Posted: Oct 07, 2017 2:53 pm
I definitely agree that morality is in no way outside causality or evolution, and I also agree that, as you say, punishment is often seen most effectively as containing a set of behaviours. If I wasn’t coerced or mentally ill, and I negligently drifted my car across a red light and crashed into someone, then I think it would be sensible to punish my lack of due care and attention, because it was free-willed in the practical sense that punishment will discourage me (as well as others) from being so careless in future. If I had been coerced or suffering an unexpected epileptic fit, then the punishment would be ineffective (the newly discovered epilepsy might disqualify me from driving, but this would not be operating as a punishment).
At the same time, it seems to me that trying to drop morality altogether runs into the same sort of difficulties as trying to be a total sceptic. Every time I tell myself it’s clear we can’t know anything, I’ve run into a paradox because I’m saying I know something, and every time anyone says we should not use the language of morality, they are using the language of morality. Why should we cut the crap in speaking, and why should we contain behaviours? – if not because we have some shared agreement that it’s a good thing if the community is flourishing, and that it’s good if we are, most of the time at least, not talking nonsense? It seems to me that these are moral predispositions, we back them up with approval or disapproval. It’s possible to argue that it all comes down to pure self-interest, but I think that argument becomes rather strained, especially as it does not in fact accord so easily with evolutionary theory as the other possibility, that we do in fact care, to some extent, about what happens to other people in the group besides ourselves, and that we have some direct interest in the group’s flourishing. We are group-living animals, and genes code for their own interests, which are not always identical with the interests of the individual in which they happen to be (where the interests of the individual are taken to be survival and direct reproduction). (If I’m derailing this thread, and if romansh is interested in continuing this discussion, we could move it to the “justice is a universal” thread.)