Posted: Oct 28, 2018 11:45 am
zoon wrote:
I think you are also arguing that mere evolved emotions are too simple and unstable to be acceptable bases of our behaviour, we should use reason and science instead? I don’t see how we can expect to get rid of emotions, they are what make life worth living in the first place; we use reason and science to fulfil them (as Hume suggested)? If we are going entirely by science, then, like all living things, we have evolved as if to maximise our inclusive fitness, that is, the number of our genes in future generations.
Is that what you think? If so, how come you don't have 30 kids? Is that because you don't have an implemented algorithm to maximize the presence of your genes in a future generation? Similarly, I don't see any program that seeks to banish emotions, nor is it evident how your comment relates to how morality functions, or even if there is anything identifiable as such. Let me know when you're actually willing to make some intellectual effort, instead of serving as a mouthpiece for emitting soundbites from the authorities you favor in the literature you read. The morality you're talking about is the one you comfort yourself with to justify your emotional reactions. If you want your selection of authorities to mean something, how about showing that your critical faculties can get beyond regurgitating soundbites.
This analysis only asks you to make evident some reasoning about the concepts you're citing, and that's going to involve something more than reciting platitudes about the projects of balancing reason and emotion. If you look at the way most people evidently function, they're not minute-to-minute cogitating about whether or not to commit violence on their neighbors and their neighbors' stupid get in order to justify their moral discourse. Instead, they're reacting emotionally to stuff that, for whatever reason, they find distasteful, but hardly worthy of extermination. The few folks who become extreme about this either gain power or they don't. But they do often enough to quash your stupid fairy tale about how morality is evolved. What's evolved is the interplay between wanting your neighbors to fuck off somewhere else and not knowing whether or not you can really get the drop on them, and your moral judgments amount to so much impotent infantile frustration.