RE: Euthyphro dilemma asked for evolution.
June 12, 2012 at 6:11 pm
(This post was last modified: June 12, 2012 at 6:13 pm by Angrboda.)
(June 12, 2012 at 2:55 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(June 12, 2012 at 12:36 pm)genkaus Wrote: I've already proposed two of them, I'll now give all three.
1. Morality is a guide for a moral agent regarding how to act.
2. A moral agent needs to be both alive and free to be able to act according to the code.
3. Every action has a goal.
This is the part I love. I like the first one, however, is morality a guide or is it merely the sum total of how we do act?
I don't think these two are necessarily in conflict. While I would agree that moral codes like the golden rule and utilitarianism are developed to correlate with our non-rule based intuitions, I think it's reasonable to suspect that our minds are implementing some sort of heuristic, the goals of which and operation of which are not apprehensible to direct introspection, but whose behavior accords well with rule based attempts to the describe it. (In other words, the rule is an attempt to reverse-engineer the behavior.) In that case, the rule is not the source of the moral, but it may be a good guide to what our moral intuitions are likely to tell us.