RE: Simple question for Christians.
July 17, 2015 at 2:38 pm
(This post was last modified: July 17, 2015 at 2:39 pm by Kingpin.)
This view changes drastically what it means to be moral. It reduces morality to mere survival, to pragmatics. We feel moral urgings because these moral urgings help us to survive better. They have at their core self-preservation in mind. But does self-preservation truly capture what we mean when we say a thing is moral? Indeed many things that fall into the moral category have to do with denying self.
But it's precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining and defies naturalistic explanation. Robert Wright wrote The Moral Animal – Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology and in it he writes:
"conscience, the seat of our moral sense, evolved as a survival mechanism. When ... we feel guilt because we have harmed a sibling, it is because we have thereby imperiled the proliferation of our genes. When we feel guilt because we have harmed someone outside the family circle, it is because we have potentially damaged our own (survival enhancing) status."
He merely offers an explanation for some low order moral conduct that has survival value. And then cavalierly refers to this other morality that enables us to become "a truly moral animal". He also writes, "Go above and beyond the call of smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren't likely to help those in return, and do so when nobody's watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal."
Arguably, certain ways of acting may have evolved (I don't believe this, but I'll grant this for the sake of argument), but morality is not merely a way of acting. How do I know this? Because there's an oughtness about behavior that we can feel that actually precedes the behavior itself. It's not a behavior pattern, but an internal compulsion that compels us to choose certain behaviors – to do what's right – even though this moral incumbency can be denied or disobeyed. If the moral element is prior to the behavior, then it can't be the behavior itself.
I'm curious what you think of guilt? Isn't guilt a conscience understanding of violating a known "ought" behavior? How do you explain feelings of guilt in an evolutionary sense?
But it's precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining and defies naturalistic explanation. Robert Wright wrote The Moral Animal – Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology and in it he writes:
"conscience, the seat of our moral sense, evolved as a survival mechanism. When ... we feel guilt because we have harmed a sibling, it is because we have thereby imperiled the proliferation of our genes. When we feel guilt because we have harmed someone outside the family circle, it is because we have potentially damaged our own (survival enhancing) status."
He merely offers an explanation for some low order moral conduct that has survival value. And then cavalierly refers to this other morality that enables us to become "a truly moral animal". He also writes, "Go above and beyond the call of smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren't likely to help those in return, and do so when nobody's watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal."
Arguably, certain ways of acting may have evolved (I don't believe this, but I'll grant this for the sake of argument), but morality is not merely a way of acting. How do I know this? Because there's an oughtness about behavior that we can feel that actually precedes the behavior itself. It's not a behavior pattern, but an internal compulsion that compels us to choose certain behaviors – to do what's right – even though this moral incumbency can be denied or disobeyed. If the moral element is prior to the behavior, then it can't be the behavior itself.
I'm curious what you think of guilt? Isn't guilt a conscience understanding of violating a known "ought" behavior? How do you explain feelings of guilt in an evolutionary sense?
We are not made happy by what we acquire but by what we appreciate.
