Niall001 wrote:Robert, I'll just make a couple of quick points here. (i) Dawkins really doesn't deserve much credit for anything. He popularised some theories, but aside from meme (a theory of questionable worth), he's come up with very little in the line of original ideas. (ii) Using our 'nature' as the basis for a moral system in problematic. Our nature is plastic and while we have many strong predispositions toward certain behaviours these predispositions are not always adaptive in the modern world. Further, not only does the phenotype vary greatly depending on the environment into which we are born (which I might add is a different environment to the one in which humanity evolved), but the predispositions present in out make-up are often at odds with each other. For instance, we have adaptations that lead us toward infidelity in some circumstances while we also have an adaptation that leads us to react with disgust to infidelity in other circumstances. Likewise, we have biases toward social loafing, toward punishing social loafing, toward pro-social behaviour and toward taking advantage of our peers. There's no doubt that our genes guide our thinking on morality in certain ways, but they don't offer a set of principles on which a stable and/or consistent moral system can be based.
Niall, Thanks. Surely you are being too hard on Dr Dawkins? I thought
The Selfish Gene was brilliant, showing quite clearly how zoology provides a rigorous context for ethics and philosophy, by defining parameters of the real. Too much non-scientific ethics is merely speculative or actively harmful because it is not grounded in observation. However, I do think
The God Delusion was superficial in its grasp of theology, presenting a popular bludgeon and failing to engage with more sophisticated views, but Dawkins has a coherent outlook which presents a useful discipline for thought.
Dawkins points to the potential to use evolution as a basis for morality, but as you say this is highly problematic. Since Hume, in view of the fact/value and is/ought distinctions, analytical philosophy has effectively claimed that derivation of strategies from observations is fallacious, the basis being that action is based on much more than evidence and that moral sentiment is not rational. I have always felt uneasy about this positivistic outlook as it makes morality too subjective. Surely there exists a moral strategy which, even if we can't know what it is, objectively produces the best/most adaptive outcomes, and which we can aim at as a goal of moral reason?
Genetics would have much to provide to inform such an adaptive moral strategy. I agree that genetics alone is not a sufficient basis for morality, but compatibility with genetic knowledge is necessary for a coherent morality. This is why creationism is so perverse, and why Christianity needs to have its anti-scientific components excised if it is to become redeemable.
The main genetic principle on which morality can be based is that actions which conduce to replication are good while those which do not are bad. This principle needs to be understood in a complex way, given that some actions can seem helpful in the short term (eg building nuclear weapons) but may prove harmful in the longer term against the benchmark of ecological adaptability, and that replication of some organisms (eg cockroaches) may not serve the interest of the broader ecology. Genetics points to a consequentialist ethic where the meaning of life is the good of the future.
There is a good article called
Taking the Gospels Seriously by Bill McKibben in the current issue of the
New York Review of Books -
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article ... e_id=20943. He points out that despite its popularity, evangelical Christianity may well be on the point of collapse because of its fallacious foundations, and that young Americans mostly view the church as contemptible, having looked at it and been disgusted by its hypocrisy and intolerance.
I agree the loafing and fidelity moral examples you give are genetically ambiguous, but they are really minor distractions against the big game, which boils down to whether humanity will become extinct and whether Christianity will aid or abet our genetic survival. I think Christianity will aid survival once it is stripped of its obsolete excrescences.
