Posted: Oct 05, 2017 8:05 pm
romansh wrote:Hi Zoon
The morality that you are arguing for is it simply some pragmatic model that can be seen as useful or does your morality have some independent existence?
I am quite happy to concede that evolution has given us a sense of emotions like pride/satisfaction and emotions like disgust/shame/embarrassment/humiliation/guilt. And at least in part, if not mostly, our society gives us the subject matter to apply these emotions.
I can see no benefit in thinking in terms of morality other than if we have a desire to shape people's behaviour by appealing to either their pride or shame. Of course this type of manipulation is quite useful ... but then is it moral?
Hi Romansch
I don’t think morality has an independent existence in any Platonic sense, I don’t see it as an ideal Form, or built into the structure of the universe, or mandated by a god. At the same time, I don’t think it’s something we just invent, it’s more analogous to language, it’s a way of thinking that’s heavily wired into our brains by evolution. As with language, I would hesitate to say “it’s simply some pragmatic model that can be seen as useful”, because it seems to me that both language and morality are more than “useful” to us, they are both at the heart of the way we operate socially; all the evidence is that they evolved together, and any attempt by a community to opt out of either is likely to fail rapidly. As soon as a few people are trying to cooperate, unspoken or explicit rules are being set up, based on human tendencies which are already wired in and which are not shared, for example, by chimpanzees. Some of the evolved tendencies towards ordinarily moral behaviour are shown in many experiments on young children, for example, quoting from a 2013 review paper here:
Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish (2013) wrote:.... recent work shows that 3-year-old children who have obtained rewards by working collaboratively with each other divide up their spoils equitably rather than monopolizing them, even when the resources could easily be monopolized (Warneken et al. 2011). This is in stark contrast to chimpanzees, whose strong tendency to compete over the spoils of collaborative efforts severely limits their collaboration (Melis et al. 2006). Most strikingly, 3-year-old children are also more likely to divide up their rewards equally if they obtained the rewards by working collaboratively than by working individually or receiving a windfall (Hamann et al. 2011).
Adult moral systems are built on these evolved proto-moral tendencies, shaped by our evolved capacity for general-purpose problem solving in the light of local circumstances, but although they are in that sense thought through, I don’t think we fully understand them, any more than we fully understand how language works. Neither language nor morality is remotely simple in a mechanistic sense, we are nowhere near to being able to manipulate either at the level of the hardware. We are forever manipulating each other, I don’t think it’s optional, just saying “hello” is looking for a response (speaking of which, it’s just dawned on me I could put “hi Romansch” at the beginning of this post in response to your “hi Zoon”).
It’s true that what I’m describing would not be regarded as morality by many people, probably the vast majority, but I think I would still call it morality. In the same sort of way, many people would say that a “person” is essentially an immortal soul, or at least something not merely material, and they might ask whether someone who thinks of a human being as no more than a collection of evolved, causal organic materials can really be thinking of a person. Perhaps I'm bringing more under the heading of morality than you are? I would say that people and morality are both evolved and causal, but none the less valuable as far as we are concerned, and still, so far, well beyond our understanding.
?
Edited to add: I’m quoting a paragraph from the introduction to the article which I linked and quoted from above, because I think it’s a good example of the way researchers think about morality and evolution:
Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish (2013) wrote:In this article, our goal is to review these new data from young children and great apes — primarily from the past decade or two — in an attempt to provide an up-to-date account of the question of the origins of human morality, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Without attempting a complete definition, in our evolutionary perspective, moral interactions are a subset of cooperative interactions. Arguably, the main function of morality is to regulate an individual’s social interactions with others in the general direction of cooperation, given that all individuals are at least somewhat selfish. And so we may stipulate that at the very least moral actions must involve individuals either suppressing their own self-interest in favor of that of others (e.g., helping, sharing) or else equating their own self-interest with that of others (e.g., reciprocity, justice, equity, and norm following and enforcement).