(August 25, 2019 at 9:34 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(August 25, 2019 at 5:51 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: There’s nothing specific about our capacity for reason.
As far as it being secondhand, there are two reasons for this. First, morality does not, strictly speaking, confer survival benefits. It often has a cost, instead. On top of that, full anatomical modernity preceded behavioral modernity by at least 100k years.
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I think there are two important things to clarify here.
Firstly, I'm not sure what you mean by "there's nothing specific about our capacity for reason." Brains seem better able to reason about certain specific subjects more than others. For example, when reasoning from conditional syllogisms, it matters whether the conditionals are stated using abstract symbols or real-world examples; people are better judges of validity when real-world examples are used (Wason, 1966). In the previously cited paper, we saw that children are better at reasoning from deontic conditionals than indicative conditionals; leading us to believe there is something specific about our capacity to reason about them. In other words, it matters what we're reasoning about specifically. The opposite, which is to say we have a general-purpose rationality, is problematic.
Secondly, concluding that morality is secondhand because it confers no survival benefits is not only questionable (meaning I would like to see the papers suggesting there is an absence of benefits) it also seem to fall into the criticized "adaptationist programme" (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). In other words, it overemphasizes adaptation and neglects other forces of evolution such as genetic drift that could be responsible for the emergence or conservation of such traits. Having no survival benefit is not a criteria for something being secondhand; not to mention I would imagine something could have a secondhand emergence, and provide benefits.
References:
Wason, P. C. (1966). Reasoning. In B. Foss (Ed.), New horizons in psychology (pp. 135–151). Harm ondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Gould, Stephen J., and Richard C. Lewontin. (1979) The spandrels of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205: 581–98.
How is arguing that morality is secondhand adaptationist? Isn't it the contrary? Or I'm misunderstanding? Haven't read the paper yet.
