RE: Euthyphro dilemma asked for evolution.
June 10, 2012 at 10:41 am
(This post was last modified: June 10, 2012 at 10:49 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Well, in my family kids are pretty much the purpose of life. Everything we do somehow boils down to our kids (or at least we like to think so). The idea of hurting a child is anathema to my families personal culture and to be quite honest I don't think its a conviction that sees much in the way of in-depth consideration.
As far as what evolutionary pathways might have played a role in our overall reluctance to harm children, just how successful at reproduction do you imagine any given species would be if it had a demonstrable tendency to deliberately hurt it's own offspring, or in fact seek out it's own offspring with the intention of torturing them for pleasure? This isn't even a difficult "moral question" to answer from a standpoint of evolutionary biology. Your offspring must survive, and so any action that is detrimental to that goal would not be expressed in the account of what remains living (which is all evolution is in the first place). That we seem to have created an elaborate structure around such behaviors has little to do with whether or not such behaviors are objectively or universally "true" and more to do with whether or not such behaviors are generally successful as survival strategies. We value what works. Not skullfucking your children with a drill seems to work.
So, with no invocations of an objectively true morality floating around making things right there is an evolutionary incentive towards not hurting your own children-at the very least. Combine the fact that we are a social species whose survival depends just as much on the guy next to us as ourselves (and ergo just as much on the other guys kids as our own) and a picture that is consistent with observation emerges. We value our own children more than we value the others guys, but push comes to shove and we value the others guys children enough to extend some measure of "goodness" to children et-all, most of the time. There are people who don't. So clearly it isn't objectively or universally morally true to them that torturing children is wrong.
As far as what evolutionary pathways might have played a role in our overall reluctance to harm children, just how successful at reproduction do you imagine any given species would be if it had a demonstrable tendency to deliberately hurt it's own offspring, or in fact seek out it's own offspring with the intention of torturing them for pleasure? This isn't even a difficult "moral question" to answer from a standpoint of evolutionary biology. Your offspring must survive, and so any action that is detrimental to that goal would not be expressed in the account of what remains living (which is all evolution is in the first place). That we seem to have created an elaborate structure around such behaviors has little to do with whether or not such behaviors are objectively or universally "true" and more to do with whether or not such behaviors are generally successful as survival strategies. We value what works. Not skullfucking your children with a drill seems to work.
So, with no invocations of an objectively true morality floating around making things right there is an evolutionary incentive towards not hurting your own children-at the very least. Combine the fact that we are a social species whose survival depends just as much on the guy next to us as ourselves (and ergo just as much on the other guys kids as our own) and a picture that is consistent with observation emerges. We value our own children more than we value the others guys, but push comes to shove and we value the others guys children enough to extend some measure of "goodness" to children et-all, most of the time. There are people who don't. So clearly it isn't objectively or universally morally true to them that torturing children is wrong.
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