By the way, you mentioned Game Theory. That seems an excellent example. What else is going on other than attempts to maximise one's position in that?

Cito di Pense wrote:I'm not any more inclined than you (apparently) are to discuss it from that perspective, but at least I recognize that it's there.

I recognise that it's there too. But it's a red herring, it seems to me. You can't engage with a question like that without adopting its assumptions, and if you adopt them, there's no point in answering.

There's the way things are. As for the way things should be, that gets you into asking 'why should?' You know where that goes.

What I'm saying and I think zoon too, is that all 'shoulds' relate to shared urges to survive and thrive. That's the only basis for 'shoulds'. And I challenge anyone to think of a better one. More to the point, it's in line with what evolution is, so it's what we're all automatically, already doing anyway, when you get down to the basics. In that sense, the descriptive and the normative are pretty much the same things and efforts by ethicists throughout history to find something other than that in norms is barking up the wrong street. Norms just get made up as we go along, on the hoof, off the cuff, as circumstances change* and while we're pursuing the same, evolved 'eat, survive, reproduce' imperatives as any other animal.


* with the caveat that many involve pre-ingrained tendencies.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:I'm not any more inclined than you (apparently) are to discuss it from that perspective, but at least I recognize that it's there.

I recognise that it's there too. But it's a red herring, it seems to me. You can't engage with a question like that without adopting its assumptions, and if you adopt them, there's no point in answering.

There's the way things are. As for the way things should be, that gets you into asking 'why should?' You know where that goes.

What I'm saying and I think zoon too, is that all 'shoulds' relate to shared urges to survive and thrive. That's the only basis for 'shoulds'. And I challenge anyone to think of a better one. More to the point, it's in line with what evolution is, so it's what we're all doing anyway, when you get down to the basics. In that sense, the descriptive and the normative are pretty much the same things and efforts by ethicists throughout history to find something other than that in norms is barking up the wrong street. Norms just get made up as we go along.

I don't think that contention can hold up amid the richness and variety of human ethical concerns. You're actually saying that they all can be explained thusly, but that's a project no one wants to tackle in detail, so the contention is just a totalizing assumption. So, OK, we neither of us want entry into the other conversation.

Here's the thing, though: If I'm working for somebody who wants me to mislead customers in a way I describe as 'unethical', and my survival depends on keeping that job, how am I coming to the conclusion that I'm being asked to act unethically? According to your rubric, I'm acting unethically if I resign my position. How can I redefine my employer's request as 'ethical'? Are you saying I'm just making it up as I go along? I predict you'll say that I don't really need to keep that job in order to survive, and customers are not going to come after me for misleading them, so there are not any ethical concerns present.

So, in that sense, I, and I think zoon too, are happy to 'go normative' while understanding that the foundations of the norms are not absolute, but that they are, at least, in line with nature and not based on some wooly idea about perfect this or that which doesn't match what's actually the situation, that isn't idealist in other words, or lofty.

Cito di Pense wrote:I don't think that contention can hold up amid the richness and variety of human ethical concerns.

I don't see why not, and I don't hear anything from you to suggest otherwise.

Cito di Pense wrote: You're actually saying that they all can be explained thusly, but that's a project no one wants to tackle in detail, so the contention is just a totalizing assumption.

No, it's a contention. Or, if you like, a provisional working assumption, until somebody comes up with a better alternative, which you haven't.

Cito di Pense wrote:Here's the thing, though: If I'm working for somebody who wants me to mislead customers in a way I describe as 'unethical', and my survival depends on keeping that job, how am I coming to the conclusion that I'm being asked to act unethically? According to your rubric, I'm acting unethically if I resign my position. How can I redefine my employer's request as 'ethical'? Are you saying I'm just making it up as I go along? I predict you'll say that I don't really need to keep that job in order to survive, so there are not any ethical concerns present.

You poor thing. You're asking me to help you 'find the right way'. I'm not your guru. Try game theory. Ditch absolutes. Think instead about contravening 'agreed norms' (eg not lying, as per your example) which are emergent attempts by hoomans to ensure a stable, functioning hooman society. There really isn't anything else going on, as far as I can see.

Cito di Pense wrote:I predict you'll say that I don't really need to keep that job in order to survive, so there are not any ethical concerns present.

Ok, so let's assume that you DO need that job to survive, or at least thrive. So, you 'break the code' (as you see it, you could be wrong of course, maybe the outcomes would be good for the customers, who knows, maybe your judgement is incorrect). That's what you do. It's what people do every day. The only problem comes, as with any other social species, when the cheating gets out of hand and adversely affects the stability of the group. That's why we have police and prisons and courts. If you end up in the latter, you lose the game. If you get away with it, you win. The norms are only there because of our shared, evolved urge to survive, which for a social species, requires societal norms to be put in place.

Do you think there's anything more than that involved?

oh. Ps. There may be something more involved. There may also be your innate sense that lying is wrong. But that's evolved, and as such, part of the same explanation, because the norms we try to adopt don't come out of thin air. You might say that you wouldn't even be here, or exist, if they weren't useful.

archibald wrote:oh. Ps. There may be something more involved. There may also be your innate sense that lying is wrong. But that's evolved, and as such, part of the same explanation, because the norms we try to adopt don't come out of thin air. You might say that you wouldn't even be here, or exist, if they weren't useful.

I remember the one that says, "tell the truth, because then there's less stuff you have to remember".

I could do worse than to try to construct a model of 'ethical' concerns that was based on simple laziness.

Cito di Pense wrote:I could do worse than to try to construct a model of 'ethical' concerns that was based on simple laziness.

That might not have worked for your hunter-gatherer ancestors though, in which case, you wouldn't be here to say it.

Perhaps that's too much of a generalisation. Bunking a ride on the hard work of others is not necessarily a losing strategy, if played well. See cuckoos, for example.

Then of course there's also, 'might is right'. Often, the rules are imposed by a subgroup of beneficiaries rather than agreed by the many. Let's not pretend anything lofty about agreement just because it's a popular system (at least on paper or via lip-service and media spin) in some parts of the modern world.

Or to put it another way, a certain two-way Prisoner's dilemma strategy might work well during a lab experiment, but not necessarily work so well if one's 'opponent' was Robert Mugabe.

I'll try to be sensitive to the dicussion you two have had here, so if I bring stuff in that's not in the following post, you'll know why.

archibald wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:If at any time I adhere to a normative rule, do I do so because an overwhelmingly powerful authority will punish me for failing to do so? What's the motivation for this view?

I would say, at least a lot of the time, yes. As in when Mencken said, "People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police".

I guess my question is still, what's the motivation for this view? If I don't already believe it, why should I come to do so? At a glance, I appear to have various kinds of reasons for action. Moral reasons seem to be among these. Consider a situation where no such punishment will attach to my actions, but where I still have my usual sorts of reasons for acting. If I continue to be sensitive to these reasons and thus adhere to the normative rule, despite the felt "force" of the norm being detached from this punishment/reward background, am I behaving irrationally? Are my reasons illusory? What's going on here? Does your view just not address the question of my practical rationality (perhaps preferring to treat it causally)? Or does it perhaps say that this sort of detachment can't happen?

archibald wrote:As to whether we can 'ground moral rules in something like that' I'm not sure what that means, since the reward/punishment activity is just the outworking function, not the grounding. The grounding (as in what lies beneath it all) is evolved behaviour, and the grounding (as in the motivations and justifications) is the urge (originating in the individual and playing out in social circumstances) to maintain stable, functioning social groups.

And that, it seems to me, is what captures/explains the variety and richness, and is arguably the source of all the 'norms' and 'universal principles' (with survival perhaps being the daddy of them all), with the variety and richness essentially stemming from the constant tension, played out in different circumstances and predicaments, between the two main demands, the 'needs' of the individual and the 'need' for viable groups.

That's what I got from zoon's posts.

Looking back at how you've fleshed this out with Cito, I guess I just don't see how this can be Zoon's view. She's taken her evolutionary view to be a competitor to traditional ethical ones and offered quite a bit about normative matters, so that suggests she does at some point take the ethicist's contentions about norms seriously, if only to offer a debunking or reductive (or maybe just an instrumental) view about them finally.

Maybe I have her wrong. Zoon seems to think that the content of moral norms is saturated with evolutionary influences. This is why she is adamant about addressing the Social Darwinist, because the SD inputs very particular and objectionable influences to the content of those norms. I also assume this is why she thinks moral realism is false: on her picture, our moral judgments are not the result of autonomous (moral) reflection and reasoning and so forth, so they differ from our judgments in other domains like science. That's not just the general idea that evolution had an ineliminable part in how we got here or ended up with certain capacities for cognitive judgment (Zoon's competitors can share such claims), but that evolution played a specific role in shaping the content of our moral norms. If, instead, Zoon's view were to enlarge itself enough to swallow all of its competitors, then it's hard to see how it would even affect their claims.

I'll wait to see what she thinks though.

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm still here, sort of. It's just difficult to tackle long posts these days so I probably won't do it so much. You'll probably have me dipping in and out of threads like this at best. And I may disappear.

zoon wrote:I think the force of “ought”, the force of a normative rule, is that some overwhelmingly powerful authority will punish infractions of that rule (and, perhaps, reward compliance). Furthermore, that authority will be inclined to punish (though less harshly) anyone who does not intervene to prevent others from breaking the rule.

I'm looking at this, Zoon, and I wonder again whether this is one of those small statements that's doing large things for you. If you think something like this, it's not so hard to see why you'd say that in the absence of God, or some other supernatural authority, we'd have quite a bit of trouble "grounding" normative rules. And if your point about social groups being quite stable in punishing individuals who disobey their rules works for you, I can further see why you'd suggest we might ground moral rules in something like that.

But I wonder why you think this. Does this capture the variety and richness of our everyday moral practices and reasons and lives, for instance? If at any time I adhere to a normative rule, do I do so because an overwhelmingly powerful authority will punish me for failing to do so? What's the motivation for this view?

It’s always good to see you, particularly when you are pointing out the more than usually inconsistent or wild ideas in my attempts to think through the impact of evolutionary theory on morality. Then I can try to clarify them, or perhaps just see that they are wrong. Aka ramble.

Leaving theology out of it, I stand by my statement that the force of “ought” is in the threat of collective punishment, but it needed a rider to avoid your very reasonable interpretation. I should have added that it’s as much about the willingness to join in dishing out the collective punishment, as it is about the fear of being on the receiving end. For example, you may have a personal rule to avoid eating Brussels sprouts, and another rule to avoid being cruel, both because you want to. However, you would probably not want to interfere with someone else tucking into a plateful of Brussels sprouts, while if someone else was being cruel you would be more likely to be inclined to tell them to stop, perhaps enlisting some like-minded people for backup. If necessary, in a bad enough case, you would bring in the law. My claim is that the operational distinction between a non-ethical rule (such as disliking Brussels sprouts) and an ethical, “ought”, rule (such as thinking cruelty is wrong), is in this willingness to use collective force to threaten and if necessary inflict punishment in the second, ethical case. In many cases, of course, both motivations (moral retribution, and fear of moral retribution) are in action at different times; for example, I support the laws preventing speeding, but when I am behind the wheel and haven’t left enough time, it’s fear of those same laws which tends to keep me from whizzing down the road just this once.

My contention here is that evolution has given humans this tendency to set up rules about antisocial behaviour towards third parties, and to enforce those rules with collective punishment. For many years after Darwin wrote the Origin of Species, it was assumed that evolution could not be behind this aspect of human behaviour. Non-human animals don’t have this tendency (or to a far lesser extent), and if evolution were all about individual survival, then there’s no reason why it should have evolved. In fact, evolution is not about the survival of individuals, but of genes, and many individuals can share the same gene, which is why evolution often wires in cooperation and altruism at all levels. This was not clear until the 1960s (Wikipedia on inclusive fitness here), and it is only in the last 2 or 3 decades that increasing evidence has come in for moral predispositions in humans which have evolved since our lineage split from that of chimpanzees around 5 million years ago. The evidence comes, for example, from neuroscience, from babies, and from precursor behaviour in non-human animals.

I think rationalists who want to ground ethics do so, in the end, on the basis of intuitions coupled with rationality? - and I don’t think this needs to change. Evolutionary theorists used to say that evolution could not have given us ethical intuitions, but the more recent research has shown that it can, and has often done so. During a human’s lifetime, the wired-in predispositions are heavily modified by learning from other people and from experience, using the uniquely large areas of our brains which evolved for general-purpose problem-solving. The basic point, both for the evolution of morality and for the rational support, is that cooperation often pays off. Of course, we also have strong tendencies to look after ourselves first and close friends and relations next, without caring about the wider group, and there are endless variations in how all this plays out in any situation. I don’t think evolutionary theory has any problem in accounting for the variety and richness of moral thinking.

Where might there be a better way to ground morality than from this evolutionary thinking? I’m not clear that rationalists have an advantage, because rationalists ground ethics on intuitions, which are merely stated to be rational, and which as far as I can tell are based on evolved tendencies while sometimes, it seems to me, being barely coherent. Taking your username for examples, both Spinoza and Ayn Rand (or her fictional character John Galt) base ethics primarily on individual flourishing, and come up with effectively opposite conclusions: Spinoza said that we should be benevolent and love our neighbour as ourselves, while Ayn Rand stays with a moral imperative to look after oneself, the claim that altruism is actively wrong (while also saying it’s OK to look after one’s own children). Evolutionary theory charts a middle course, that we have evolved to look after ourselves and close kin, and also, more recently, to think in group terms as well. From the point of view of practical ethics, we need to work with whatever intuitions we find we have, to get where we think we want to be, or at any rate to avoid blowing up the pale blue dot.

???

Edited to add: I've only just seen your last post, it may well be that I'm merely restating views which my "competitors" have already put forward more coherently, could you point me to the competitors you have in mind?

Spinozasgalt wrote:I guess my question is still, what's the motivation for this view? If I don't already believe it, why should I come to do so? At a glance, I appear to have various kinds of reasons for action. Moral reasons seem to be among these.

I'll try to answer, without again being fully sure I know what you're asking.

The motivation for that view (about needing rules and for them to be enforced)? I'm surprised you ask. Isn't it self-evident, both in everyday observation about how societies function and in (what must surely be) a well-attested literature on human behaviour/psychology? The alternative (that we don't need enforced rules) seems.......implausible to the point of being untenable, surely? Is there any viable alternative?

ETA Caveat: By 'need' I mean 'use', as in usefulness. Ditto for 'appropriate'. Strip them down and they're just functions of blind natural selection.

Spinozasgalt wrote: Consider a situation where no such punishment will attach to my actions, but where I still have my usual sorts of reasons for acting. If I continue to be sensitive to these reasons and thus adhere to the normative rule, despite the felt "force" of the norm being detached from this punishment/reward background, am I behaving irrationally? Are my reasons illusory? What's going on here? Does your view just not address the question of my practical rationality (perhaps preferring to treat it causally)? Or does it perhaps say that this sort of detachment can't happen?

Let's consider your situation, where I think you're asking why you might still 'self-police' in the absence of any outside sanction. I hope I've got that right. Well, why mightn't you still act 'according to the same rule'? After all, the social rules are only the outworkings of that which is evolved in individuals already. Let's call it their evolved consciences. You'll probably have one, assuming you're not a sociopath.

At bottom, what you are, I'm suggesting, in an evolved survival machine. I can't see how that doesn't explain everything to do with what we call your moral behaviour, in all it's nuances, messiness and richness. Not least because individuals and predicaments vary tremenduously. Hence there's no point in searching for any absolute rules.

So let's not aim to over-simplify. It's definitely not a case of pinning moral behaviour on the explicit threat of punishment by others, and I don't think anyone here is suggesting it is. The way your/our evolved survival instincts play out will be complicated and varied depending on circumstances. And you will have innate, inner instincts whether you happen to be in a situation where they are being policed, where they may possibly be policed (ie are implicit rather than explicit) or where they aren't going to be enforced at all. It will make a difference either way, of course, but that's part of the richness. It doesn't mean that everything is not fundamentally derived from the bare fact that you are an evolved survival machine. It just means that you have the capacity for sophisticated responses.

Spinozasgalt wrote:Looking back at how you've fleshed this out with Cito, I guess I just don't see how this can be Zoon's view. She's taken her evolutionary view to be a competitor to traditional ethical ones and offered quite a bit about normative matters, so that suggests she does at some point take the ethicist's contentions about norms seriously, if only to offer a debunking or reductive (or maybe just an instrumental) view about them finally.

Maybe I have her wrong. Zoon seems to think that the content of moral norms is saturated with evolutionary influences. This is why she is adamant about addressing the Social Darwinist, because the SD inputs very particular and objectionable influences to the content of those norms. I also assume this is why she thinks moral realism is false: on her picture, our moral judgments are not the result of autonomous (moral) reflection and reasoning and so forth, so they differ from our judgments in other domains like science. That's not just the general idea that evolution had an ineliminable part in how we got here or ended up with certain capacities for cognitive judgment (Zoon's competitors can share such claims), but that evolution played a specific role in shaping the content of our moral norms. If, instead, Zoon's view were to enlarge itself enough to swallow all of its competitors, then it's hard to see how it would even affect their claims.

I'll wait to see what she thinks though.

I wish I knew what you were getting at there. For example, I'm not sure what, 'the ethicists contentions about norms' are, given that I'm guessing they will differ from ethicist to ethicist. Also, doesn't Social Darwinism have several definitions? I see it as a mixed bag, sometimes correct, sometimes not. Even Moral Realism can vary between being robust and minimal, I believe.

I'm not even sure we've agreed what a 'norm' is. I'm happy to think of it as an evolved thing and as such, keep the word in the lexicon, on that basis. Perhaps, for example a Moral Realist, or some ethicists, might have something else in mind*.

So, I'm not entirely sure what's to be gained by talking in labels which may be too vague to allow us to know that we agree on what they are being used to mean or describe. I do accept that you are probably much more au fait with the terminologies, but I can only repeat my preference for 'concrete' examples to illustrate what we are talking about. Case studies, if you like. Put me a person in a predicament (isn't that what life consists of, predicaments, at bottom?). That's not a criticism of your no doubt more-knowledgeable-than-mine use of labels. I'm just thinking there's too many potential crossed wires otherwise.



* I have to say that I can't remotely see how Moral Realism, if it seriously involves the suggestion that there are any objective morals beyond that, that is to say beyond those morals which are evolved norms (and will thus be flexibly applied by certain intelligent animal species according to responses to circumstances) can hold water. It sounds like woo-influenced, idealist bunkum to me and I can't think of a single foundation for it.

Or, in a nutshell.......

Natural selection.

The rest is commentary.

Anyone disagree, in any way?

zoon wrote:From the point of view of practical ethics, we need to work with whatever intuitions we find we have, to get where we think we want to be, or at any rate to avoid blowing up the pale blue dot.

I'm going to let you get away with that, partly because you prefaced it with the agreeable qualifier, 'from the pov of practical ethics'.

But it (or specifically the 'need to work' bit) may nonetheless be where our generally shared analysis diverges, slightly.

In that you may hope for 'better for hoomanity' (or life on muther earth generally) a tad more than I do.

But I can't easily defend my feelings on that (even if they're only mixed rather than being wholly negative) without sounding cynical and possibly hypocritical, given that I am, like almost everyone, swayed by the vanities of hooman existence and end up valuing it (humanity) arguably too much. I'm biased, in other words. You might get a more non-partisan opinion if you asked a tardigrade, who, if they were capable of expressing an opinion, might say, 'Nuclear war? Bring it on. At least it'll get rid of those Homo Sap pests'. You see? There's my cynicism showing.

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'll try to be sensitive to the dicussion you two have had here, so if I bring stuff in that's not in the following post, you'll know why.

archibald wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:If at any time I adhere to a normative rule, do I do so because an overwhelmingly powerful authority will punish me for failing to do so? What's the motivation for this view?

I would say, at least a lot of the time, yes. As in when Mencken said, "People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police".

I guess my question is still, what's the motivation for this view? If I don't already believe it, why should I come to do so? At a glance, I appear to have various kinds of reasons for action. Moral reasons seem to be among these. Consider a situation where no such punishment will attach to my actions, but where I still have my usual sorts of reasons for acting. If I continue to be sensitive to these reasons and thus adhere to the normative rule, despite the felt "force" of the norm being detached from this punishment/reward background, am I behaving irrationally? Are my reasons illusory? What's going on here? Does your view just not address the question of my practical rationality (perhaps preferring to treat it causally)? Or does it perhaps say that this sort of detachment can't happen?

I think I’ve answered this part in my post #172 above. I did not mean to imply that we only ever obey normative rules because we are afraid of punishment. Some theologians might take that view, with God promising hellfire for rule-breakers, but the evolutionary view requires individuals in the group to set up the collective rules in the first place and then to administer the punishments, which I don’t think would be likely to happen if the only motive for adhering to them was fear.

Spinozasgalt wrote:

archibald wrote:As to whether we can 'ground moral rules in something like that' I'm not sure what that means, since the reward/punishment activity is just the outworking function, not the grounding. The grounding (as in what lies beneath it all) is evolved behaviour, and the grounding (as in the motivations and justifications) is the urge (originating in the individual and playing out in social circumstances) to maintain stable, functioning social groups.

And that, it seems to me, is what captures/explains the variety and richness, and is arguably the source of all the 'norms' and 'universal principles' (with survival perhaps being the daddy of them all), with the variety and richness essentially stemming from the constant tension, played out in different circumstances and predicaments, between the two main demands, the 'needs' of the individual and the 'need' for viable groups.

That's what I got from zoon's posts.

Looking back at how you've fleshed this out with Cito, I guess I just don't see how this can be Zoon's view. She's taken her evolutionary view to be a competitor to traditional ethical ones and offered quite a bit about normative matters, so that suggests she does at some point take the ethicist's contentions about norms seriously, if only to offer a debunking or reductive (or maybe just an instrumental) view about them finally.

Maybe I have her wrong. Zoon seems to think that the content of moral norms is saturated with evolutionary influences. This is why she is adamant about addressing the Social Darwinist, because the SD inputs very particular and objectionable influences to the content of those norms. I also assume this is why she thinks moral realism is false: on her picture, our moral judgments are not the result of autonomous (moral) reflection and reasoning and so forth, so they differ from our judgments in other domains like science. That's not just the general idea that evolution had an ineliminable part in how we got here or ended up with certain capacities for cognitive judgment (Zoon's competitors can share such claims), but that evolution played a specific role in shaping the content of our moral norms. If, instead, Zoon's view were to enlarge itself enough to swallow all of its competitors, then it's hard to see how it would even affect their claims.

I'll wait to see what she thinks though.

I don’t think I do have much quarrel with traditional views of ethics, until the ethical theorists tell me that I have to set evolution aside to ground them. We evolved, body and mind.

I don’t make nearly such a clear distinction as I think you do between evolutionary influences on the one hand, and autonomous moral or rational reflection on the other. To take an example, I think from my googling of Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) that both Spinoza and Ayn Rand, while not agreeing on much else, agree that a foundational element of both ethics and rationality is the individual’s looking after their own interests. From the SEP on Spinoza:

This conatus, a kind of existential inertia, constitutes the “essence” of any being. “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.”

. From Wikipedia on Objectivism:

Rand's explanation of values presents the view that an individual's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being—it is for his life and his self-interest that an individual ought to adhere to a moral code.

This intuition is simple and obvious to common sense, we do it, other animals and even plants and bacteria do it, it’s a teleological principle since the individual is doing what will lead to the goal of a continued and, if possible, improved life, it can be taken as a foundational tenet of rational (and perhaps ethical) behaviour. However, seen from the perspective of evolutionary biology, this behaviour, of the individual advancing its own interests, is (1) not simple, (2) not essentially teleological, and (3) not in fact foundational.
(1) Building a robot with the self-preserving abilities of a house fly would be very difficult, it would involve much complex machinery and many subroutines. A single line of code “Preserve yourself” would not be enough. Advancing one’s own interests feels simple to us because we use Theory of Mind to predict other people and animals, this uses the implicit assumption that their brains are like mine. It’s simple for me to guess what I would do in the place of a house fly about to be swatted, but working out and following the actual mechanisms would be extremely complicated.
(2) It’s not essentially teleological because evolution by natural selection is not a teleological process.
(3) At the foundational level, natural selection does not design individuals to maximise their own fitness, but that of their genes. This does often mean that an individual looks after itself, but it may involve even extreme altruism towards other individuals. In the more measured words of a 2010 letter in Nature here:

Natural selection explains the appearance of design in the living world, and inclusive fitness theory explains what this design is for. Specifically, natural selection leads organisms to become adapted as if to maximize their inclusive fitness.

With all those caveats, the assumption that people will look after their own interests is very often a useful starting point in ordinary social life. I would not want to stop rationalists from using it very much as before for practical purposes such as working on what moral rules might be useful, but I would object to being told that it’s a foundational principle which has essentially nothing to do with evolution. As a foundation stone of rationality, it is steeped in evolution, and it’s not always as obvious as it seems.

zoon wrote:I did not mean to imply that we only ever obey normative rules because we are afraid of punishment. Some theologians might take that view...

Well that seems to be your focus, and myopically so, to the exclusion of any analysis of normative rules about what we are expected to do in various circumstances, as opposed to what we might be punished for doing.

It's difficult to punish somebody for not acting, but there are lots of examples of rules about due diligence and about negligence, which can simply refer to failures to act as much as it refers to choosing the wrong action.

Are these normative rules, or are they only rules set up by a legal framework? You'd say they're set up so we can predict what someone is going to do in certain circumstances of emergency or just of stress.

If you promise to do something and renege, there are not usually punishments outside of contract law and the like, but there may be normative rules nonetheless and they function in a different way than punishments do as disincentives. If you've ever been through a divorce, you'll know what I mean. It's a failure to keep a promise, among other things, but you can pitch it as a positive act, breaking a promise.

You can still count this as promoting stability in a social group, but the hold is pretty tenuous, given the rates of divorce we presently experience in some societies. "Social stability" as the touchstone of ethical behavior is an avatar of anxiety over the unpredictable. Normally, when things look iffy, people just try to roll with the punches rather than legislate stability.

Arch, I'm going to focus on Zoon's replies. But hopefully it'll help with your points as well.

zoon wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm still here, sort of. It's just difficult to tackle long posts these days so I probably won't do it so much. You'll probably have me dipping in and out of threads like this at best. And I may disappear.

zoon wrote:I think the force of “ought”, the force of a normative rule, is that some overwhelmingly powerful authority will punish infractions of that rule (and, perhaps, reward compliance). Furthermore, that authority will be inclined to punish (though less harshly) anyone who does not intervene to prevent others from breaking the rule.

I'm looking at this, Zoon, and I wonder again whether this is one of those small statements that's doing large things for you. If you think something like this, it's not so hard to see why you'd say that in the absence of God, or some other supernatural authority, we'd have quite a bit of trouble "grounding" normative rules. And if your point about social groups being quite stable in punishing individuals who disobey their rules works for you, I can further see why you'd suggest we might ground moral rules in something like that.

But I wonder why you think this. Does this capture the variety and richness of our everyday moral practices and reasons and lives, for instance? If at any time I adhere to a normative rule, do I do so because an overwhelmingly powerful authority will punish me for failing to do so? What's the motivation for this view?

It’s always good to see you, particularly when you are pointing out the more than usually inconsistent or wild ideas in my attempts to think through the impact of evolutionary theory on morality. Then I can try to clarify them, or perhaps just see that they are wrong. Aka ramble.

Leaving theology out of it, I stand by my statement that the force of “ought” is in the threat of collective punishment, but it needed a rider to avoid your very reasonable interpretation. I should have added that it’s as much about the willingness to join in dishing out the collective punishment, as it is about the fear of being on the receiving end. For example, you may have a personal rule to avoid eating Brussels sprouts, and another rule to avoid being cruel, both because you want to. However, you would probably not want to interfere with someone else tucking into a plateful of Brussels sprouts, while if someone else was being cruel you would be more likely to be inclined to tell them to stop, perhaps enlisting some like-minded people for backup. If necessary, in a bad enough case, you would bring in the law. My claim is that the operational distinction between a non-ethical rule (such as disliking Brussels sprouts) and an ethical, “ought”, rule (such as thinking cruelty is wrong), is in this willingness to use collective force to threaten and if necessary inflict punishment in the second, ethical case. In many cases, of course, both motivations (moral retribution, and fear of moral retribution) are in action at different times; for example, I support the laws preventing speeding, but when I am behind the wheel and haven’t left enough time, it’s fear of those same laws which tends to keep me from whizzing down the road just this once.

I still can't see how this works or sheds light on your point about normative "force". It's a problem with moving back and forth between causal-centric and reason-centric approaches, I guess. Am I to take the connection between the threat of collective punishment and this normative force to be some conceptual truth about oughts or ought statements, or am I to read it in some other way? You say above that you stand by this point about normative force residing in collective punishment (and add a willingness to join in with such punishment), but in your later post (#176) you seem to say that you don't, and that you suspect things must be more complicated. I did make clear in the scenario you replied to that it's not just punishment, but the reward/punishment background that's not present.

Absent some type of argument or other sufficient motivation to think so, it's hard to see how the force of an "ought" statement has any such obvious strong connection to this sort of enforcement or this willingness to join in. If you restricted your view to legal norms and obligations, you might have a point. But if our ordinary moral practices and lives are supposed to bear this out, then it's not at all obvious to me. And if the evolutionary view predicts that this is how our ordinary moral practices should look, then it seems to count against the view if they don’t.

zoon wrote:Where might there be a better way to ground morality than from this evolutionary thinking? I’m not clear that rationalists have an advantage, because rationalists ground ethics on intuitions, which are merely stated to be rational, and which as far as I can tell are based on evolved tendencies while sometimes, it seems to me, being barely coherent. Taking your username for examples, both Spinoza and Ayn Rand (or her fictional character John Galt) base ethics primarily on individual flourishing, and come up with effectively opposite conclusions: Spinoza said that we should be benevolent and love our neighbour as ourselves, while Ayn Rand stays with a moral imperative to look after oneself, the claim that altruism is actively wrong (while also saying it’s OK to look after one’s own children). Evolutionary theory charts a middle course, that we have evolved to look after ourselves and close kin, and also, more recently, to think in group terms as well. From the point of view of practical ethics, we need to work with whatever intuitions we find we have, to get where we think we want to be, or at any rate to avoid blowing up the pale blue dot.

Just a note about "competitors": I followed your lead on this and started out pitting you against normative views (virtue ethics and the like), and when you linked me to the Stanford article about morality and evolutionary biology, I assumed you were now arguing against the sort of generic realism that Fitzpatrick was using in that article to interrogate evolutionary approaches. I thought the moral realist was your competitor. Certainly, Fitzpatrick argues against some of the people you've quoted approvingly in the thread, but then Fitzpatrick and others mentioned don’t say anything about keeping evolution out of ethics. Are you against the type of realist view in that article or not? One way to figure out whether or not you're competing with other ethicists could be to specify what it is you want to explain or account for and see if it's also what they're looking at.

Spinoza and Rand aren't at all representative of what today's realists are doing (Spinoza predates certain splits, and Rand stuck a bit too much with Aristotle and didn't develop against the projects of the time), so I think we can leave them out. Ethicists have already interrogated their claims and those like them in the ways your evolutionary approach recommends (although I think the teleological point, at least, is confused, and I'm not sure the two of them are actually agreeing on anything in the quotes you gave). And whether or not our first-order moral intuitions and the content of our moral views are saturated with evolutionary influences is what's at issue, so I don't think we can assume against the realist that this is the case unless we’ve already taken your side. Whereas the gap between predispositions and norms seems like something you can bring out against the evolutionary approach without begging the question. If there are advantages to your approach, it's not easy to see what they are.

zoon wrote:I don’t make nearly such a clear distinction as I think you do between evolutionary influences on the one hand, and autonomous moral or rational reflection on the other.

Do you mean you don’t clearly distinguish between the two? Or that you think we’ve got a mixture of the two in the moral beliefs we actually have?

Spinozasgalt wrote:Arch, I'm going to focus on Zoon's replies. But hopefully it'll help with your points as well.

No prob. I hope you don't mind me commenting nonetheless. You don't need to reply necessarily. Though as ever, I wish you'd pin your own angle down a bit more explicitly so that it was clearer where you're coming from. My best guess is that you're bringing your agnosticism (you seem to be at least half-defending Moral Realism), which, since it's about things which, in the absence of any alternative (see my second comment below) seem to me to be the bleedin' obvious (natural selection, the rest is commentary, etc), feels a bit like you're holding out for 'something more' (in this case some form of Moral Realism perhaps, some sort of guiding star to navigate by in the dark and meaningless void) with nothing much more than the hope and optimism of the person eating the screwball ice-cream expecting to find a gumball at the bottom.

Or do I have you pegged all wrong?

Spinozasgalt wrote:And whether or not our first-order moral intuitions and the content of our moral views are saturated with evolutionary influences is what's at issue, so I don't think we can assume against the realist that this is the case unless we’ve already taken your side. Whereas the gap between predispositions and norms seems like something you can bring out against the evolutionary approach without begging the question.

There's an alternative (to our moral intuitions being saturated with evolutionary influences)? There's a good reason not to assume against the Realist? I'm all ears. I feel it's time for you to do a bit more than be unconvinced by the aforementioned apparently bleedin' obvious and give us some sort of viable Plan B to consider.

Spinozasgalt wrote:If there are advantages to your approach, it's not easy to see what they are.

Same sort of advantages as atheism, I'd guess, in that at least you stop looking for answers in what appear to be the wrong places. Finding a good place to start, in other words.

Again, apologies if I've pegged you wrong.

Well, see, Zoon and I have encountered each other on quite a few ethics threads over the years. But we've never had a chance to just, sort of, shoot the shit. And when she's brought up her view in the past, I've never gotten to focus in on it because I'm usually debating someone else. So here I've just been trying to work out some of her view and throw some challenges at it from the areas I'm familiar with to see how her view handles them and whether or not she wants to change things. So if it looks like I'm a realist, it's largely because I'm arguing as a realist for the exercise. But how I respond is going to depend on who her opponent happens to be, so if it looks like I've changed through the thread, it's probably that I have. I know it's confusing. If she wants me to stop at any time, she can also say so. I won't be offended.

She linked me to this article from Stanford earlier in the thread and once again I took my lead from there and thought the autonomy assumption in there was the foil. (I guess it's the plan B? And because we use something like it in other domains, it becomes a task for the evolutionary view to show more working out.) For all I can see, I would swear Zoon was just offering an empirical picture of the evolution of certain capacities and predispositions, but the moment she tries to move to norms and reasons, from the starting point of this causal picture, things go haywire for me. Again, I'm no longer sure, so I'll wait and see.