(March 6, 2013 at 6:09 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Sounds like this conclusion conflicts with any form of morality based on reason. You're just acting on a biological imperative that in itself is amoral. From a biological point of view, reason is only a tool of survival. Therefore the naturalist appeal to reason is just another form of 'might makes right', one that secures the 'qualitative' by-products which in themselves have no survival value.
Except, I'm not talking about acting on a biological imperative, I'm talking about a rational one. In my argument, I made a clear distinction between simple survival and life and the things you refer to as 'qualitative' by-products of biology are crucial to that distinction.
You keep talking about seeing things from a biological perspective - as if all naturalist philosophies reduce to biology - but that has never been my position. I can recognize the fact that our capacity to reason developed - or was opted for by natural selection - biologically as a result of the enormous survival advantage it confers and yet not be limited to that perspective. When it comes to morality, there is not reason why I should consider human biological make-up to be the only standard or survival to be the only value and thus no reason to limit myself to your understanding of naturalist perspective. In fact, if you look into the potential human traits I mentioned, you'd find that only a few of them pertain to biological or physiological needs while the rest are psychological in nature.
