Posted: Dec 11, 2018 12:46 pm
aban57 wrote:zoon wrote:
I definitely appreciate his insistence that features of human behaviour can be shown to be consistent with evolutionary explanations, and to that extent "wired in", without immediately jumping to the conclusion that they are fixed and somehow excusable because they are "natural".
That's probably because too many people don't make the difference between explaining and excusing. Without this insistence he would be accused of the latter.
It will most likely happen anyway.
Morality, whether someone should be excused or not, still tends to be thought of as something outside evolution, rather than as an evolved feature of human behaviour? It seems to me clear that morality, being an aspect of every functioning human group that has been studied, is something that, like violence, evolved by natural selection, but I still find it tricky to integrate this with ordinary social life.
Perhaps, in order to explain without excusing, it's necessary to insist that morality, like every other aspect of our bodies and behaviour, is the result of evolution by natural selection? Then one can argue that while it may indeed be natural, for example, for a young man to injure another who has disrespected him, it is equally natural for the rest of society not to excuse that behaviour, but instead to operate as a group to identify the offender and make sure that he does not profit in any way from being a disruptive nuisance? The human groups which succeeded in keeping individual violence under control were also the groups which cooperated more effectively. The cooperating individuals, with the early forms of morality, were the ones who succeeded in leaving more of their own genes in later populations. Violence is natural, and so is the morality which does not excuse that violence, but instead punishes the perpetrator. Human behaviour is, naturally, as a result of evolution by natural selection, extremely flexible and complex - as the saying goes: "evolution is cleverer than you are".
(Sometimes, for example in cases of epilepsy, it's appropriate to excuse someone's behaviour on the grounds that "their brain made them do it", but of course that is an instance of a malfunctioning brain, and the downside for the individual of being excused in such cases is that they are no longer trusted as fully capable; for example, they may not be allowed to drive a car. By contrast, a young man who has been punished for injuring another may well have the option afterwards of mending his ways and becoming fully accepted as a member of society.)