics is merely one part of evolution. But not the only part of it.

I can't draw this as an either or issue, evolution is both genetics and environment outside after birth. It is both nature vs nurture, and cruelty and cooperation. Ultimately evolution is a process, and isn't concerned with how life gets to the point of reproduction. Unfortunatly cruelty works, but so does cooperation and compassion. Genes can explain lots of things, but I think it is wrong to call genes the Holy Grail. Genes only explain the shuffle in DNA, but human behaivor after birth unfortunately involves group think, win or lose, and that group think might have the benefit of group survival, but still be based on very false perceptions. 

The Ancient Egyptians were successful for 3000 years or so, falsely believing in Ra, Osirus, Isis and Horus. From their point of view those beliefs were moral, and because of that group think, they had thousands of years of success. But that did not make Ra or Isis or Horus real.

Wrong. Evolution is ALL about genetics.

Boru