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Re: Complexity and Intelligence
Interbane: I'm still curious, but haven't really ever asked, what is your most likely candidate as an explanation for morality besides evolutionary ethics?
Well, first off, the term "evolutionary ethics" may not refer to what you think. It's not really a distinction between the anthropological derivation of morality and the sort of revealed morality that would claim that there was no morality prior to the injunction of a deity. When most of the biologists I'm reading speak of an evolutionary ethics, they're talking about refounding ethics in reference to evolutionary theory.
I personally think that evolution plays two approximate roles in ethics. The first is that ethics isn't really conceivable without the advent of a few evolved capacities. I won't even try to give an exhaustive list, but as an example, try to imagine having ethics at all in the absence of language. So we can say with some assurance that a species must at least evolve the capacity for language before they can develop ethical theory.
The other role that evolution plays is that it can serve as a limit on the persistence of certain ethical claims. A pretty common example is that of total abstinance. That is to say, if a group makes lifelong abstinance from sex one of its ethical imperatives, then evolution puts some rather harsh limits on their capacity to continue that ethical tradition. If ethical claims were inherited like genetic traits, then that particular ethics would be a dead end. But since it can also be spread linguistically, it still has some chance at persistence -- it's merely limited, especially since morality tends to be indoctrinated in the young, to which that particular group will have very limited access.
Those are the two major roles that I see evolution playing in ethics, and they are, to a large degree, roles that we can do little about. When a philosopher or a scientist talks about evolutionary ethics, though, they're usually talking about using evolution as an argument in the construction of ethics. That's problematic for a lot of reasons. It may still be possible, but having already read close to a dozen books on the subject (with more in the "to read" stack) I'd say it's a great deal more difficult than most of these authors would be willing to admit. Even a fairly modest claim, like Waddington's argument that evolution can be used as a rational criteria for choosing between competing ethical claims, tends to fall into a sort of circularity for the simple fact that his argument already assumes an implicit ethical good analogous to "fitness" in the Darwinian scheme.
At present, it looks to me that all ethical systems are ultimately reducible to some specialized form of mythology, such as cosmology or metaphysics. I mean reducible in the sense of an argument -- I wouldn't deny that our capacity for ethics is derived through the process our of which the species developed.
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Re: Complexity and Intelligence
Evolution plays a role in that we've evolved certain capacities for, and mechanisms to control behavior, and as a limit set against certain behaviors. I reworded that fast, but I get the idea and I agree.
Society in some cases defines what is moral behavior, which we then provisionally follow, depending on the strengths of our own capacities and mechanisms to guide that behavior.
Something needs to be separated here in my head.
There tend to be moral acts which need not be claimed as immoral for moral people to know the difference. It's hard to have a case example where a moral person is completely isolated from society to test this. I'm speaking of the acts which appear everywhere in all societies as immoral, murder comes to mind first. Yes, people do murder, but it may be that those individuals lack the capacities and mechanisms that most others have had passed down, genetic differences perhaps. I'd give some weight to the idea of in-groups also, the idea explains a lot and is reasonable.
Then there are moral or immoral acts which do not appear everywhere and seem to be made at the whim of men. A woman having sexual relations before marriage is one that doesn't appear everywhere in history. Religion is the factor here, and I'm hard pressed to find an example of an immoral act which is a construct of men outside religion. But then, I'm no historian.
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Re: Complexity and Intelligence
Interbane: Society in some cases defines what is moral behavior, which we then provisionally follow, depending on the strengths of our own capacities and mechanisms to guide that behavior.
That leaves out a pretty crucial part of the equation, namely that we may voluntarily transgress the moral boundaries set by our social context. Or maybe you'd include that in the category of "mechanisms to guide that behavior". I don't know that the social sciences really have the conceptual tools to deal with actual moral choice -- to that end, most of the truly insightful forays into the realm of moral choice are to be found in works of art, like Steinbeck's "The Winter of Our Discontent". Anthropology, sociology and psychology are mostly limited to descriptive views of morality, and their analysis is nearly always along statistical rather than subjective lines.
There tend to be moral acts which need not be claimed as immoral for moral people to know the difference.
I don't think that's the case -- at least, I haven't seen any evidence convincing me of that idea. It may be that a great deal of what we recognize as intrinsic morality is rather implicit in the social scheme, or is meta-consciously derived from the explicitly formulated moral scheme.
I'm speaking of the acts which appear everywhere in all societies as immoral, murder comes to mind first.
My knowledge of anthropology and sociology suggests that there are no universally applicable morals. The category of murder changes from society to society, and is so mutable that I can't see much basis for arguing that there's any core belief that is really held by all societies. For ancient Norsemen, for instance, a killing was only murder if the killer failed to announce the death. To kill an unfaithful spouse or disloyal offspring is not counted as murder in some Arabic societies. Freud counted incest as a universal taboo, and Freudian psychology lost some of its strength when the findings of anthropologists demonstrated that incest was not a universal taboo, and that, anyway, even the societies that enforced strong prohibitions against incest defined incest differently, such that what counted as incest in one society was permitted without question in another.
Religion is the factor here, and I'm hard pressed to find an example of an immoral act which is a construct of men outside religion. But then, I'm no historian.
I don't know that there are any moral constructs that were formed without the aide of religion. I'm offering this not as an argument for religion, just as an observation. And it seems to me that the primary role that religion plays in this is a categorical one -- religion is a creative endeavor, and one of the things that it fashions are the categories on which morality is founded. Marriage, for example, is a religiously devised category, and the basis for moral prohibitions like that against infidelity and fornication.
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Re: Complexity and Intelligence
MA: "That leaves out a pretty crucial part of the equation, namely that we may voluntarily transgress the moral boundaries set by our social context."
I can't think of a single immoral act that is never committed frequently in all parts of the world. Being immoral is a part of humanity, so any explanation of morality must take that into account. Moral behavior is far from absolute. That is why I said we provisionally follow what society deems moral in that sentence.
Me: "There tend to be moral acts which need not be claimed as immoral for moral people to know the difference."
MA: "I don't think that's the case -- at least, I haven't seen any evidence convincing me of that idea. It may be that a great deal of what we recognize as intrinsic morality is rather implicit in the social scheme, or is meta-consciously derived from the explicitly formulated moral scheme."
The distinction I was trying to make was that in every past society, certain acts are always found as immoral, where other acts do not appear in all societies as immoral. Murder is seen as immoral in all societies, pre-marital sex is not.
MA: "For ancient Norsemen, for instance, a killing was only murder if the killer failed to announce the death. To kill an unfaithful spouse or disloyal offspring is not counted as murder in some Arabic societies."
That murder appears at all as immoral, regardless of contingencies, is enough. Morality is complex, and we'd be hard pressed to categorize most acts as purely moral or immoral. The lines are fuzzy, so it serves to highlight those few clear instances of morality so we have something to work with.
MA: "I don't know that there are any moral constructs that were formed without the aide of religion."
Prior to religion, men may not have called certain acts immoral, but the reaction from society was still negative. The acts may not have been formally announced as immoral until after religion, but in retrospect we may see that past societies were only lacking terminology or structure to categorize those acts.
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Re: Complexity and Intelligence
Interbane: Murder is seen as immoral in all societies, pre-marital sex is not.
And I'm saying that's not the case. Murder is not taboo in all societies, and even in those societies where it is taboo, differences in the way in which they formulate the category of murder tend to negate the supposed universality of that moral prohibition. To say that murder is immoral in two cultures is only really meaningful so long as those two cultures are talking about the same thing.
Prior to religion, men may not have called certain acts immoral, but the reaction from society was still negative.
How would we know that? What evidence is there to support that idea?
My reading suggests that consistent social forms -- the cultural organization of a human society -- are the products of religious categories of thought, cf. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, "Primitive Classification". When you start talking about inherent social forms -- that is, the sort of social foms that you see among other primates, which are instinctual rather than cultural -- then you're talking about the borderline between being human and being another kind of animal.
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