Morality in Nature

[genkaus]

I always see humans acting according to their animal instinct too. There is no transcending your animal instinct, you're a human, deal with it, you're taken care of by the Earth and sustained by it, why do you want to transcend it, don't you like the Earth? The Earth... is there. I think it's beautiful.

You are not making any sense. Do you mean to tell me that your behavior has never transcended your instincts? That you never chose not to hit someone when your instinctual anger made you want to hit them? Or that you never chose to stay and face the thing you are afraid of when you instincts were telling you to run as fast as you can? Or is it that you don't understand what 'transcend' means? What does transcending your instincts have to do with liking Earth?

[Whateverist]

I suspect you mean in the sense that the feeling of must or must not in human morality probably is built on something instinctual. No doubt these inhibitive impulses have been fine tuned by nature through evolution in pro-social directions for the most part. All the rationalizing and systematizing of course come in secondarily.

No, I don't. Most certainly not.

What I mean is that one may have an instinctual sense of "must or must not" - but this instinctual sense does not qualify for human morality. However, we can build a code of behavior based on these instincts and that would qualify as morality. Or we can ignore them altogether and build it on something else altogether. It is the rationalization and systematization that gives rise to morality - not the existence of instincts.

I believe you have the cart out in front of the horse. Between knowing that an action will cause harm and giving a shit about that, it is clearly the giving a shit which is primary. Of course, unless one is aware of a formal reason why an action is morally good or bad, one's behavior may not be correctly said to be 'moral'. Such a person may merely be kind or sensitive or generous without any moral goodness to it, or contrariwise, be cruel or insensitive without there being any quality of moral badness about it.

This is the classic Kantian difference in morality. Unless an action is chosen because it is thought to be morally superior, it is not a moral action. That of course leaves us to conclude that the son who visits his sick mother in the hospital because he endeavors to be a good son has a motive that is morally superior (especially if he loaths her) to that of the son who visits because he loves her and is concerned for her comfort. A conclusion I could never agree with.

[genkaus]

I believe you have the cart out in front of the horse. Between knowing that an action will cause harm and giving a shit about that, it is clearly the giving a shit which is primary. Of course, unless one is aware of a formal reason why an action is morally good or bad, one's behavior may not be correctly said to be 'moral'. Such a person may merely be kind or sensitive or generous without any moral goodness to it, or contrariwise, be cruel or insensitive without there being any quality of moral badness about it.

This is the classic Kantian difference in morality. Unless an action is chosen because it is thought to be morally superior, it is not a moral action. That of course leaves us to conclude that the son who visits his sick mother in the hospital because he endeavors to be a good son has a motive that is morally superior (especially if he loaths her) to that of the son who visits because he loves her and is concerned for her comfort. A conclusion I could never agree with.

Nope. The cart is firmly behind the horse. Without the knowledge that an action causes harm, giving a shit about it would not be possible. Ofcourse, that assumes that causing harm is the primary consideration in morality and there is no reason to assume that. The actual awareness of moral quality of an action is not required for it to have a moral dimension - the capacity for such awareness is. Any reflection on the subject of morality presumes a capacity for such reflection and the existence of that capacity results in that action having a moral dimension - whether the agent acknowledges it or not.

[Whateverist]

Nope. The cart is firmly behind the horse. Without the knowledge that an action causes harm, giving a shit about it would not be possible. Ofcourse, that assumes that causing harm is the primary consideration in morality and there is no reason to assume that. The actual awareness of moral quality of an action is not required for it to have a moral dimension - the capacity for such awareness is. Any reflection on the subject of morality presumes a capacity for such reflection and the existence of that capacity results in that action having a moral dimension - whether the agent acknowledges it or not.

I wonder how you conceptualize this difference-making knowledge. Is it the reasoned categorization of the action, or is it an empathetic wince? Does an empathetic wince imply the presence of knowledge? Or does the knowledge have to be consciously held to be the sort you have in mind? I would be willing to concede the body contains knowledge which is actionable without my conscious participation - as when my hand jumps off the hot pan. Or when I wince in empathy for another's pain. Not sure what difference any of this makes in regard to morality .. but as you know that is not a concept I am invested in propping up.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Esquilax, if you should have read the contents of the article to which you linked. From the second paragraph on, the article clearly states, “Altruism in animals is not identical to the everyday concept of altruism in humans.” The article continues to elaborate on the very specialized use of the word altruism.



In his book The Selfish Gene, E. O. Wilson was the first to promote the theory of kin selection or, as he called it, sociobiology. Since then the term sociobiology has been dropped and advocates changed the label to evolutionary psychology. In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright popularized evolutionary psychology. He presented various “just-so-stories” about human behavior and attitudes that are consistent with the theory. Wright’s approach is similar to creationists that start with a narrative and look for examples to fit the theory. Human behavior is vastly more complex than groundhogs barking when a predator approaches.



For a more recent and fairly comprehensive critique of evolutionary psychology, I invite you to read this short article:



http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l7/problems_in_...sychology/

Perhaps if you guys better understood the history of kin selection theory and recent science debates about it, then you would be less likely to latch onto this highly speculative theory to justify your belief in materialist foundations for morality. You simply cannot ground a qualitative system of values in science. Science is methodologically restricted to quantitative inquires. As genkaus correctly pointed out, you can find secular moral system that do not reference religion. I find the adequacy of these systems wanting, but that is another debate.

[Esquilax]

Esquilax, if you should have read the contents of the article to which you linked. From the second paragraph on, the article clearly states, “Altruism in animals is not identical to the everyday concept of altruism in humans.” The article continues to elaborate on the very specialized use of the word altruism.

Of course; the article then goes on to, quite understandably, state that it will be restricted to this definition: "Altruism refers to behavior by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor." It then goes on to detail that human altruism is defined by a conscious decision to do good; in essence, the reason the article uses a different definition is merely because we have no way of determining the motivations of an animal in any given action it takes. I don't exactly see this definition as unreasonable, nor is it contrary to the point I was making.

You seemed to be advocating the idea that in nature survival of the fittest rules, and this is rendered untrue by the examples given by Wikipedia of animals caring for those that are not the fittest; whether or not we can define their motivations in doing so, it's clear that your initial premise is a little flawed.

Perhaps if you guys better understood the history of kin selection theory and recent science debates about it, then you would be less likely to latch onto this highly speculative theory to justify your belief in materialist foundations for morality. You simply cannot ground a qualitative system of values in science. Science is methodologically restricted to quantitative inquires. As genkaus correctly pointed out, you can find secular moral system that do not reference religion. I find the adequacy of these systems wanting, but that is another debate.

I think you're ascribing motivations to me that I don't have; I only sought to correct you on what I saw as a basic oversimplification. I'm not pinning all my hopes for morality on science, because that'd be ridiculous; while I think that our morality is partly formed by our animal nature and what it has taught us about the world we live in, it's definitely more hit and miss than that, and not something science has any business in, really.

My point was that to characterize animal behavior as just "might makes right" or "survival of the fittest" is to skip over those parts of our evolutionary origin and position as a social species that informs part of our basis for morality.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Genkaus, I agree with your distinction between nature and instinct. Thank you for that clarification. Human nature includes Man’s intellect. And intellect allows people the ability to act contrary to their first impulse and/or cultivate habits that will override their animal instincts. From our other discussions, I’m certain we disagree about the character and source of Man’s intellect.



Esquilax, my apologies. I continued with the post to address what I see as rampant scientism on the forums. As far as I’ve seen you have avoided falling into that mistake. I agree that as social creatures, our evolutionary legacy does inform our moral systems. They do not determine our moral systems. If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and if that life took a radically different evolutionary path, then I have no doubt their moral systems would seem very strange and wonderful to us. Yet despite those differences, I have to believe that creatures that do have intellectual capacities, on par with or exceeding our own, would still use rational inquiry to develop values that also transcend their animal/insect/silicone-based instincts.

Without the requisite intellect, other animals lack the ability to engage in rational inquiry. That leaves them beholden to their instinctual reactions. Since the instincts come from natural selection, then survival of the fittest, from the perspective of naturalism, entirely explains their behavior.

[genkaus]

I wonder how you conceptualize this difference-making knowledge. Is it the reasoned categorization of the action, or is it an empathetic wince? Does an empathetic wince imply the presence of knowledge? Or does the knowledge have to be consciously held to be the sort you have in mind? I would be willing to concede the body contains knowledge which is actionable without my conscious participation - as when my hand jumps off the hot pan. Or when I wince in empathy for another's pain. Not sure what difference any of this makes in regard to morality .. but as you know that is not a concept I am invested in propping up.

Not sure what you are trying to say here.

Without the capacity to reason, I do not believe morality to be possible. And no, an empathetic wince need not implies a presence of knowledge only so far as you know who to empathize with. And I do not regard unconscious instincts as knowledge.

[bennyboy]

Without the capacity to reason, I do not believe morality to be possible. And no, an empathetic wince need not implies a presence of knowledge only so far as you know who to empathize with. And I do not regard unconscious instincts as knowledge.

Add add without free will, morality is impossible. Because without free will, "morality" is just a euphemism for an (incredibly complex, to be sure) accidental interaction between instinct and environment.

[genkaus]

Add add without free will, morality is impossible. Because without free will, "morality" is just a euphemism for an (incredibly complex, to be sure) accidental interaction between instinct and environment.

Depends upon what you mean by "free will". While I do say that morality requires "free will", what I mean by the word is probably very different from what you do. For example, if you're referring to the libertarian definition of free-will, then, even without it, morality would still not be reduced to an accidental interaction between instinct and environment.