Natural and Existential Morality

Wayfarer

Humans are animals throughout. — Kenosha Kid

I think this is problematical. Humans are plainly - empirically, even - different to any other animal, in terms of their capabilities, intellectual and otherwise, and certainly in terms of self-awareness. And that's both a blessing and a curse - a blessing in that self-awareness, combined with language and the ability to seek meaning, opens horizons of being that are simply not available to animals. And a curse, in that we can contemplate the meaning of our existence and our death.

(Actually this point was made by Alfred Russel Wallace in his essay Darwinism Applied to Man, although it's generally accepted that this was Wallace the quaint Victorian spiritualist rather than Wallace, co-discovered of natural selection.)

That said, I think your approach makes sense as a code of civil ethics (and is also terrifically well-written) but really it falls under the heading of utilitarian ethics, doesn't it? Greatest good for the greatest number? Or the best set of principles for the cultural situation we live under? Nothing intrinsically the matter with that, but clearly those who accept, as Wittgenstein said, that ethics is transcendental, will not be inclined to settle for it.

Kenosha Kid

That's a really nicely written piece. I agree with a substantial portion of what you say, but agreement is boring so... — Isaac

Cheers Isaac! Yeah, kick it in its vulnerable parts, that's the right way.

I'm not so sure that you can move as smoothly as you do from the biological description of empathetic pain to the non-hypocritical maxim of the new globalised society we find ourselves in. That pain has not gone away, and I don't think it can be as easily cast aside - socialisation can dictate behaviours, but it is less successful in undermining physiological processes. — Isaac

Overall, yes, I agree, and did not mean to suggest otherwise. It seems quite clear that you can raise animosity toward certain people, and it is experimentally evident that this subdues our natural empathetic behavioural responses, even if it does not seem to subdue our initial empathetic neurological response. So to that extent, socialisation can be perverted to make us do antisocial things. But you're right that we still have those capacities and drives, so we cannot statistically be antisocial. We are biased toward altruism, and that bias has to be compensated for to make us selfish.

And I think this wins out in the history of our cultures. Conservativism relies on violence to stop itself from losing ground, as we see now in Hong Kong and in the protectionism of the US police forces, without which the trend always seems to be to extend our altruism to an ever widening diversity of strangers.

I think that introducing new out-groups has a catastrophic quality. Because we clearly can't have traditionally had overriding empathetic responses to strangers (the suggested counter-empathetic responses to out-group members), and because we cannot have reigning socialisations that bias us one way or another to specific new out-groups (although we can have blanket positions on general ones), powerful nations have historically not treated new peoples humanely... at first. Those few who seem always inclined to exploit new out-groups tend to get in there while we have no substantial moral position on the matter. But exposure to these injustices always seems to incline us toward ending them rather than adopting them as good-for-us, which, and in this I agree 100% with you, is a testament to the robustness of our humanity (our ultrasociality) on a statistical level.

Being a statistical phenomenon, it is prone to its peaks and troughs, it's Martin Luther King Jr.s and its Hitlers. But we don't seem to be winning the war on the ideological perversion of our social capacities by powerful minorities very quickly, which itself is a testimony to the power of socialisation. Hopefully this too is just a weird fluke, but given the lifespan of archaic memes, I fear not.

So what's happening is that we're using the very same moral decision-making approaches you list in your first half, unaltered. What's changing is the determination of in-group and out-group which is now highly flexible and circumstantial. — Isaac

Yes, absolutely, but the important point is:

we construct flexible and overlapping 'virtual' small-groups, and it is these we use to to determine valuation — Isaac

I have a friend, we'll call him Alex, who has a friend, we'll call him Bob, who is very Nigel Farage (I'm British) and constantly posts nationalistic ass-hattery on social media, a lot of it about Polish people. He has a good Polish friend, call him Cris. How does Bob rationalise this? "I don't mean you, mate, it's everyone else." This is an excellent working example, because there are many virtual social groups in play. There are Bob's actual friends (including Cris), then there is his social media group, then there are his political affiliations and associates, and they conflict with one another. He is losing actual friends (including Alex who has distanced himself) via social media because of his political affiliations. The inconsistency is a clear sign of hypocrisy: Bob would not agree to the persecution of Cris, but agrees with the persecution of Polish people. This, I would say, is typically antisocial.

But yes other people might be more consistent across their virtual groups. However, I do question whether, when one's virtual social groups geographically encompass the world, one can actually maintain e.g. racist or nationalistic viewpoints without hypocrisy. It seems to me that out-groupism was on its surest footing back when social groups were small and other groups were largely existential threats. In-groups do not typically suffer existential threat from out-groups, whatever lies they may tell. It also seems to me that those who exploit our unpreparedness for dealing with new out-groups (as in slavery), or raise our animosity against existing ones (e.g. Hitler), in any other way tend to comprise a minority of powerful psychopaths.

Part of the obvious wooliness in this part of my OP comes from lack of space, because this is such an expansive and complex topic, part from my own ignorance, and part probably from the ignorance even of our most knowledgeable experts. What would, say, American white-black relations have been like if more representative people, who had not inherited racist or slavery-affirming socialisations, had mediated them from the start? This starts off looking like a simple question that suggests that maybe if power wasn't so concentrated always among psychopathic opportunists, things might have been better. But of course slavery had been accepted as natural since the middle ages, in no small part thanks to religion, and in no small part thanks to its legal status, so its still likely that even normal people might have gone the same route.

My feeling is that, whatever initial difficulties there might have been in encountering new out-groups, in the absence of socialisations that push us toward pre-social behaviours and suspend our social capacities, and in the absence of a credible existential threat from such out-groups, our natural altruism would tend toward inclusivity. The main evidence I see for this is that, despite everything that powerful psychopaths have tried to pass off as fair game, and despite the methods of socialisation obviously employed to pass them off as good, we have always tended toward inclusivity as the geographical boundaries of our social groups have expanded.

Mww

Square One:

1.)

Social animals tend to operate in their cohabitation groups: hunting, gathering, child-rearing, migrating, fighting, etc. Humans are ultrasocial animals: we pack a lot of biological capacity specifically for operating in social groups compared with other animals. — Kenosha Kid

2.)

we are ultrasocial animals with heritable altruistic and empathetic capacities that compete with other, selfish heritable characteristics that, together with a heritable amenability to socialisation, allows us to make moral decisions concerning other individuals.

3.) That on its own isn't much of a foundational morality though. — Kenosha Kid

1a.) Ultrasocial can be attributed to over-population and/or economic dictates, which implies adaptability and/or small-scale tactical necessity, rather than an evolutionary progression. That we are social animals is sufficient.

2a.) Decisions grounded in those heritable capacities denote compatibility, rather than morality.

3a.) Granted, insofar as 1.) and 2.) are more related to consequentialist ethics, a psychological domain with respect to some arbitrary conduct in general, rather than moral determinism, a purely metaphysical domain with respect to innate human qualities under which mere capacity is subsumed, which first generates, then judges, what the specific conduct will be.

Acceptable?
————-

Square Two:

Understanding the perspective of another individual allows us to assess their threat and their vulnerability. It comes under the general negotiations of subsocial and social animals. — Kenosha Kid

What we have learned scientifically since is that no such understanding is required by us. Instead it needed to be the case in the past that a certain behaviour is a) statistically beneficial for survival and b) within our genetic space. — Kenosha Kid

How in the Holy Dickens can you reconcile these two assertions? Now, given that your “such understanding” relates to my “understanding is the first conscious activity”, you still have to demonstrate that the understanding we still use to assess threats, isn’t the same understanding science has shown we no longer require. “Negotiations of subsocial and social animals” leaves out “ultrasocial” animals, sure, but “ultrasocial”, being an extravagance anyway, if nothing else, puts understanding right back in the picture, by your own admission. Which is a good thing, because no otherwise rational or moral agent is going to function properly without it.

The problem is, of course, what you mean by understanding, such that we used to need it but now we don’t, and what I mean, such that it is absolutely needed, always. That is to say, understanding the benefit of staying clear of Sabre-tooth cats and warlords is exactly the same as understanding the benefit of staying clear of dump trucks and panhandlers.

Acceptable?
———-

Square Three, for Tic-Tac-Toe and the win:

It follows that there are no unreal or non-sensical scenarios
— Mww

There certainly are: a society of mostly antisocial actors being one. — Kenosha Kid

Prison.

TA-DAAAA!!!!

Kenosha Kid

VLTTP :smirk: (Excellent OP and discussion. Mods keep up the bannings; that seems to be classing-up the joint! :up:) — 180 Proof

Thanks a lot! You were the first member I followed on here, so it means a lot.

Isn't "cannot have top-down rules" a top-down rule? — 180 Proof

Cannot "support" might be better phrasing. It is outside the capability of natural selection to implement such top-down rules, so even the top-down rule "No top-rules!" cannot be a natural rule. It's just a description of natural limitations.

This caricature certainly doesn't apply to what's called 'virtue ethics' (i.e. eudaimonism) from the Hellenes through the (neo)Thomists down to moderns like Spinoza ... G.E.M. Anscombe, Alasdair McIntyre, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Owen Flanagan, et al. — 180 Proof

In terms of social altruism, sure, and of course the existentialists who defied such oughts long before my parents were born. The eudaimonists are still concerned with "oughts" though. They are in the same situation of having moral capacity unsuited to their environments, they just come up with different answers. Within the scope of what is salvaged from our sociality, I'd vouch for them. It seems at least as justifiable to me to act to increase personal well-being, so long as it is not at the expense of others, than it is to concern oneself principally with others. The divorcement of good-for-self and good-for-the-group cannot justify one over the other. Extending that to antisocial behaviour that is good for personal well-being at the expense of others, well, it's no longer your personal well-being when you have not only have the others to contend with but the empathetic masses who you have hurt via them. Provided you have sufficient power, e.g. sufficient legal protection or maybe a small army to protect you from the consequences of the harm you do in the name of personal fulfilment, you'll be okay. For a while anyway.

"existentialism" is just Kierkegaardian 'subjective idealism' (i.e. decisionist fideism), which is just coin-flipping (à la "Two-Face" or "Anton Chighur") — 180 Proof

See:

In the existential sense, and it was existentialism I was comparing our post-social situation to, freedom is a lack of "ought". It is in the sense that any choice we make, giving that freedom, is absurd by virtue of the fact that our freedom cannot justify one action over another (Kierkegaard), and in the sense that the necessity to perform that absurdity it is a symptom of human beings beings incompatible with their environment (Camus). — Kenosha Kid

"relativism", in so far as its a truth-claim (negative or positive) is self-refuting — 180 Proof

I think this is where the OP differs from quite a few of the more metaphysically-minded, and by design. It is not necessary for relativism to justify relativism, i.e. it need not be an elementary moral theory. In fact that's the point: no moral theory will be both elementary and true. Relativism is a default of a naturalistic depiction of morality that observes that our moral drives and capacities cannot be exhaustively or accurately fulfilled in the environment they now exist in (existentialism), and that, beyond the existence of these drives and capacities, there is no natural justification for one schema of how and when one act above another.

Small social groups cannot maintain diverse social mores, and so the origins of relativism lie in the non-overlapping memetic histories (to whatever extent they might have been less uniform) of disparate social groups. Large social groups, or large networks of virtual social groups, comprised of modern equivalents of social groups, clearly do maintain diverse social standards. Some can be dismissed on antisocial grounds, i.e. the politics of subhuman animals. Some can be dismissed on practical grounds (e.g. most deontolies, such as Kant's notion of duty, and probably all consequentialisms). Between those, a lot of moral philosophies can exist that are practical, socially consistent, and different. Our nature cannot tell us which to choose (because our nature is unaware of our circumstances) and I argue that, since our morality derives from natural selection of social drives and capacities, no fucker else can either. Relativism then is a description of nature, including in unnatural environments, not an ab initio theory.

Disembodied, non-ecological cognition? Solipsistic fallacy (if it ain't, it should be). More Berkeley, I guess, than Kiergekaard? — 180 Proof

I was thinking more of the French existentialists. Kierkegaard had higher, and in my view imaginary, authorities. French existentialism is ethically solipsistic to an extent, and in some ways terminally so: no sooner do existentialists announce freedom, they try and find an "ought" (God, overcoming, communism, personal experience) to fill the void. I'm hoping to avoid the same mistake here. I can vouchsafe someone's freedom to behave antisocially, to be inhuman. It is possible and that can't be pre-moderated by others. I just can't vouchsafe their personal safety from the empathetic masses afterwards. Unfortunately, others can.

Natural. Selection. Shake-n-bake variation by descent sans teleology. Exhibit 1: the 3+ billion year old fossil record. Exhibit 2: nucleogenesis and planetary systems formations. Exhibit 3: "junk DNA", spandrel traits, etc. Exhibit 4: cosmic expansion (towards) thermodynamic equilibrum or maximum disorder (heat death) --> heat itself. Etcetera ... — 180 Proof

I disagree with the shake-n-bake analogy; I think it very inaccurate. Natural selection is not simply a random searching of genetic space. That is just mutation and combination, and even that is heavily constrained. Natural selection is much more: it is an optimisation algorithm that minimises a cost within that space of function without it. One needs noise (mutation) for it to find non-local optima and one needs a means of exploring combinations of parameters to move along the space, but the power, both explanatory and in terms of building complexity, is really in eliminating the unfit via competition for resources, which is definitively not random.

Damn. You drew me into the natural selection debate and I said I was not going there. :scream:

Kenosha Kid

1a.) Ultrasocial can be attributed to over-population and/or economic dictates, which implies adaptability and/or small-scale tactical necessity, rather than an evolutionary progression. That we are social animals is sufficient. — Mww

I think you may have a different definition of ulrasocial going on. I meant it in the typical neuroscientific sense of ultracooperative social groups, such as in Neurosciences in the Human Person by Battro et al, rather than later e.g. agricultural or technological solutions to living. These are understood in terms of evolutionary biology and psychology.

Decisions grounded in those heritable capacities denote compatibility, rather than morality. — Mww

If you are saying that natural capacities for empathy and altruism have nothing to do with morality, I would have to disagree strongly. If you are disputing that these natural capacities are identical with any metaphysical idea of morality, yes, hopefully, because I believe one is real and one is not.

Granted, insofar as 1.) and 2.) are more related to consequentialist ethics, a psychological domain with respect to some arbitrary conduct in general, rather than moral determinism, a purely metaphysical domain with respect to innate human qualities under which mere capacity is subsumed, which first generates, then judges, what the specific conduct will be. — Mww

Not sure what you mean. From the imagined perspective of natural selection as a designer, yes, our natural more apparatus developed because it gave us greater odds at survival. But our moral apparatus is as unaware of its origin as our ancestors were. It is not a consequentialist philosophy of human beings. It is biology as a consequence of natural selection. Is that what you mean?

Square Two:

Understanding the perspective of another individual allows us to assess their threat and their vulnerability. It comes under the general negotiations of subsocial and social animals.
— Kenosha Kid

What we have learned scientifically since is that no such understanding is required by us. Instead it needed to be the case in the past that a certain behaviour is a) statistically beneficial for survival and b) within our genetic space.
— Kenosha Kid

How in the Holy Dickens can you reconcile these two assertions? — Mww

I'm struggling to see where the apparent contradiction could lie. The first refers to the understanding of another's likely perspective or feelings given to us by our empathetic apparatus. The second refers to an understanding of how that apparatus did it and why. Again, I can use a TV without knowing how it works. Likewise I can "use" empathy and gain insight, without knowing how or why it works.

That is to say, understanding the benefit of staying clear of Sabre-tooth cats and warlords is exactly the same as understanding the benefit of staying clear of dump trucks and panhandlers. — Mww

The "understanding" of the danger of sabre-tooth tigers, as well as of spiders, rodents, and other pests, the dark, the unusual, the sheer, etc. was also selected for. We don't really understand why a spider is to be feared, especially when it is evidently unscary ("It's more scared of us than you are of it!"). Unfortunately our ancestors had better reason to be scared of spiders and apparently weren't scared enough.

It's the rationalism trap again, big-R Rationalism as @Pfhorrest corrected me: someone does something, therefore they must have worked out that that was the best thing to do using their reason alone and, if it was the wrong thing, they made a rational error. In reality, if your ancestor had attempted this in the face of an oncoming sabre-tooth tiger, you almost certainly wouldn't have been born because rational thought is slow while pattern recognition and rules of thumb are fast. Meanwhile, thanks to my ancestor having the wisdom to mate with a flight creature, I wouldn't have anyone to talk to about this :( There was an excellent survival reason why your ancestor legged it, but that wasn't your ancestor doing the deciding, that was natural selection.

Pfhorrest

If this statement referred only to your own instantaneous "hedonic experience" then depending on details your theory might be something like emotivism (or a tautology.) But your theory involves some kind of integration over the experiences of all people in all circumstances. At which point those experiences become data and you are squarely in the is-ought transmutation business. — SophistiCat

The important difference between what you’re picturing and what I’m actually saying is that on my account we are not merely to base moral reasoning on people’s self-descriptions of their hedonism experiences. Just like we don’t base science on people’s self-descriptions of their empirical experiences, but rather we replicate those circumstances first-hand for ourselves and see if we ourselves experience the same thing. Likewise on my account of morality, we are to replicate others’ hedonic “observations” to confirm for ourselves that it actually does seem bad. So we’re never starting with a description and getting to a prescriptive conclusion. We’re always starting with a prescriptivists experience (an experience of something seeming good or bad), and getting to a prescriptive conclusion.

Of course even in science we don’t all always replicate every observation everyone reports (apparently there’s a bit of a crisis of nobody doing nearby enough replication), and I’m not suggesting we have to do that with mora reasoning either. But in the case of science, when we don’t replicate, we take the (descriptive) conclusion at its word, rather than taking a description of the empirical experiences someone had at someone‘s word and then coming to the same conclusion ourselves on the ground that someone has some experience. Likewise, if we don’t replicate a hedonic experience, we’re just taking the prescriptive conclusion of the person who had it at their word — trusting them that such-and-such does actually seem good or bad — and using that in our further moral reasoning. We’re never taking a description of an experience that someone had and reaching a prescriptive conclusion from it, and so not violating the is-ought gap. We’re just trusting someone’s prescriptive claim, and drawing further prescriptive conclusions from it; or else verifying that claim with our own prescriptive (hedonic) experiences and drawing prescriptive conclusions from them.

Pfhorrest

The distinction I prefer is social/antisocial. [...]

I did, perhaps regrettably, try and cast these things in terms of how a moral philosopher might see them — Kenosha Kid

In that case you are not so much ignoring the is-ought divide, as just ignoring the ought side of it completely. You are only describing why certain behaviors did in fact contribute to the survival of our ancestors and consequently why we are in fact inclined to behave that way still, but you’re not giving any account at all of why it’s good to survive and so good that we behave in that way today.

You’re also overlooking that the same tacit “passing on your genes is good” premise hidden under all of this would justify many antisocial behaviors too. Genghis Khan did a lot of antisocial stuff, a bunch of murders and rapes, and his genes are all over the world population today because of that. So does that make rape and murder good, in the right context where you’ll get away with it and have lots of successful offspring? I suspect you’ll be inclined to say no, but while you’ve given an account of how rape and murder are antisocial and so what causes lots of people to condemn them, you haven’t given any reason (not cause, but reason) for you to condemn them in the case of Ghengis Khan, for whom they were quite a successful reproduction strategy.

Kenosha Kid

In that case you are not so much ignoring the is-ought divide, as just ignoring the ought side of it completely. — Pfhorrest

As I said, I am not ignoring it: I am rejecting it completely.

You are only describing why certain behaviors did in fact contribute to the survival of our ancestors and consequently why we are in fact inclined to behave that way still, but you’re not giving any account at all of why it’s good to survive and so good that we behave in that way today. — Pfhorrest

No, nor should I. You're looking for another, more fundamentally moral "good" so that we can say: "We agree with nature, it does happen to be morally good to survive." I can't think of anything more redundant. It's the other way around: we think altruism is good because it historically improved our chances of survival. We think it's good because we want it (a drive) and it makes us feel nice (a hit of oxytocin) and it benefited us (reciprocal altruism). Selection first, then rationalisation: that is the order I believe is correct.

You can, as we have discussed before, attempt to step outside of our biology and take the cosmic insignificance stance. There is nothing invalid about this. In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if I kill a man for a loaf of bread and spend 20 years in prison for it and let down my family who end up on the street. However, I do exist within a society far more immediately than I exist within a cosmos. The cosmos does not cause me pain, for instance. So I shan't. Also, thanks to that biology again, I do not wish to.

Looking for a moral reason to follow one's biological impulses is like looking for consciousness in a neuron. At the scale where you find an underlying cause, there is no "ought" beyond a the outdated selection criterion of an unconscious natural process.

You’re also overlooking that the same tacit “passing on your genes is good” premise hidden under all of this would justify many antisocial behaviors too. — Pfhorrest

Competing selfish (pre-social) drives are covered in the OP, albeit briefly. Happy to delve into it more, as has been done in a number of responses in this thread already. I assure you I am not overlooking them.

Genghis Khan did a lot of antisocial stuff, a bunch of murders and rapes, and his genes are all over the world population today because of that. So does that make rape and murder good, in the right context where you’ll get away with it and have lots of successful offspring? — Pfhorrest

As in good-for-me, yeah sure. But I'm not suggesting that our morality derived from good-for-me, rather from good-for-the-group, namely the biological capacities for altruism and empathy. Again, I'm not proposing that what's good for our genes is a foundation of a moral philosophy. I am proposing that we have moral philosophy because what's good-for-the-group is not actionable anymore.

Enrique

socialisation clearly has some corrupting effect — Kenosha Kid

As long as we're getting into some detail and wow, substantive thinking!, I'd be interested in your analysis of corruption, which ties in with the account of cultural conditioning necessary for any theory of ethics. I would claim that contemporary society is devolving into early antiquity's stage of civilization, an era where values were in turmoil and societies vulnerable to extreme inefficiencies or even collapse. Maybe this outlook is excessively doom and gloom, with the situation being less dire than I tend to surmise, but you guys tell me! The following is a somewhat lengthy summary of the perspective I have in mind. With this thread, I might actually have a chance of well-considered critical analysis.

The simple influence of concentrating into a large population can deeply explain why embarking upon civilization had such seachanging effect. In the quintessential hunter-gatherer village on the cusp of transitioning to a civilized way of life, perhaps consisting of about a hundred individuals as a rough estimate, all its members are living off surrounding countryside, hunting, gathering nuts and berries, with perhaps a bit of rudimentary crop-raising thrown into the mix. They live on self-subsistent surpluses that require the same type of tool-making and tool-use to sustain everyone in the tribe. There is some primordial division of labor, as a shaman may fabricate implements of spiritual significance and provide guidance in exchange for food supplies, a chief may also have his needs met by the rest of the group as a perk of leadership, but most households are engaging in almost the exact same essential behaviors, supporting their families by nearly identical means, and can usually function on their own just as well as in commerce with the collective barring competition with rival tribes and warring. As population increases, some families set out on their own and found a new village with approximately the same lifestyle a distance away.

Once humans closely packed into towns and cities, conditions were much different. The same amount of land had to support greatly enlarged populations, so almost full transition to larger scale production of farming occurred. In order for farming to keep up with a swelling quantity of residents, this profession needed to become more technological, requiring specialized tool-making by nonfarmers in town, and conversely necessitating that food producers devote the majority of their working life to tending the fields, altogether greatly reducing degree of self-subsistence. Agricultural food supplies are susceptible to changing seasons and climates, so although huge surpluses could sometimes be achieved, as in large amounts of grain and so on stored year round, sustenance of the population is impossible if crops fail, and at this juncture of development they inevitably would at some point. The first civilizations were putting all their eggs in one basket when it came to the food supply: if agriculture collapsed, specialized populations of high density did not simply hunt or gather instead nor pick up the whole operation and move to a new area, but either dispersed, calling it quits, or starved.

Between 10,000 and 6,000 B.C.E., most civilizations went through periods of at least temporary dissolution that were probably induced by mercurialities of long-term climate; this was especially true of the ancient Americas with their sometimes severe El Nino and La Nina effects. But by around 6,000 B.C.E., relatively stable growing seasons in numerous Old World regions well-watered by river systems, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and many parts of Europe, prolonged an advancement in farming and food distribution methods sufficient to permanently settle thousands of square miles.

Infrastructure and trade were indispensable for this full commitment to an agriculture-based lifestyle of specialization in large communities. At first, the erecting of integrated economies must have been quite local, an arrangement along the lines of Greek city states with their small satellite colonies, pockets of high population at strategic spots such as river basins or areas particularly defensible from attack. Some light trading probably took place along stretches of river, modest impetus for large-scale organization, but the key event in the move towards a globally enculturated antiquity was emergence of strong central authority, for it enabled civilizations to pool resources in service of massive engineering projects such as civic construction and man-made canals for irrigation or travel. Supremely powerful government was also more capable of securing vast, sprawling economies against inclement conditions - nomadic migrations, opportunistic invasions by rivals, regional food shortages, and so on - with enhanced military and commercial organization.

Though large-scale civic legislating offers some logistical advantages when suitably technologized, it originated with the obligation that populations give up their independence in order to seek, resist or capitulate to imperial conquering, and many of the first rulers and ruling classes considered themselves elites, committed to enforcing sovereign superiority over the general public. Popular psychologies that upheld this lopsided inequality across vast spans of time probably involve some subtle variety, but the basic conditioning factor in their persistence is elementary enough to conceive, for it similarly obtains in the contemporary age. A civilized society in which almost no citizens live a self-subsistent lifestyle depends on law and order for its very survival. If efficient distribution and protection of goods and resources is not possible due to inadequate military control or incompetent civic upkeep, famines, wars and so on are more threatening to the population's way of life, a greater vulnerability to natural cataclysms as well as violence from hostile cultures. Civilizations in perpetual political chaos, a state of uproar and unrest, will eventually be overrun by more unified outsiders as it is recognized that exploitative actions will not be capably resisted. Citizens also often consider cultural traditions sacred in some sense, with human minds in antiquity all the way up to the present day seeing a connection between viability of social structures and the will of deities or their declared representatives, so that fear of divine wrath or belief in spiritual mandate lead to consent for all but the most egregious, sacrilegious, immoral or traitorous oppressions. Thus, though no one likes to be herded around by pugnacious authority, individuals are usually agreeable to suppressing some level of disgruntlement in order to ward off potential for utter catastrophe.

In a large populace, various distinctly civilized dynamics take effect. Loss of self-sufficient living off of reliable surpluses in communal territories providing for each household’s equivalent way of life means that individuals are more susceptible to misfortune from changing natural and economic conditions. Citizens also simply differ more, as they are living divergent professional and personal lifestyles, often with unintegrated ancestry that introduces the further divisive effect of language barriers and variant manners, a partition of society into separate subcultures. Citizens sometimes lack common financial or cultural interest with many in their own or other neighborhoods, and may even be unable to engage in the most basic spoken communications. Materially, particular citizens matter less to sustenance of the community as a whole, with occupational roles quickly filled by someone new when practitioners are no longer able to render professional services, and large benefits often accrued by elimination of rival tradesmen from the economy. Value placed on individual lives diminishes in an overall milieu of less trust, empathy, and solidarity against community detriments such as poverty or abuse of power.

In antiquity, acquiescence of populations to rulers often involved a conspicuous absence of oversight by commoners, which contributed to a tendency for leadership to become corrupt, living large at the expense of subjects or mischievously manipulating public opinion for personal gain. But logistical crises inevitably happen, the most flagrant neglects of the public good tend to get exposed, and when citizenries become dissatisfied enough with the conduct of those in power to overthrow a government, opulence is practically helpless against popular revolt, especially if conditions grow so bad that even military discipline disintegrates. Exploitative unaccountability is a tough sell, and the earliest authorities stemmed the tide of opposition to their more or less unjust social status with immediate and extremely harsh measures designed to scare so-considered “rabble” into apprehensive obedience, usually nipping any inclination towards social disorder in the bud. Combined with general lessening of empathy in civic settings of anonymity, competition, and subcultural differentiation, the administering of punishment waxed more than a little insane.

Modernizing globalization had been in its preliminary stages during the Enlightenment 18th century, with most of the civilian world not yet technologized to the level of Europeanized societies, and even the main body of Europe’s population lacking access to higher education. A predominant upper class existed in every civilized culture, sustaining exclusivity as the most wealthy, learned, and politically powerful demographic, possessing a primary role in determining the course of culture. As economic advantage amongst the home territories and countries of Europe’s empires came to be seen as reliant on a populace optimally mobilized for technical competence, civic-minded humanism gained more traction with intellectuals. The rich began to realize their security depended on committing to some concessions for the sake of the general population’s well-being and satisfaction, leading to groundbreaking philosophies that promoted pursual of egalitarian institutions. This would stimulate transition towards more democratically representative systems, initially intended as a mechanism by which to uphold certain universal legal equalities so that political organization would better serve everyone’s interests, making civil unrest obsolete.

Despite the best efforts of enlightened thinkers, conflict erupted across the globe in the 19th and 20th centuries as lingering imperialism struggled to sustain a grip on rebellious locals, citizenries in Europe and elsewhere fought violent battles to overthrow the vestiges of autocratic rule, and economically or culturally oppressed demographics everywhere confronted persecution with civil disobedience and demonstration. The quest for egalitarianism had splintered into aristocracies and in some regions bourgeoisie also warring for sustainment of their way of life, a proletariat seeking to free itself from the chains of economic exploitation, and innumerable subcultures whose very survival was at stake.

In the early and mid 20th century, as population exploded and turmoil escalated in many locales, declining egalitarian idealism and rise of a survival of the fittest competitive principle, already well underway, broke through remnants of moral and political tradition, washing over the human race in a monstrous wave of devastating power plays. Fascist Germany quickly overran all of Europe and began to genocidally exterminate minority demographics in many countries. Imperial Japan severely subjugated the Chinese during its WW2 era occupation. After the war, the Stalinist Soviet Union executed many millions. China’s new communism governed its population with surpassing strictness. Corporate capitalism in the Western world became less obligated to promote social welfare and more engrossed in consolidating financial control with every passing year. By the beginning of the 21st century, commitment to progressive civic reform in the mold of both religious and secular enlightenment had been largely derailed, devolving into brazenly exploitative cultural imperialism.

In the contemporary world, finance only stokes the flames of a growing nihilism (in the Nietzschean sense) that is despoiling ethical tradition. Profit models utilized by large corporations judge success based on rate of fiscal growth, with exponential expansion in wealth being the quantitative standard of viability in a company’s business strategy, for it guarantees larger salaries amongst top officials, indicates a trend towards market dominance via monopoly, and allows investment in additional sectors of the economy, a diversification which insures conglomerates against commercial misfortune in any particular venture. Unfortunately, there are many aspects of society that are difficult to quantify and thus do not figure into profit assessments: quality of life, values of a culture, financial security of the general population, organizational integrity of political systems, and so on.

Neglect of more intangible factors that contribute to a society’s health has pushed some parts of the world way beyond what unadulterated, long-standing traditions permitted even a couple generations ago. Shameless greed and general acquisitiveness are much more prevalent in populations than they used to be as corporate leadership spars for hegemony, and ordinary individuals fight to remain solvent in an environment where money is sucked out of their pockets at maximal levels by manipulation of the market. Transmission of memes has lost all sense of overall ethical purpose, usually mimicking the vitiated nature of advertising and character portrayals in corporate media, a shallowness, subversiveness and rapid-fire contradictoriness. Imagery and related behavioral mimesis in many cultures is much more gratuitously violent and sexual than it used to be, which desensitizes citizens to exploitation. The empathetic dimension of ethical responsibility is degenerating due to desensitization, and its rational dimension rarely matures as inducement of superficial decision-making proves most effective in stimulating consumption. Individuals are less concerned with cogent political discourse and vigilant about the ideological direction of their countries, political systems radicalize as they are infused with a market-driven bankrupting of values, pushing much of the modernized world towards invasive, exploitative authoritarianism within largely acquiescent populations.

In the United States, monopolizing in the private business domain is expropriating many of the country’s institutions in order to consolidate financial control and maximize profit. The most sobering factor in this contemporary capitalism is its intersection with media and democracy. Whatever suspect, probably self-defeating economic thrust is being made, media seems to be one of the main vehicles, with mechanisms of publicity often devoted to the purpose of producing an illusion that unifying mass movements are taking place, most likely deflecting attention of some demographics away from declines in wealth, security, freedom and quality of life. Democracy has largely been assimilated into this circus of hype, so that political discourse is becoming more civically incompetent, endless jabbering about manufactured scandals that have no connection with what is really going on in the world. Decadence of official information has become so dire that it is impossible to discern from traditional communications mediums such as news, T.V. shows, big budget internet websites and so on what exactly the status of the social system is. A network of independent publicity consisting in personal postings such as blogs, messaging and video is rapidly coalescing as a replacement for exploitatively compromised popular culture, but this format is extremely disorganized, so diverse that the overall course being set is almost incoherent, making it to this point only marginally capable of countering imperialistic finance.

Deterioration of the American value system, economic hardship hitting the majority increasingly hard, and rampant disinformation have worsened some long-standing institutional issues in the country. The justice system has always been liable to discriminate against the poor and especially minority ethnicities, with these demographics the most arrested, falsely convicted and harshly punished, while the financially well off have better legal representation and are more apt to obtain lenience. Health care is of exorbitant cost in the U.S., requiring similarly expensive insurance that usually must be paid for as a perk of employment at the top-tier companies, so-called “benefits”. This makes medical treatment prohibitive for a large proportion of the citizenry, ruling out preventative care that would mitigate incidence of many life-threatening illnesses commonly associated with aging, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The country is quite multicultural, and tensions between those of very different background can occur in many areas. These hot button issues have been inflamed by a less civic-minded lifestyle with accompanying disintegration towards “fend for yourself” and “take care of your own” social mores, exploding into greater divisiveness along class and racial lines, a subcultural isolationism which foments bullying, crime, hostility towards immigrants, political factionalism, smeared reputations, and prejudicial profiling along with stereotype-based accusations, all placing great strain on law and order as well as applying pressure to subvert or dismantle basic legal equality as the working standard for society’s progress.

If this is an accurate assessment, the species' prehistoric instinctuality is almost negligible to the fate of civilization, and our increasing, declining or lack of capacity to reason in mutualizing ways has become the core factor in moral incentive and agency, a situation that education might be able to deeply influence. We are considerate of those around us on a large scale when our intellects manage to convince us it is beneficial and motivate us, especially with regards to long-term decision making. Modern society is trending towards conditions within which collaborative progressiveness seems extremely unfavorable for our fitness in the short-term as we reason about culture, though this is catastrophically maladaptive for humanity's long-term prospects. The issue then is how we get human beings committed to cooperative reasoning. Relativism is a veneer of complacency, though it draws upon the truth in a disingenuous or misguided way.

Pfhorrest

"We agree with nature, it does happen to be morally good to survive — Kenosha Kid

Nature doesn’t say it’s morally good to survive. Nature just says things that kinds of things that survive more successfully tend to be the kind of things we continue to find around.

This is why I mean by ignoring the ought side. You say you’re denying it, but rather you’re just declining to answer a certain kind of question, instead giving an answer to a different question.

If someone asks whether something ought to happen, a statement to the effect that something does (or does not) happen gives no answer at all to that question. So to insist on discussing only matters of fact, and trying to twist all discussion of norms into discussion of facts, is simply to avoid answering any normative, moral questions at all, and so implicitly to avoid stating any opinion on morality at all, leaving one in effect a moral nihilist.

You’re clearly not actually a moral nihilist in practice, but if you got into a moral disagreement with someone, it sounds so far like you couldn’t give any reason why they should agree with you; you could only state the causal origins of your moral intuition and the probability that they share those intuitions given your shared heritage.

Scientism like yours responds to attempts to treat normative questions as completely separate from factual questions (as they are) by demanding absolute proof from the ground up that anything at all is objectively normative, or moral, and not just a factual claim in disguise or else baseless mere opinion. So you end up falling to justificationism (rejecting anything that can’t be proven from the ground up) about normative questions — and so denying that anything is actually moral, instead only talking above why we think things are moral — while failing to acknowledge that factual questions are equally vulnerable to that line of attack.

Someone could just as well demand an infinite chain of proofs that anything is real, and it would be just as impossible to prove it. But we accept that some things sure seem real or unreal and take that at face value and then try to sort out what seems real regardless of viewpoint and so is objectively (i.e. without bias) real. Why not likewise just accept that some things sure seem moral or immoral (as you do) and then take that at face value, act as though some things actually are moral or immoral and that that’s not just a baseless opinion that it was useful for our ancestors to have, and then try to sort out what seems moral regardless of viewpoints and so is objectively (i.e. without bias) moral?

Kenosha Kid

Nature doesn’t say it’s morally good to survive. — Pfhorrest

Allow me to clear up two ambiguities at once, then, "With utmost redundancy, we deduce that moral good is identical to that good for the survival of the group found in selected-for human social capacities."

How you could possibly have concluded from all I've said that I believe natural selection itself has moral goods, I will never know.

This is why I mean by ignoring the ought side. You say you’re denying it, but rather you’re just declining to answer a certain kind of question, instead giving an answer to a different question. — Pfhorrest

I can't give you the answer you want because your question, as with all such questions, is in my view based on false premises.

Consider sight. I look a tree, I see a tree. I look at the human genome and point a load of genes and say these are responsible for this bit of eye, that optical cable, these bits of the brain, etc. You're basically asking me where the picture of tree is. It's not there. The image of the tree is a consequence of the capacities of sight I have inherited via genes selected for because this way of seeing trees is better than my distant ancestor's for human survival.

In fact, it's worse because there's always been trees as long as there have been human eyes to see them. Our moral biology is for an extinct way of life. Not only are those moral "oughts" I derived not there in the genes or the selection history where you want me to point to them, they're not even here in the world anymore except as baffled relics in our own behavioural constitution.

you could only state the causal origins of your moral intuition and the probability that they share those intuitions given your shared heritage. — Pfhorrest

This misses the point that you clearly don't need to know any of this stuff to be a social person. Biology bypasses understanding and knowledge. A baby turtle does not have knowledge that it needs to head to the sea, it just does it. In the same way I don't need to cite the reasons why my ancestors had good cause to fear arachnids in order to assess the potential danger of a house spider, I don't need to work through the evolutionary history of my species to deduce that I ought to help a person in need. I just do it. Or not. Depending on the circumstances. Our bodies have this covered, as they do with so many things, without solely relying on rational input, and irregardless of our post hoc rationalisation. Much to the chagrin of rationalists, natch.

Scientism like yours responds to attempts to treat normative questions as completely separate from factual questions (as they are) by demanding absolute proof from the ground up that anything at all is objectively normative, or moral, and not just a factual claim in disguise or else baseless mere opinion. — Pfhorrest

I don't think anyone is expecting ground-up proof of normative questions any more than they're expecting proof that God wears a yellow hat. Your counter-argument here seems to be that to weigh up, say, whether we should be a welfare state or not be a welfare state, first we must question our social biology which in turn necessitates that we must refer to the human genome which in turn suggests we must figure out our evolutionary history. Is it your impression of science that when people want to determine the mating habits of African elephants they first solve the many-body Schrodinger equation for two elephants?

If people statistically want a welfare state, they'll probably get one eventually. That seems to be the trend. You don't need an ought for a welfare state. What you need is a population with empathy and altruism to, generation and after generation, press for a welfare state because enough of them want it individually and because conservativism against it cannot withstand indefinitely. Why do enough of them want it? Because they're altruistic and empathetic. Why are they altruistic and empathetic? Because nature made them that way for different reasons. There are powers to overcome that are not for shifting. They're the ones who need the "oughts". The altruists have numbers and genetics and time. They don't need "oughts". "Oughts" are for memes and, while memes of moral "oughts" can be appeals to our social biology, they're mostly attempts to turn us away from it. Sometimes both, leading to cognitive dissonance: "Thou shalt not kill! Now kill, kill, kill!"

Why not likewise just accept that some things sure seem moral or immoral (as you do) and then take that at face value, act as though some things actually are moral or immoral and that that’s not just a baseless opinion that it was useful for our ancestors to have, and then try to sort out what seems moral regardless of viewpoints and so is objectively (i.e. without bias) moral? — Pfhorrest

Sounds beautiful! In principle, anyway. If there was an effective means of establishing what seems moral to the time-averaged altruistic majority as moral ab initio, then the world that had these lets-pretend morals would probably be a nicer place to live in. But I think that a world in which the time-averaged altruistic majority had this sort of influence wouldn't need those moral truths any more that baby turtles need to know to head to the sea.

Unfortunately, the danger of accepting objective moral truths is precisely that they're not honed by statistical trends of natural behaviour. There's quite a lot of killing that goes into making laws, and religions, and other ideologies because the ideas themselves don't really present any merit to the majority. However when you've frightened enough people, killed enough, tortured enough, bribed enough, incarcerated enough, you can convince people to brainwash their own children into believing in objective moral truths and, no surprise, they're not very human ones, because anyone who frightens enough people, kills enough, tortures enough, bribes enough, incarcerates enough, is an absolute psychopath.

Mww

I think you may have a different definition of ulrasocial going on. I meant it in the typical neuroscientific sense of ultracooperative social groups.... — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, looks like. I don’t know anything about neuroscience or ultracooperative social groups, so to me, ultrasocial is just somewhat more social than social. Doesn’t matter; they’re all still just a bunch of individuals.
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If you are saying that natural capacities for empathy and altruism have nothing to do with morality, I would have to disagree strongly. If you are disputing that these natural capacities are identical with any metaphysical idea of morality, yes, hopefully, because I believe one is real and one is not. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. I don’t see any reason to include heritable traits in the metaphysical idea of morality. But the metaphysical idea of morality is just that, an idea, hence will never be real in the sense of morality in which heritable traits serve as the criteria for personal or social conduct.

An idea is nonetheless real in the sense of its thought. And it is obvious everybody, without exception, thinks, regardless of their social status, even to the extent they don’t have any, therefore it would seem much more opportune to consider the rational aspect of conduct over its existential or natural aspect.
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But our moral apparatus is as unaware of its origin as our ancestors were. It is not a consequentialist philosophy of human beings. It is biology as a consequence of natural selection. Is that what you mean? — Kenosha Kid

That we are moral beings may be a consequence of natural selection, insofar as evolution granted us the apparatus sufficient to enable the kind of being we are to become morally inclined. So yes, our moral apparatus is unaware of its origin. So what, I ask. We are concerned with being moral, not with where moral being came from, which grants that our moral apparatus is not a consequentialist philosophy.

If I’m still with you, it appears you’re claiming our moral apparatus is the same, or given from, our heritable traits, such that

It is biology as a consequence of natural selection. — Kenosha Kid

Even if that is the case, it remains how that biology, that moral apparatus, is used by the individual subject in possession of them, in order to satisfy the criteria that describes what it means for him to be moral. Again, that it is used is given, because that we are moral beings is given, but we want to know how. We want to know whether our morality can be controlled, and how much, if at all. Mostly, we want to know why we feel we’re better people than those other guys. That we are altruistic and empathetic and whatnot is because science felt the need to inform us of stuff we already knew without calling it by name.
————-

On rationality:

someone does something, therefore they must have worked out that that was the best thing to do using their reason alone and, if it was the wrong thing, they made a rational error. In reality, if your ancestor had attempted this in the face of an oncoming sabre-tooth tiger, you almost certainly wouldn't have been born — Kenosha Kid

Now we’re gettin’ downright serious. That is a little bit categorical error and a whole lotta misplaced concreteness. I’m here, therefore he didn’t get killed by the cat, but he did die.

But none of that is sufficient to prove that he couldn’t possibly have rationalized the danger. It is every bit as likely he did, therefore I’m here. The human thought process is, after all, virtually instantaneous. Not like he had to ask the cat to wait a minute.

Rationalism trap. As in, trapped by rationalism? Being trapped by that which is impossible to escape, seems like a mischaracterization of terms, doesn’t it?

You’re doing an outstanding job of trying to defeat metaphysics with scientific principles. Thing is, the only way to defeat a metaphysical position, is with a better one.

Kenosha Kid

There is some primordial division of labor, as a shaman may fabricate implements of spiritual significance and provide guidance in exchange for food supplies, a chief may also have his needs met by the rest of the group as a perk of leadership, but most households are engaging in almost the exact same essential behaviors, supporting their families by nearly identical means, and can usually function on their own just as well as in commerce with the collective barring competition with rival tribes and warring. — Enrique

Yes, and there is evidence for similar biological inheritance of social strata for the sizes of groups you seem to mean which were presumably also selected for on the basis of group benefit which might go a long way to explain the long-term persistence of desires for caste systems and make it even more difficult to derive a set of moral truths from our nature.

Citizens also often consider cultural traditions sacred in some sense, with human minds in antiquity all the way up to the present day seeing a connection between viability of social structures and the will of deities or their declared representatives, so that fear of divine wrath or belief in spiritual mandate lead to consent for all but the most egregious, sacrilegious, immoral or traitorous oppressions. Thus, though no one likes to be herded around by pugnacious authority, individuals are usually agreeable to suppressing some level of disgruntlement in order to ward off potential for utter catastrophe. — Enrique

Not necessarily in the generation that spawned those superstitions. I find memetics has tremendous explanatory power in this area. One of the interesting characteristics of superstitious practise is that it tends either to the pleading or the hysterical. One can rationalise this as apt for what the practice's aims are, but one can also see this as an origin: you've got one person among many who are desperate for rain go mental and it rains. That guy is going places. "Geoff, do the crazy stick-shaking thing again, that'll work!"

At the other end you've got dogma: claims to truth with no basis in fact that parents convince their children they must observe if they want the rains to come. In between, it's likely much as you say, with those too disgruntled making obvious scapegoats when the rains don't come (just like every natural calamity is the fault if the gays in the US), pushing further toward a reigning meme.

Materially, particular citizens matter less to sustenance of the community as a whole — Enrique

Sounds familiar.

As economic advantage amongst the home territories and countries of Europe’s empires came to be seen as reliant on a populace optimally mobilized for technical competence, civic-minded humanism gained more traction with intellectuals. — Enrique

I think this is kind of where @Pfhorrest is coming from. Given that we aren't in an environment in which our natural altruism has dictated some moral order, would it not be efficacious to base a competing, better set of morals from our more social inclinations? And to the extent that it is, we obviously have done this without knowing anything of why we think altruism and empathy are good, but with plenty of rationalisation about it.

I remain to be convinced that moral philosophy is as useful as it seems. The political among a disillusioned group will rally people around ideas, perhaps to overcome their existing social mores. But I suspect that, say, in the build-up to the French revolution, a country of starving people ruled by a nobility enjoying excess had more to do the implementation of democracy than the philosophy itself.

If this is an accurate assessment, the species' prehistoric instinctuality is almost negligible to the fate of civilization, and increasing, declining or lack of capacity to reason in mutualizing ways has become the core factor in moral incentive and agency, a situation that education might be able to deeply influence. — Enrique

Yes, this is gloomy. I'm more optimistic. I mean, I know you lost most of Obamacare, but you *had* Obamacare in a country in which corrupt politicians and media had your people brainwashing kids on their behalf that helping people was communist and communism is evil. That's a hell of an achievement! And things like this keep happening which suggests to me that our natural instincts for altruism and empathy, in part via whatever philosophies they inspire that counter regressive philosophies I grant you, might actually make all the difference to the trend. We've abolished all but civil war in Europe, given up overt colonialism, abolished slavery, mostly abolished the death penalty, promoted rights for people who, in your more enlightened times, had none or few, and damn it man we got McDonald's selling salads. They might seem trivial now we have them, but altruism and empathy (and salads) persist against all the regressive, antisocial memes that those with power can muster.

So I think what is more likely is that the competition between regressive ideas that make virtues of our presocial instincts and the progressive ones that favour our social instincts will continue, with battles fought and won on both sides, but with a long-term tendency for the former to cede ground to the latter. Today's racists are not slapping men in the street and calling them 'boy'. It's a better place for the inclusive altruist to be working from.

Pfhorrest

With utmost redundancy, we deduce that moral good is identical to that good for the survival of the group found in selected-for human social capacities — Kenosha Kid

How do you deduce this? This is precisely the is-ought problem. You have social capacities that are "good for" (contribute to) the survival of human groups, and an explanation for why humans today have those traits (they are the traits that our ancestors had, who became out ancestors because they survived, thanks to having those traits).

But still, someone asks "What ought we do?" and your answer is "We are inclined to do these things." If they ask "Yes, we are inclined that way, but is that right?" and you say "It's what helped our ancestors survive", you're still dodging the question. Saying something "is" in response to a question of what "ought" is a non-answer, unless you and the audience already agree on some "ought". You give an account on why we probably do agree on some "oughts", but that account isn't itself any answer to an "ought" question; you could just as validly point out simply that we already agree on an "ought", with no explanation needed, and then proceed from there. The evolutionary cause of our agreement isn't relevant; just the agreement itself is sufficient.

It's like if I ask what flavor of ice cream I should buy, and you tell me "chocolate is popular". Okay? Does that mean I should buy chocolate? Or that I shouldn't buy chocolate? Is popularity a good thing or a bad thing? In this case, the question is a stupid one to begin with, because the person asking the question has way more information about what flavor of chocolate would best please them than anyone else, and the question is probably rhetorical anyway. But that aside, telling them a fact about people's ice cream preferences is irrelevant, unless they already are of the opinion that they ought or ought not follow the crowds. You could tell them some evolutionary fact about why people evolved to crave certain flavors, but still that's not going to help them answer their question.

Consider sight. I look a tree, I see a tree. I look at the human genome and point a load of genes and say these are responsible for this bit of eye, that optical cable, these bits of the brain, etc. You're basically asking me where the picture of tree is. It's not there. The image of the tree is a consequence of the capacities of sight I have inherited via genes selected for because this way of seeing trees is better than my distant ancestor's for human survival. — Kenosha Kid

That's a poor analogy, because you're still entirely within the domain of "is".

A better analogy would be to flip the is-ought divide around the other way. You ask someone a scientific question about how the world is. They reply by telling you about different cultures beliefs on that topic and how it influences their way of life. You ask which if any of those cultures is actually correct about the question of fact you're asking. They tell you a story of how these cultures came to hold those views, because of the way that holding those views influenced their political or moral or other cultural development. You ask again, What is the truth of this matter?, but all they will tell you is why different people think it's good to believe this or that is the truth. Because they're a social constructivist, who believes that all of reality is a social construct, nothing is actually true or false, there's just different beliefs that are held in different cultures because believing this way or that is important to them for this or that normative reason.

That's really frustrating, isn't it? Someone who won't give you a straight answer to your "is" question, and instead will only tell you why people think you ought to believe this or that answer to it.

I just do it. Or not. Depending on the circumstances. Our bodies have this covered, as they do with so many things, without solely relying on rational input, and irregardless of our post hoc rationalisation. — Kenosha Kid

For the most part this is also true of descriptive beliefs about factual matters. We just observe what we observe in our lives and our brains just intuit what's real and what isn't. And yet there have been huge disagreements about the nature of reality across history, and we eventually developed a method of paying really close methodical attention to the experiences that inform those evolved intuitions in order to settle those disagreements, and in doing so developed a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of what is or isn't real than our ancestors had done with hundreds of thousands of years of using the same exact brains with the same exact intuitions and getting by well enough to at least survive on that alone.

I am not saying that we have to do a bunch of heavy thinking about morality every time we make any decision, any more than we need to do controlled experiments to perceive distances from other vehicles on the road: we can just see where things are with our evolved intuitions, on that scale at least. I'm only suggesting that by paying really close methodical attention to the experiences that inform our moral intuitions, we can make progress settling the huge disagreements that those intuitions have failed to settle, and in doing so develop a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of what is or isn't moral than our ancestors did with hundreds of thousands of years of using the same exact brains with the same exact intuitions and getting by well enough to at least survive on that alone.

Your counter-argument here seems to be that to weigh up, say, whether we should be a welfare state or not be a welfare state, first we must question our social biology which in turn necessitates that we must refer to the human genome which in turn suggests we must figure out our evolutionary history — Kenosha Kid

No, I don't want to bring up social biology or genes or evolutionary history at all. You're the one bringing that up as though it justified any "ought" claims. It explains why people intuitively have the "ought" opinions that they tend to have, sure, but explaining the cause of having an intuition isn't justifying content of that intuition.

Kenosha Kid

Yeah, looks like. I don’t know anything about neuroscience or ultracooperative social groups, so to me, ultrasocial is just somewhat more social than social. Doesn’t matter; they’re all still just a bunch of individuals. — Mww

Oh okay, well maybe not. To the extent that I can't really differentiate, in my ignorance, between human physiology and sheep physiology, and to the extent that antisocial behaviour is just antisocial, not anti-ultrasocial, behaviour, you're quite right. But with the caveat that statements I make about human biology don't necessarily extend to non-humans.

I don’t see any reason to include heritable traits in the metaphysical idea of morality. — Mww

Oh, of course! If metaphysics factored that sort of thing in, it would cease to be metaphysics.

But the metaphysical idea of morality is just that, an idea, hence will never be real in the sense of morality in which heritable traits serve as the criteria for personal or social conduct. — Mww

No need to tell me. My argument is not against moral ideas, but moral ideas with claims to a priori knowledge or an objective right-wrong moral world. If moral philosophy is an artefact of having moral biology evolved in one environment give ambiguous or unfeasible drives in our current environment, there is good reason for moral questions. However those don't have to be based on fantasies, thanks to our scientific understanding.

We are concerned with being moral, not with where moral being came from, which grants that our moral apparatus is not a consequentialist philosophy.
...
Again, that it is used is given, because that we are moral beings is given, but we want to know how. — Mww

And that's the Catch-22. In small groups, our morality would give right/wrong answers to moral questions that need not be asked because the answers are not rational answers but physiological and neurological responses. In the world-of-strangers, those answers are not well-defined, so we rely on instead on rationality to try and figure out the answers. And we fail, because morality is not rational, and because the only moral answers we have pertain to a world we do not live in.

And this is why, in my view, the correct approach is the existential, relativist, pluralist approach. We can derive moral limits on the basis that that there are still things inconsistent with our moral instincts. We cannot dispense with the notion of morality because we are driven toward it. Morality is based on good-for-the-group altruism and empathy, so anything that jettisons those for reliance on pre-social drives is ipso facto immoral and subhuman. Otherwise we cannot define a moral answer to a question about strangers or a world with effectively limitless harm and limitless need. Any philosophical question about what we should actively do to limit harm and satisfy need in a given situation is faulty in its foundation.

But none of that is sufficient to prove that he couldn’t possibly have rationalized the danger. It is every bit as likely he did, therefore I’m here. The human thought process is, after all, virtually instantaneous. — Mww

Is the metaphysics apologist demanding proof?!? ;) It is well understood that rational thinking is slower than pattern-recognition and instinct. It is far from instantaneous.* Since we have a flight instinct, it follows that a lot of our ancestors' cousins died for lack of one.

Rationalism trap. As in, trapped by rationalism? Being trapped by that which is impossible to escape, seems like a mischaracterization of terms, doesn’t it? — Mww

It is not only true that not all human responses are rational, it also seems to me to be true that the rational mind takes credit for a lot of stuff it doesn't do.*

You’re doing an outstanding job of trying to defeat metaphysics with scientific principles. Thing is, the only way to defeat a metaphysical position, is with a better one. — Mww

Many thanks! *bows* But I think another way to defeat a metaphysical position is to make it redundant. Historically, that seems to be the case.

* Again, I thoroughly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow. It goes into all this stuff in a lot more detail and with compelling tests for you to do yourself. Psychology has made a lot of ground in understanding how the mind works.

Kenosha Kid

How do you deduce this? — Pfhorrest

With utmost redundancy, that's the point. As for how you can deduce it from first principles without reference to urgh-sticky-irrational biology, you don't, that's the other point. In reality, moral philosophies have principles based on biological phenomena, while pretending to be based on something else. Metaphysicians are extremely sympathetic to themselves. They want a God? They can prove He exists. It won't be a great proof, but it suffices for them.

The OP is the nearest I can get: since our morality derives from social biology, any truly moral philosophy has to be based on altruism and empathy. Any philosophy not based on empathy and altruism is not social, and therefore not moral. But that cannot define an exhaustive set of oughts, rather a smaller set of ought-nots if one wishes to be social at all, nor can they be seen as imperatives (due to feasibility).

But still, someone asks "What ought we do?" and your answer is "We are inclined to do these things." If they ask "Yes, we are inclined that way, but is that right?" and you say "It's what helped our ancestors survive", you're still dodging the question. — Pfhorrest

It is a matter of the questioner's belief that there must be an ought. If the believer cannot get their heads around the fact that there isn't one, that's their intellectual limitation. If the questioner maintains that a false positive answer to their answer-less question based on false belief or lies is better than an honest non-answer, then they are merely insisting on an echo chamber around their dodgy belief system.

The OP is not a schema for deriving moral imperatives. It's a description of why such questions arise but have no well-defined answers, with a recommendation to proceed accordingly. Complaining that it doesn't give you instructions on how to behave is to completely miss the point. Nature is not obliged to implement anyone's metaphysics.

It's like if I ask what flavor of ice cream I should buy
...
But that aside, telling them a fact about people's ice cream preferences is irrelevant, unless they already are of the opinion that they ought or ought not follow the crowds. You could tell them some evolutionary fact about why people evolved to crave certain flavors, but still that's not going to help them answer their question. — Pfhorrest

As you pointed out, it's a inapplicable analogy. If your argument depends on it, it can be dismissed on those grounds. If there is something to salvage, then perhaps make the effort to provide a better analogy.

However I will set fire to the straw man: at no point have I suggested that that which is popular becomes the answer to a moral question. I have described how outcomes can arise from statistical moral inclinations, such as trends over time toward altruism and empathy, but that is purely descriptive precisely because it does not depend on outright moral truths to exist in order to occur. And that's another salient point. In our natural environment, we did not need to ask or answer these ought questions. Our moral biology took care of that for us, and is still in effect now, giving us the moral conundrums -- the quest for oughts -- that we now have. Where that moral inclination comes from is not popular opinion, although that can act to reprioritise a perspective. Where it comes from is genetics. Everything else is rationalisation and propaganda.

That's really frustrating, isn't it? Someone who won't give you a straight answer to your "is" question, and instead will only tell you why people think you ought to believe this or that answer to it. — Pfhorrest

I can't stop you re-characterising my position, in which normative questions do not generally have well-defined answers and are themselves products of erroneous thinking, as mere question-dodging or being a frustrating jerk for the sake of defending a position, simply on the basis that you feel you need answers to normative questions anyway. If that seems a valid approach to you, then fill your boots of course. It will severely constrain the bandwidth of intelligent debate, though.

That's a poor analogy, because you're still entirely within the domain of "is". — Pfhorrest

As are you. You are not asking "ought" questions but "is" questions about "oughts". At this stage in your argument, any ought is better than no ought. But nature, which provided you with your moral capacities, did not provide you with any.

I'm only suggesting that by paying really close methodical attention to the experiences that inform our moral intuitions — Pfhorrest

I agree that experience is important, precisely because of the large degree of freedom that we have in prioritising selfish and selfless drives, because that experience is obviously so crucial to developing our moral capacities, and because our experience tells us that moral positions are abundant. While our biology is a given, a) it doesn't follow that we stand by our actions, and b) it doesn't follow that the net behavioural response on an individual in a given circumstance is determined by genetics alone, even if the difference is itself a genetic trait. I said as much in the OP:

We also have a genetic amenability toward socialisation, mediated by oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and seratonin. Socialisation is important because most of the above are capacities rather than drives we are born with. To that extent, an immediate empathetic response to an individual in distress is not fully natural but learned via natural capacities for empathy, altruism, and socialisation together. — Kenosha Kid

If your point is that any fundamental element of our individual morality must be informed by experience, then that's just another unjustifiable metaphysical belief which I will reject on the grounds of it being inconsistent with scientific evidence. If you're merely asserting that our morality as a whole is impacted by experience, then you're not contradicting my view, but nor are you showing how my experience that leads to my moral frame of reference is less justified than yours.

[EDIT: Missed a bit]

No, I don't want to bring up social biology or genes or evolutionary history at all. — Pfhorrest

Sounds familiar. "How does the idea of a 6000 year old Earth explain the geological records?" "Oh, I don't want to bring up geology."

You're posting on a thread about naturally selected social biology. It's gonna come up. If you're just feeling obliged because I mentioned you in the OP, honestly it's fine. It's nice that you came, but I didn't aim to piss you off with a subject you don't want to talk about, and it's fine to pass.

You're the one bringing that up as though it justified any "ought" claims. — Pfhorrest

Quite the opposite of what I said. And you've given me reason to believe that you understand this.

Mww

Is the metaphysics apologist demanding proof?!? — Kenosha Kid

Nahhh....any metaphysician worth a decent pointy hat knows better, but still stands his ground when, for instance, the existential dogmatist offers unreliable suppositions relative to ancestral behavior.
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My argument is not against moral ideas, but moral ideas with claims to a priori knowledge or an objective right-wrong moral world. — Kenosha Kid

Agreed on a right-wrong moral world. There is only a world in which right or wrong manifest, and manifest not because of the world as causality, but only because of it as possibility.

Ideas are predicated on a priori conceptions, that is, that for which there is no real object of sense. If the conception is thought, it is immediately known to the subject that thinks it. Thus, all moral ideas involve a priori knowledge, not of moral things, which are the possible manifestations of the moral ideas, but of conceptions which validate the moral idea.

Altruism and empathy are no less ideas than morality, for there is no object which belongs to any of them, but only phenomenal manifestations derivable from them for which they can be said to be the causality. That is to say, there is no object in the world to which these can be a property.

(Keeping in mind the condition for, is not the same as a property of. The rational being is an object in the world, but absent certain conditions, it remains an object, but absence certain properties, it does not so remain)

None of these have claims to a priori knowledge, but none of them would exist as valid conceptions if not understood by the subject that thinks them, which he can never do except by cognizing them a priori, and then only as logical inference given from phenomenal exhibition.

It’s good that you’re not against moral ideas. And as altruism and empathy are every bit as metaphysical, as mere conceptions, as morality, I’m baffled as to the rejection of metaphysical explanations for any of them. It is completely irrelevant that each is a social instinct, trait or drive as evolutionary consequence, they are nonetheless purely a priori conceptions, which demands they be treated by metaphysical constructions. One shouldn’t mistake the foot for the boot.
—————

In small groups, our morality would give right/wrong answers to moral questions that need not be asked because the answers are not rational answers but physiological and neurological responses. — Kenosha Kid

It must be the case that all responses for anything are predicated on physiological and neurological grounds. We are brain-bound, right? So putting that aside, and while it is true small groups won’t have the same ethical questions as large groups, it is nevertheless inconsistent with the idea of moral dispositions to restrict its questions to the size of the group from which the questions arise. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the possible situation whereby an agent, say wandering aimlessly, not a member of a community thus having no moral determinations with respect to it, subsequently finds himself in contact with a community. Now we must consider the parsimony as to whether he initiated a sense of morality merely from contact, or whether he was already a moral agent before the contact. I reject he became moral for no other reason than he has opportunity for it, as opposed to possessing the intrinsic capacity whether he displays it or not. If the latter, the size of the group becomes immediately irrelevant, from which it follows necessarily that all moral answers are rational, because if he is already a moral agent he must be capable of rational moral answers whether or not the occassion arises.
—————

Morality is based on good-for-the-group altruism and empathy, so anything that jettisons those for reliance on pre-social drives is ipso facto immoral and subhuman. — Kenosha Kid

I don’t accept the major in that proposition, insofar as morality is to be considered a personal human condition, therefore morality is based on the good of the individual. I would accept that which is based on the benefit for the community be named ethical jurisprudence, which is the compendium of moral subjects included as members. The reason for this, is in the consequences. The consequences of violations within a group being physical manifestations of some kind, but the consequences of violations within the individual are subjective manifestations alone, in the form of feelings. Being illegal is not necessarily being immoral, but being unethical is always immoral.
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It is not only true that not all human responses are rational, it also seems to me to be true that the rational mind takes credit for a lot of stuff it doesn't do — Kenosha Kid

True, not all human responses are rational, but even irrational responses are derived from reason. Just poorly. Irrational responses, or, which is the same thing, irrational judgements, are nothing but a case of the understanding mistaking the conceptions in its synthesis. (Have fun with that one!!)

I submit, Good Sir, the rational mind, better known as reason, does everything; it just doesn’t always do it well.

Point/counterpoint. May the games continue.......

Kenosha Kid

unreliable suppositions relative to ancestral behavior. — Mww

Flight/fight behaviours aren't exactly a grey area; they're well studied. Humans and chimpanzees are particularly wired for it. The comparative slowness of rational thinking is also pretty well established, and that it accounts for a small percentage of human decision-making. So when you suggest that your ancestor had no such response and instead thought her way out of the sabre-tooth tiger situation rationally, I'm inclined to believe that that's where the unreliable supposition is happening.

Altruism and empathy are no less ideas than morality, for there is no object which belongs to any of them, but only phenomenal manifestations derivable from them for which they can be said to be the causality. That is to say, there is no object in the world to which these can be a property. — Mww

Abstracted away from the individual, sure. But that's not what the OP is talking about. The physio/neurological systems that underpin the empathetic and altruistic responses of an individual are built for that individual alone from genes it inherited. Those things aren't in the wild and abstract: they belong to that individual. The statistical conformity between social biological systems is in part due to their heritability, in part due to natural selection, which tends to whittle variance down. So my empathy and altruism are strictly mine, albeit copies of ancestors common to us both.

It’s good that you’re not against moral ideas. And as altruism and empathy are every bit as metaphysical, as mere conceptions, as morality, I’m baffled as to the rejection of metaphysical explanations for any of them. — Mww

Because it puts the cart before the horse. Metaphysics rationalises natural human responses post hoc, then claims a discovery, because it is inclined to ascribe to rationalism everything it cannot understand. It is at best a redundancy. I understand more about morality from cognitive psychology, neurology, physiology, and evolutionary biology and psychology than I can get from any strokey-beard blighter trying to find a way to derive "do not harm others to benefit yourself". Nature derived that hundreds of thousands of years ago without a brain, and gifted it to us without a clue.

The other issue I have is that, since no metaphysical theory of morality is actually rationally justified (which, at least, it has in common with natural morality) but relies instead on claims to magical knowledge and disingenuous linguistic contortions, none is rationally justified more than any other. The worry is that antisocial propaganda is not obviously worse than truly moral philosophy on metaphysical grounds. If you can convince someone that metaphysics is worth a damn, you might convince someone that bad metaphysics is worth a damn, that gays are evil, for instance, or that you will have to spend an eternity without your unbaptised child, or that black lives don't matter as much as white ones.

While history has put social altruism on bad enough footing, it has at least kept us as altruists. Metaphysics puts altruism on an even weaker footing by making it contingent on non-existent truths ("because God said so") or comprised of metaphysically unjustifiable ones ("altruism is good in itself") to which some other, more antisocial strokey-beard blighter can say "actually it's not, prove me wrong". At least knowing that altruism is part of what makes us human, that it is an unavoidable part of us selected to help us, alleviates justification, for you need not justify what you are, only the beliefs you hold.

It must be the case that all responses for anything are predicated on physiological and neurological grounds. We are brain-bound, right? — Mww

We have a central nervous system, yes. We are not rationalism-bound though. Reason is hugely overcredited. But I don't mean it to be taken that rational thought is not part of the decision-making process. We have a rational mental system precisely for figuring out things like "How can I help this hungry person when all I have is this bre- oh!" But all of the build-up to that need not be conscious at all, and indeed most of it won't be. We do not rationally learn to invoke cognitive empathetic responses; we do learn by experience, but the mental process for associating empathetic responses to certain patterns is not conscious. At least, I have no memory of how I did it, and haven't met anyone who has. ;)

So putting that aside, and while it is true small groups won’t have the same ethical questions as large groups, it is nevertheless inconsistent with the idea of moral dispositions to restrict its questions to the size of the group from which the questions arise. — Mww

Ahh no, sorry, I was obviously unclear. I'm not saying that smaller groups pose different challenges and therefore different moral questions. I'm saying that small groups, for which our social responses were evolved, bypass the need for moral questions altogether. Smaller groups were what our social responses were adapted for. The responses must therefore be sufficient, otherwise nature could not have selected for them. That is distinct from now where our social responses, inclined toward outcomes of reciprocal altruism with relatives and neighbours, no longer determine the moral course of action. Yet we still respond to empathetic stimuli in the same way. Our social biology is for small groups, and did not alter for large ones.

I don’t accept the major in that proposition, insofar as morality is to be considered a personal human condition, therefore morality is based on the good of the individual. — Mww

Good-for-the-group was good-for-the-individual at the time we evolved altruism and empathy. Individuals in cooperative groups had greater chances of survival (covered a bit in the OP). The difference is that it didn't depend on a human ever figuring out that good-for-the-group was good-for-me (which is fortunate given the state of politics after hundreds of thousands of years of progress); those disinclined to good-for-the-group -- antisocial elements -- could not compete for resources with cooperative animals that shared them.

Being illegal is not necessarily being immoral, but being unethical is always immoral. — Mww

Agreed. In the same way that not observing the sabbath is not necessarily immoral, or not claiming that your country/race/class is better than others is not necessarily immoral. These are moral frames of references. It would be immoral for a police officer who fines people for speeding to himself speed on his day off (hypocrisy). It would be immoral for a Rabbi who preaches the shabbat to put in a few extra hours one Saturday (hypocrisy). But it is always immoral to stab a child in the back, that is, there is no frame of reference in which this could not be hypocritical.

True, not all human responses are rational, but even irrational responses are derived from reason. — Mww

This is meant merely as a statement of a belief, I assume, not of fact. My understanding of the psychologist's current thinking is that reason comprises about 2% of human decision-making. Rationalism, as far as I can make out, is claiming the other 98% is also rational, then trying to figure out how. Just found this:

Modern cognitive science and neuroscience show that studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings, for example, an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference. — Wiki

No citation given :( but sounds about right.

Pfhorrest

However I will set fire to the straw man: at no point have I suggested that that which is popular becomes the answer to a moral question — Kenosha Kid

I never meant to suggest you did. The “chocolate is popular” hypothetical response was just another example of giving an “is” answer to an “ought” question.

you feel you need answers to normative questions anyway — Kenosha Kid

Everyone who ever has to make a reasoned decision about what action to take needs an answer to a normative question, because that’s exactly what normative questions are about. The only beings who never need to ask normative questions are those that act entirely in a straightforward stimulus-response way, with no reflective, contemplative function mediating the relationship between their experiences and their behaviors. Are you suggesting humans are like that? That we just do whatever we’re going to do and there’s no thinking about it to be done? I didn’t think you were suggesting that, and if you’re not then you are already admitting that normative questions matter, likely just misconstruing them as something more than they are. (The repeated references to metaphysics, the comparison to questions about God, and the talk of whether there “is” an ought, all suggest that you think normative questions are questions about some nonphysical moral entities, when they’re not at all; they’re just a different kind of question about the same ordinary stuff).

You are not asking "ought" questions but "is" questions about "oughts". — Kenosha Kid

Nope. See above.

But nature, which provided you with your moral capacities, did not provide you with any. — Kenosha Kid

It did, precisely as much as it provided me with some elementary “is” answers. My ideas of what is come from my empirical experiences: my first notion of reality is of the stuff that I can see rather than what I can’t, and every later notion of what is real is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. Likewise, my ideas of what ought to be come from my hedonic experiences: my first notion of morality is of stuff that feels pleasant rather than painful, and every later notion of what is moral is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it.

One of my philosophical principles is basically just to not reach beyond mere refinement of those nature-given intuitions. Don’t start invoking the will of god or spiritual purity or things like that. I think we broadly agree in that respect. But another principle of mine is to proceed on the assumption that with enough effort and care we can establish an arbitrarily-much unbiased refinement like that. You seem to think that the latter means a negation of the former, and I think that that’s just a result of you reading unwarranted baggage into the terminology used to state the latter.

Sounds familiar. "How does the idea of a 6000 year old Earth explain the geological records?" "Oh, I don't want to bring up geology."

You're posting on a thread about naturally selected social biology. It's gonna come up. If you're just feeling obliged because I mentioned you in the OP, honestly it's fine. It's nice that you came, but I didn't aim to piss you off with a subject you don't want to talk about, and it's fine to pass. — Kenosha Kid

I didn’t say I don’t want to talk about that, I said that I’m not the one bringing it up, in response to you suggesting that I think we need to dig into all of that in order to answer a much more superficial moral question. You said:

Your counter-argument here seems to be that to weigh up, say, whether we should be a welfare state or not be a welfare state, first we must question our social biology which in turn necessitates that we must refer to the human genome which in turn suggests we must figure out our evolutionary history — Kenosha Kid

And I’m saying no, I’m not arguing that we have to do that. You brought those things up, not me. I don’t think they have any bearing on whether we SHOULD be a welfare state or not; and you seem to be saying they don’t either, because you’re saying “should” questions can’t be answered, it seems. You give an explanation on account of all that biology of why we might (or might not?) tend to be inclined to be a welfare state, and I’m not contesting any of that. Just pointing out that it doesn’t answer the “should” question.

I’m not pissed off BTW, and I’m not here because you mentioned me in the OP, but because of a comment about the is-ought divide later in the comments. My angle here isn’t that anything you wrote in the OP about biology is wrong at all, but just that that is all an answer to an “is” question, which doesn’t answer any “ought” questions at all.

Mww

↪Kenosha Kid

I read the book; it’s at academia dot com from a bing title search. I dumped my write-up commenting on it, being wrong on one count and superfluous on the next.

Thanks for the referral anyway.

Mww

"do not harm others to benefit yourself". Nature derived that hundreds of thousands of years ago without a brain, and gifted it to us without a clue. — Kenosha Kid

Metaphorically speaking, I understand; Nature doesn’t derive and Nature doesn’t have a brain. It is true Nature gifted us, but just like getting a gift for Christmas, it stands perfectly well as gift, but is completely useless unless unwrapped.
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So my empathy and altruism are strictly mine, albeit copies of ancestors common to us both. — Kenosha Kid

As my reason is mine. We all have a variation of each of them.
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Metaphysics rationalises natural human responses post hoc, then claims a discovery — Kenosha Kid

Post hoc, yes, because experience is always the ground. Metaphysics doesn’t claim a discovery, as much as posit an explanatory methodology for that experience. Metaphysics doesn’t permit knowledge of future moral actions, but only what future moral actions should be, and then only if one remains aligned with his subjective values.

We do moral things without the need to ask why, but if we do ask, we can only ask ourselves and only ourselves can answer. I grant the intrinsic circularity, always have. Like I said....blame Mother Nature. And if we do ask, is never our altruism or empathy receiving the query; we can ever only ask our reason.
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I'm saying that small groups, for which our social responses were evolved, bypass the need for moral questions altogether. Smaller groups were what our social responses were adapted for. (...) That is distinct from now where our social responses, inclined toward outcomes of reciprocal altruism with relatives and neighbours, no longer determine the moral course of action. — Kenosha Kid

If altruism and empathy were naturally selected predicated on small groups, but we no longer inhabit small groups specifically, did altruism and empathy evolve in keeping with the evolution of group size?Just be becoming reciprocal? And if we evolved from small groups in which moral questions were bypassed, what made moral questions become relevant? Just because of the group size? Seems to me if moral questions become relevant for some reason, either the members of the group became moral agents for the same reason, or they were already moral agents-in-waiting. I reject that an individual suddenly becomes moral just because he inhabits something more than a small group. How small is small? Is a hundred people a mall group? There never were 8M people in a large group until relatively recently, so.....seems altogether arbitrary to me.
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there is no frame of reference in which this could not be hypocritical. — Kenosha Kid

Your hypocrisy is my immorality. No matter its name, it is that which goes against the good. My immorality’s frame of reference is lawful obligation, herein the violation of it, and is a subjective condition. What is the frame of reference that is not violated by hypocrisy?
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True, not all human responses are rational, but even irrational responses are derived from reason.
— Mww

This is meant merely as a statement of a belief, I assume, not of fact. My understanding of the psychologist's current thinking is that reason comprises about 2% of human decision-making. — Kenosha Kid

It is neither. I don’t do belief, but rather cognize relative certainty, and, it isn’t a fact any more than the concept of reason is a fact. Something undeniable goes on in our head all the while we’re awake and aware; we call it reason just to call it something. It is a fact something is happening; it is not a fact it is reason that’s happening.

Conscious decision making is judgement, in which things are related to each other and a conclusion is drawn. Judgement is a facet of reason, and we make judgements every time things relate to each other. Daniel’s S1 and S2 working together, so to speak.

No autonomic system decisions are judgements, hence are not facets of reason, which means that of the total of all possible decisions a human could be said to make, conscious or autonomic, not all of them come from reason. Call it 2% if you like, but all I would say about it is the percentage is determined by the time we are awake and aware. We must be awake and aware to make irrational judgements, which means they are facets of reason.

Rationalism, as far as I can make out, is claiming the other 98% is also rational, then trying to figure out how. — Kenosha Kid

All human thought is by means of reason, hence is rational. Reason influenced by the sensibility is a posteriori, reason without any influence from sensibility at all, is a priori. And yes, then cognitive metaphysics tries to figure out how, in exactly the same way as we try to figure out how to change a flat tire.

180 Proof

The eudaimonists are still concerned with "oughts" though. — Kenosha Kid

In the exact same sense which surgeons, ecologists (e.g. sylviculturists, hydrologists, habitat preservationists), fitness coaches, for example, use "oughts" as, what Kant coined, hypothetical imperatives - to wit: if you want/need A, then B rather than C - if fitness, then exercise & diet rather partying & gluttony; if viable ecosystem, then sustainable caretaking, resource-use/extraction with smallest optimal footprint, rigorous pollution restrictions; etc.

Eudaimonism (very primatively) says: if well-being (optimal capabilities/readiness for moral conduct), then habitualize virtues by (a) exercising them and (b) avoiding/abstaining from exercising vices; the "ought" prescribes a moral agent's readiness and not which preferences / rules / actions are or are not applicable to any given (or hypothetical) situation. In other words, what's 'hypothetical' for eudaimonists is derived from the conditional goal and not how to resolve the situational dilemma/tradeoff.

The divorcement of good-for-self and good-for-the-group cannot justify one over the other.

True. But nothing entails such "divorcement". In fact, eusociality requires convergence - complementarity - of self & group more often than not (as you point out vis-à-vis "antisocial behavior").

It is not necessary for relativism to justify relativism, i.e. it need not be an elementary moral theory.

Ok.

Relativism is a default of a naturalistic depiction of morality that observes that our moral drives and capacities cannot be exhaustively or accurately fulfilled in the environment they now exist in (existentialism),

No. "Relativism" is too arbitrary, or reactive, to be as reliable as a morality needs to be for efficacy over many circumstances and thereby for mimetic success (e.g. cultural transmission). The mismatch between "moral drives and capacities" and a dynamic, or artifical non-adaptive, "environment" is an unsolvable problem that ethics deploys 'practical reason' to manage pragmatically. "Relativism" is, at best, a suboptimal 'whatever is clever' management approach or stance.

The "naturalistic default" - my metaethical naturalism is kicking-in - implied by this mismatch of drives & environment is pluralism, or logical space to game-out heuristically many different approaches to managing this drives-environments mismatch and ranking them by their utility ranging over variably many circumstances over time; there are [some number] X ways in [some number] Y situations with [some range] Z reliabilities, and ethics - moral philosophy - reflects / speculates on the plurality of these paths rationally [inventories the universe of tools] and selects the most optimal path pragmatically [assembles a toolbox for eusocially sharing a commons of scarce goods, services, opportunities]. Ethical naturalism entails that not only are we eusocial agents but also, more fundamentally, we are ecosystem agents (i.e. a species)

and that, beyond the existence of these drives and capacities, there is no natural justification for one schema of how and when one act above another.

There is, to my mind, no such thing as a "natural justification" that is not a naturalistic fallacy (and thereby an ideology).

Our nature cannot tell us which to choose (because our nature is unaware of our circumstances) and I argue that, since our morality derives from natural selection of social drives and capacities ...

We're an animal species. As such, each of us is constituted by the same functional defects: physical, affective, social, cognitive, etc which, if not maintained and sustained, lead, often rapidly, to deprivation and on to permanent or fatal dysfunction. I'd say our functional defects inform us as to (1) what harms us as well as (2) what harms other animals like us to the degree they are like us; true this, as you say, "cannot tell us which to choose" but that's because our species-functional defects are constraints which constitute homeostasis, affection, eusociality (or sustainability) & adaptivity, respectively (re: list above) AND NOT "OUGHTS" THEMSELVES, providing a 'natural' baseline for, or (basic) facticity of, moral judgments & conduct. Thus, negative utilitarianism, etc (vide Philippa Foot + Karl Popper ... + Spinoza).

French existentialism is ethically solipsistic to an extent, and in some ways terminally so: no sooner do existentialists announce freedom, they try and find an "ought" (God, overcoming, communism, personal experience) to fill the void. I'm hoping to avoid the same mistake here.

I'm afraid, KK, collapsing the is-ought distinction has left "Natural Selection" to fill your "existentialist void" (i.e. scientism-of-the-gaps).

Again, I'm not proposing that what's good for our genes is a foundation of a moral philosophy. I am proposing that we have moral philosophy because what's good-for-the-group is not actionable anymore. — Kenosha Kid

Maybe the notion of "group" is too top-down and can be reconceived as bottom-up community (ecosystem). How do you account for, or understand, the salience of Hillel the Elder's "That which is hateful to you, do not do to anyone"?

Isaac

I do question whether, when one's virtual social groups geographically encompass the world, one can actually maintain e.g. racist or nationalistic viewpoints without hypocrisy. — Kenosha Kid

I think the human mind has an incredible capacity for hypocrisy. We do not, despite post hoc rationalisation to the contrary, act in a unified and consistent manner. As you have correctly pointed out, 'reasons' are formed after the behaviour that was going to happen anyway, and it's only reason that has to be consistent. I get what you're saying here, but perhaps has more faith (and so less hope) in the capacity for 'creative' thinking. If racist or nationalistic actions become social norms for large enough numbers, then I think we'll go a long way before running out out post hoc rationalisations no matter how convoluted they have to be to fit our new globalised status. One thing that you left out of your account (perhaps, as you say, just for brevity) is the extent to which existing social norms dictate behaviour. Put together with the process you already mentioned, where behaviour determines beliefs, and you have a situation where existing behaviours can determine beliefs. We can come to believe some group of people deserve some treatment simply because we see that group of people being dealt that treatment.

So how does this relate to treatment of outsiders? Well, if one's own social group is consistent (ie most of the people you meet most of the time are within the same social group and treated with the same level of compassion) then most of the behaviour you'll see happening will be compassionate. This will make it harder to find non-compassionate behaviour tolerable (even when it seems to be required - ie war). I believe this is the situation with wide-ranging tribal communities - which makes them so open to strangers, and we see the opposite in more close to tribal communities (such a Papua New Guinea) where a state of almost permanent war was the norm.

One of the issues in modern society which allows for non-compassionate behaviour (and therefore it's post hoc rationalisation in racism etc) is the fact that it is seen acted out on a day-to-day basis. The relatively wealthy walk straight past the homeless (when Sitting Bull toured with the rodeo for a time he apparently gave away his wages to the destitute in the cities - it's not that he was more saintly than the rest, just that he'd not been inculcated into ignoring them).

Hunter-gatherer communities are notoriously lax with their children, letting them do almost anything. The one exception in most cases is that sharing is enforced. One of the ways egalitarianism is maintained is that non-egalitarian behaviours are simply never seen, and so can't be normalised, and so resist rationalising belief formation, and so are forcibly admonished, and so are never seen...

We broke that cycle.

American white-black relations have been like if more representative people, who had not inherited racist or slavery-affirming socialisations, had mediated them from the start? This starts off looking like a simple question that suggests that maybe if power wasn't so concentrated always among psychopathic opportunists, things might have been better. But of course slavery had been accepted as natural since the middle ages, in no small part thanks to religion, and in no small part thanks to its legal status, so its still likely that even normal people might have gone the same route. — Kenosha Kid

Interestingly, slavery used to be non-racist. Slaves were taken from defeated territories, from those in debt, or just random enemies. It wasn't until Christianity made the subjugation of one's enemies less noble that a new justification was needed and so sub-human races were invented. The behaviour persisted because it was seen and copied, all that was need was a new post hoc justification to match other beliefs (formed from other behaviours elsewhere).

My feeling is that, whatever initial difficulties there might have been in encountering new out-groups, in the absence of socialisations that push us toward pre-social behaviours and suspend our social capacities, and in the absence of a credible existential threat from such out-groups, our natural altruism would tend toward inclusivity. — Kenosha Kid

I agree. In a similar vein I always dispute people who think we're naturally greedy and selfish. If that were the case why would we need advertisements every 45 minutes telling us to buy stuff. Organisations work incredibly hard to get us to behave certain ways, which I see as a fairly clear indication that we wouldn't behave in those ways if left to our own devices. I think the same's true of altruism. We'd rather include as many people as don't present a threat. The trouble is twofold 1) we are surrounded by non-compassionate behaviours which create belief systems to justify it, and 2) there are people whose objectives are advanced by leveraging those belief systems toward some particular group.

Isaac

My ideas of what is come from my empirical experiences: my first notion of reality is of the stuff that I can see rather than what I can’t, and every later notion of what is real is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. Likewise, my ideas of what ought to be come from my hedonic experiences: my first notion of morality is of stuff that feels pleasant rather than painful, and every later notion of what is moral is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. — Pfhorrest

I don't necessarily want to get into this again, but for the thread as much as anything else, you are either very abnormal or absolutely wrong here and this may be the crux of the problem. Virtually all the psychological and neuroscientific evidence we have so far contradicts your assessment. One's ideas of what ought to be do not come from one's hedonic experiences, and one's first notions of morality do not come from notions of stuff which feels pleasant rather than painful. Yours might, I'm not claiming to know your individual mental processes, but if they do you'd be an anomaly, based on the research to date.

One's ideas of what ought to be come from a very complex interaction of the behaviours one is surrounded by, the degree of innovation or conservatism one is feeling at the time (or perhaps even genetically disposed to), the multiple affects (of which pleasure and pain are only two), one's self-narrative (which itself is a construct bourne of dozens of other influences in life), one's value judgement of whomever is going to be affect by one's immanent behaviour, the judgement of others, the degree of engagement of the mirror neuron system (which, again, is actually a result of several preceding factors)... plus probably a handful of other factors I've forgotten. Most importantly though, the vast majority of this goes on sub-consciously and what you have is simply a feeling that acting that way "wouldn't be you".

Pfhorrest

↪Isaac

Do you (or some scientific consensus) not agree with Kohlberg's stages of moral development? That seems to confirm my own experiences. The first stage is all about avoiding immediate suffering (punishment) and seeking pleasure (reward). Then they start considering reciprocality and more and more altruistic social behavior until in the final stages it's all a matter of abstract principle. As the people in the middle (conventional) stages usually see those in the post-conventional stages as though they were actually in the pre-conventional stages, not being able to conceive of a post-conventional moral capacity, I similarly think those post-conventional abstract principles end up appealing to the the same basic criteria as the first stages, but in a much more universalized way.

Just like religious people think that science is more "base" or "unenlightened" for caring only about empirical observations. Religious belief is like conventional morality. Science is like post-conventional morality. And those stuck in the middle can't differentiate the end from the beginning.

"Before you walk the path to enlightenment, chairs and chairs and tea is tea. Upon the path to enlightenment, chairs are no longer chairs and tea is no longer tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, chairs are again chair, and tea is again tea."

Isaac

Do you (or some scientific consensus) not agree with Kohlberg's stages of moral development? That seems to confirm my own experiences. — Pfhorrest

Kohlberg's stages are about the justification for moral-type behaviour, not the cause of it.

Notwithstanding that, I do disagree with a lot of his work, (see Margret Donaldson, for example, or later Alison Gopnik - Kohlberg's work, and Paiget's, was ill conceived with very young children) but that disagreement isn't relevant here. Kohlberg's stages are, I'd say, not the most prevalent, or up-to-date theories of moral development (look to Gopnick or Tania Singer for those), but they are still adhered to by some. The main point is the one above. They are justificatory, not explicatory.

Kenosha Kid

Everyone who ever has to make a reasoned decision about what action to take needs an answer to a normative question, because that’s exactly what normative questions are about. The only beings who never need to ask normative questions are those that act entirely in a straightforward stimulus-response way, with no reflexive, contemplative function mediating the relationship between their experiences and their behaviors. Are you suggesting humans are like that? — Pfhorrest

Sure, if I want to know how to make a pie I should consult a recipe. Even in questions of executing moral decisions, I still need to decide how I should go about them. And, as I've said, there are pre-social and social drives in competition and, while the question of what I should do need not be reasoned, it could be reasoned about. I might reason, for instance, as to whether I will get away with an antisocial act.

But these are a far cry from the sorts of normative questions you want answers to which are, if I understand you, blanket, objective answers to all moral questions justified with respect to something other than "well, that's just the way we're built". Our current environment and our unfitness for it does appear to incline us to produce new normative moral questions. It doesn't mean that answers to those questions come fully justified. (By the way, this is not particular to the OP. Kantianism, utilitarianism, liberalism, hedonism, etc. have no firmer justifications. Adopting a position is not the same as justifying it.)

As for the false dichotmy, we are mostly stimulus-response, however our conscious mind is largely concerned with rational, algorithmic thinking so we tend to overemphasise this role in our decision-making. Part of the thesis of the OP is that, when our ancestors existed in small social groups, questions of what the morally good thing to do is would not have existed, as the role that moral oughts are supposed to play now would have been played by largely biological factors (and, to the extent that it was not biologically determined, the remainder dictated by homogeneous socialisation, which also needs no rationalisation). This is justified by the fact that nature could not have selected for altruistic characteristics if our actual outcomes were dictated instead by rational thought unless that rational thought itself had a bias that could be selected for. Considering moral choices to be essentially rational, as rationalists do, is imo nonsensical.

Now it is different. Our social impulses do not come close to determining a response equivalent of a moral ought, since they did not evolve to yield optimal survival outcomes for strangers with different socialisations. The onus is then put on what remains -- rationalism -- to determine not only how we should act to realise a moral good, or whether we wish to, but what those moral goods are.

Nope. See above. — Pfhorrest

This seems to be a diversion that we might both be regretting. Asking where the 'oughts' are is not an 'ought' question. An ought question presupposes that there is there is an ought. I do not. It is your presupposition I believe to be invalid.

Likewise, my idea of what ought to be comes from my hedonic experiences: my first notion of morality is of stuff that feels pleasant rather than painful, and every later notion of what is moral is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. — Pfhorrest

Very young children do demonstrate no or limited capacity for empathy, i.e. it is not switched on at birth. Environmental factors play an important role in children developing empathy, as of course do genetic factors. This is why the lack of possible variance in small social groups is an important prerequisite to reason-free social behaviour, as is necessary for nature to select for.

But another principle of mine is to proceed on the assumption that with enough effort and care we can establish an arbitrarily-much unbiased refinement like that. — Pfhorrest

If you reject the possibility (quite rightly) that mere biology -- the circumstance of our birth -- can justify a moral position such as altruism, you must reject that the natural hedonism of your birth can justify a hedonistic moral position. I believe you're just rationalising an 'is', not deriving an 'ought'. I see no reason here to accept your definition of 'unbiased' as, itself, unbiased.

But I do not believe the notion that our personality is refined rationally by effort and care to be in any way realistic. If I meet an alien with an extendable neck, I will probably be nice to it, not because I have derived a be-nice-to-aliens morality through attention and care to the world, but because ET made me cry when I was a child, and I'm stuck with that. That is how susceptible our socialisations are. Epiphanies, fundamentalism, and brainwashing are not gradual refinements to our moral positions but forceful paradigm shifts -- re-programmings, figuratively and literally -- in response to experience, for instancel.

I didn’t say I don’t want to talk about that, I said that I’m not the one bringing it up
...
I’m not pissed off BTW, and I’m not here because you mentioned me in the OP, but because of a comment about the is-ought divide later in the comments. — Pfhorrest

I'm glad. I thought you sounded disinclined but obliged.

Your counter-argument here seems to be that to weigh up, say, whether we should be a welfare state or not be a welfare state, first we must question our social biology which in turn necessitates that we must refer to the human genome which in turn suggests we must figure out our evolutionary history
— Kenosha Kid

And I’m saying no, I’m not arguing that we have to do that. You brought those things up, not me. — Pfhorrest

I think there's been a misunderstanding, because I used impersonal but you read personal 'you'. I didn't mean that you think the above, rather that you think the above characterises my argument. It does not. If you were not making this point, then I don't know what to make of this:

you could only state the causal origins of your moral intuition and the probability that they share those intuitions given your shared heritage — Pfhorrest

which seems to be suggesting that, given the viewpoint of the OP, an answer to a moral normative question would be something like the OP. That would be a straw man.

Kenosha Kid

I read the book — Mww

That was bloody quick!

If the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, then the bat costs a dollar, regardless of the cost of the ball. — Mww

Ummm. So I know the experiment you're referring to. It typically shows that unconscious pattern recognition is responsible for our answers to such questions. People see $1.10. They see $1. They're asked to calculate a difference. They say $.10. This is not a rational solution to the problem, which is an insanely easy maths problem. And yet people believe they've answered the question rationally. When the rational answer is given, they usually see their error. You seem to have gone one step further and rationalised a new mathematics, which is atypical.

the words one is suppose to place left or right of center, are the words left and right — Mww

What do you mean supposed? With reference to what order do you require the word 'left' to always appear on the left of a page and the word 'right' to appear on the right? Do you demand this of novels? The subject is 'supposed' to follow instructions. If they agree to that, and cannot, what does that say about the action or efficacy of their rational minds?

Would you be surprised, dismayed, or unreceptive, if I quoted a series of texts from the book, followed by a collaborating series of texts from 1787? — Mww

Yes, do. I'd like to defend at least the spirit of the OP, if not the specifics. Of course, part of that spirit is to base our thinking on the best knowledge we have. But there are some excellent 200 year old ideas that still stand up today. The Origin of Species is pushing 200.

Mww

↪Kenosha Kid

Interesting. Where are you still seeing my comment?

I deleted everything, by this, as you say here....

You seem to have gone one step further and rationalised a new mathematics — Kenosha Kid

....admitting to being wrong, and by this.....

But there are some excellent 200 year old ideas that still stand up today. — Kenosha Kid

.......as being superfluous. I didn’t encounter anything in the book that relates to your half of this conversation, hence my commentary on it being superfluous with respect to the OP. Which leaves me to think you just wanted me to be exposed to modernization. So, thanks.....I guess. (Grin)

Kenosha Kid

I read the book; it’s at academia dot com from a bing title search. I dumped my write-up commenting on it, being wrong on one count and superfluous on the next. — Mww

Oops! I should have reloaded the page before responding yesterday. Now I'm superfluous! :rofl:

I didn’t encounter anything in the book that relates to your half of this conversation, hence my commentary on it being superfluous with respect to the OP. Which leaves me to think you just wanted me to be exposed to modernization. So, thanks.....I guess. — Mww

The bat & ball example was the sort of thing I had in mind. It is not that we get the answer wrong -- most do, and that isn't particularly interesting other than to show that human decisions aren't typically rational decisions. The interesting part is how the rational mind rationalises the irrational answer. People swear blind they thought it through rationally, i.e, worked out the answer mathematically, and yet they clearly didn't. That's what I find fascinating. We are not only irrational, we lie to ourselves about it, without knowing that we're lying to ourselves.

We do moral things without the need to ask why, but if we do ask, we can only ask ourselves and only ourselves can answer. I grant the intrinsic circularity, always have. Like I said....blame Mother Nature. And if we do ask, is never our altruism or empathy receiving the query; we can ever only ask our reason. — Mww

And our reason swears blind that it worked out the ball cost $0.10. It will swear blind that it worked out altruism is good too (most of the time, not Ayn Rand, obviously). But, as I said to Pfhorrest, there isn't much more redundant than an altruistic animal working out that altruism is right.

If altruism and empathy were naturally selected predicated on small groups, but we no longer inhabit small groups specifically, did altruism and empathy evolve in keeping with the evolution of group size? — Mww

It's a really interesting question. Humans are still evolving other than in arbitrary (e.g. sexual selection) way, but they tend to evolve quickest in isolated groups still, such as the evolution of genetic mutations to exist at high altitudes as seen in Tibet. Whether a larger social group could evolve traits for surviving in larger social groups depends on how long that group stays roughly that size: if the population expands faster than evolutionary timescales, it seems unlikely.

Humans have, for 90% of their existence, lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. The agricultural era of humanity is only about 12,000 years old. However this is long enough (Tibetans evolved to high-altitude existence in the last 3,000 years) if a selection criteria exists that prefers e.g. social stratification over reciprocal altruism (since we can't all be farmers in an agricultural society). As it happens, other primates and ancestral mammals already have such social strata, so there was likely an existing genetic amenability that nature could hijack for the neolithic revolution, which would speed things up. On the other hand, people started dying much less after agriculture (hence our population explosion), which gives nature a much more limited means of selection, which in turn means that evolutionary timescales are prolonged. 12,000 years might not be enough for any meaningful changes to how we organise, although there is evidence that we have evolved in the agricultural era to get better as certain tasks.

I reject that an individual suddenly becomes moral just because he inhabits something more than a small group. How small is small? Is a hundred people a mall group? There never were 8M people in a large group until relatively recently, so.....seems altogether arbitrary to me. — Mww

Small enough such that a) socialisation is approximately homogeneous, and b) the people one meets on a given day are more likely to be relatives or neighbours. At that point, empathy becomes more accurate (the person you encounter is more likely to respond like you), and altruism becomes sufficiently reciprocal that nature can do something with it. If humans had evolved in sufficiently large social groups that socialisation was diverse and most people you encountered were strangers (e.g. from some large social group of primates), then empathy would not be accurate enough to be selected for and altruism not reciprocal enough to be selected for. I put that in bold because it's a good rewording of my key argument.

Note, it is not the individual that changes from group size to group size, nor has the quality of the moral hardware altered one iota. If you took moral philosopher from Paris and put him in a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania (I have hunted with one such tribe, but too briefly to anecdotally verify there were no philosophers :rofl: ), he would not change. There are not genes for switching between modes depending on environment (that I know of). There are genes specifically for small social groups that would make rationalisation of moral truths redundant.

What is the frame of reference that is not violated by hypocrisy? — Mww

The cosmological frame of reference, in which nothing we do matters, would be one in which it is as reasonable to be a hypocrite as to be social.

Conscious decision making is judgement, in which things are related to each other and a conclusion is drawn. Judgement is a facet of reason, and we make judgements every time things relate to each other. — Mww

Defining judgement as per the first emphasised point, the second is where I differ with empirical justification. Or rather I would not leave this open to the interpretation that our decision-making (conscious or not) is the judgement being made consciously. The way S1 and S2 work together is that S2 consciously verifies the decisions of S1 while believing them to be S2's decisions.

Imagine a programmer with inconsistent amnesia. Every day he opens his project and there's some work that's been done. The programmer looks through the code and says, 'Yes, this is what I would have done, so I must have done this.' Occasionally he spots a bug and says, 'What was I thinking? This isn't right,' but most of the bugs he misses (as does any programmer: they are terrible at self-reviewing). Then he goes home, and another programmer sits at his desk, working hard not smart, adding to the first programmer's code.

Rationalism is purely the first programmer's point of view. I'm not saying he doesn't also write code, just that he's mostly just unconsciously taking the credit for another programmer's work, good or bad.

Moral philosophy is the first programmer coming to work and finding that he (thinks he) had started work on a new class consisting of boolean methods.

private boolean giveToCharity(final Object situation, final float currentBankBalance, final String charityName) {
...
}

and he's like "What the f*** was I trying to do here?!?" unaware that the second programmer had misunderstood the problem.

Natural and Existential Morality

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