The Philosophy Discussion Forum

thomyum2 wrote: ↑Mon May 18, 2026 11:45 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 16, 2026 8:07 pm

MikeNovack wrote: ↑Sat May 16, 2026 7:55 pm

That is an assumption on your part.

It's not an assumption that nobody has anything. It's evident. It's what's called "the most pausible explanation of the data": unless you have something...let's see it.

I wouldn't identify myself as a 'secularist', but most people I've known who fit that description will usually cite something along the lines of 'all humans have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', or a variant thereof, as their basic and fundamental moral precept - i.e. that every human life has an intrinsic value and that everyone has a duty to act in ways that respect others' life and freedom.[/quopte]
Okay, that phrase "life, liberty and property" (as the original said) comes from John Locke. But when asked "Why?" John Locke's own reasons turn out to be solidly Protestant...as were the reasons cited by the founders of the US Declaration of Independence, which cited these rights as having been "inalienable" only because they were "endowed by [man's] Creator."

And, of course, you have already pointed this out. Good spotting.

But secularism cannot accept such reasoning as the above. There can be no appeal to the Creator allowed, and no Protestant explanations of WHY people have these alleged rights. So we come back to the question: WHY would secularists be telling us to believe that all people have such rights? What's their basis for insisting we have them and owe them to each other?

Granted that those who are not religious won't consider these rights to be 'endowed by their creator', so they don't derive that moral precept from a religious belief, yet they still take it as a given or foundational principle that those right exist and derive their moral or ethical code from that basis.

Right you are. They can't be "endowed by the Creator," according to secularism. And you say, "they still take it as a given." But WHY? Why should people who doubt...even secular people who doubt...be rationally compelled to concede those rights to others? What's the basis?

The English certainly doubted it. Despots and monarchs, whether secular or religous, would deny it. Slave owners certainly didn't believe it. Heck, there was even a question of whether such a passel of rights could be doled out to women...and that was to be settled still. There were no end of such doubters around; so something better had to be provided; a real basis for the claim.

It can't be "Well, this is just what our particular group of secularists takes to be given." Nobody else gives it to them. So they need more of an explanation, a real WHY to back their case.

Your posts argue that secularist can't rationally support their moral positions, which suggests to me that you think moral positions must be rationally derived from a metaphysical basis.

Excellent. Yes, precisely.

But my experience has been that morality (especially for non-philosophers) is more intuitive than rational, and that people generally start with the moral precept and then develop the rational basis from there, when called upon to do so, rather than the other way around.

Two questions, then: 1) How would indifferent nature endow its products with a belief in morality, a thing about which nature it self knows nothing and can know nothing, since it's not sentient? 2) Assuming we have such an intuition, and assuming it were all the same for every one of us, why would any of us be duty-bound to follow it? (After all, we have many intuitions we do not follow, because they fail to correspond to some reality, or because we have some other interest that we find transcends our immediate impulse. So what makes this kind of "impulse" special?)

I might be misunderstanding you, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on the idea that a moral precept itself could be a premise that is taken as self-evident - as a starting point - in the absence of a specific religious or metaphysical commitment.

I'm guessing you're thinking of the opening of the D of I, which talks about "we hold these truths to be self-evident"?

We still need an explanation of why we should regard anything as "self-evident" or as "given." The founders referred that problem to "his Creator," but secularly, we can't do that. But the founders clearly recognized that problem; which is why they didn't let "self-evident" stand alone. Because without some metaphysical backup explanation, the response "Well, it's not self-evident to me" is all it would take to defeat the whole moral imperative they were hoping to assert. But they wanted something durable, compelling and ethically primary upon which to found their whole Declaration.

So "self-evident" plus no explanation will not work, even in responding to a secular doubter, let alone any religious one.

THERE IS NO INTENT. What ends up as evolved is by chance, not intent.

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2026 4:43 pm

THERE IS NO INTENT. What ends up as evolved is by chance, not intent.

It's not chance.
That which evolved is better aligned with the structure of the universe than that which did not evolve.
That favors certain behaviors, certain morality, in humans and social animals.

MikeNovack wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2026 3:41 pm

"Two questions, then: 1) How would indifferent nature endow its products with a belief in morality, a thing about which nature it self knows nothing and can know nothing, since it's not sentient? 2) Assuming we have such an intuition, and assuming it were all the same for every one of us, why would any of us be duty-bound to follow it? (After all, we have many intuitions we do not follow, because they fail to correspond to some reality, or because we have some other interest that we find transcends our immediate impulse. So what makes this kind of "impulse" special?)

1) This MIGHT belong in the "Restore or leave to Nature topic, not here.

What ends up as evolved is by chance, not intent.

2) But "morality" is just knowledge, knowledge in a given situation what is the right action to choose (what is expected of a "good human") and what the wrong action to choose (and how the others will react if they catch us "cheating").

Misunderstanding. What SUCCEEDS (evolves) is fit for the environment. That is still chance.

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2026 8:43 pm

Misunderstanding. What SUCCEEDS (evolves) is fit for the environment. That is still chance.

Well, you're going to have to go into some details cause the only way that makes sense is if you're using a trivial definition of "chance".

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2026 10:35 pm Mutation may be random but selection is not random.

Therefore, evolution is not random.

Literal / Dictionary: Proceeding without a definite aim, reason, or pattern. It suggests an outcome that cannot be predicted ahead of time.

Statistics: A process of selection where every item has an equal probability of being chosen.

phyllo wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2026 11:22 pm "Fitness" is a pattern.

MikeNovack wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2026 5:12 pm IC has this right.

"Fitter" means a higher probability of survival and reproduction, but that is still subject to chance/randomness.

MikeNovack wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2026 5:12 pm IC has this right.

"Fitter" means a higher probability of survival and reproduction, but that is still subject to chance/randomness.

The dictionary definition is referring to when the probability (for all) is 50% -- or in any case, the same probability for all of them. THEN equal chances. But if the probabilities are NOT equal (and that is exactly what we mean by "fitter", higher probability) then the chances of survival/reproduction not equal.

We can even do this in reverse. We might be asking, of A or B, which more fit (a better move in go, more likely to win the game). So for each of these moves, we play out a large number of random move games. Let's say the results of that are after move A, 35% wins and after move B, 45% wins. If the number of random games was 1000, it is likely B is a better move than A. If the number of games was 10,000, VERY likely. Note however that were the results 39.9% for A and 40.1% for B while we still think B better than A, we are far less certain of that. We might need to be playing 100,000 random games, but not enough time for that. BTW -- this is exactly how the modern programs able to play go at the level of the best human experts work. A neural net is used to select "candidate moves"(a smallish set of moves very likely to contain the best move) The neural net cannot tell which of these candidates is in fact the best, but with a small enough number of potential best moves, time enough to do a large number of random playouts for each.

Note that IN THEORY the"random" would work by itself (compare EVERY legal move) but not enough time for that.

7. Is evolution a random process?
Evolution is not a random process. The genetic variation on which natural selection acts may occur randomly, but natural selection itself is not random at all. The survival and reproductive success of an individual is directly related to the ways its inherited traits function in the context of its local environment. Whether or not an individual survives and reproduces depends on whether it has genes that produce traits that are well adapted to its environment.

So it is a misconception to view natural selection as a process that perfects organisms. At the opposite extreme, natural selection is sometimes interpreted as a random process. This is also a misconception. The genetic variation that occurs in a population because of mutation is random — but selection acts on that variation in a very non-random way: genetic variants that aid survival and reproduction are much more likely to become common than variants that don’t. Natural selection is not random!

Have you ever come across a statement like this:

“I can’t believe that something as beautiful and complex as the human eye could be the result of a random process like evolution”?

Or this:

“It seems implausible that the intricate molecular machinery of the cell – a finely-tuned nanofactory of exquisite complexity – could have arisen by chance”?

The basic argument being made is as follows:

Premise 1. These complex, organized, functional parts of the body and brain could not possibly have arisen by chance.

Premise 2. Evolution is a chance process.

Conclusion: Therefore, these complex parts of the body and brain cannot be a product of evolution.

The fatal flaw in this argument is that premise 2 is incorrect. Evolution is not a chance-driven process; that is a widespread misconception.

To see why, we can break evolution down into two steps:

Step 1: Mutation. This step introduces new genetic variants into the population.

Step 2: Natural selection. In this step, some of these new genetic variants make it into the next generation, and some do not.

(This is a bit of a simplification, but it is good enough for our current purposes).

Step 1, mutation, is random. Mutations don’t arise in order to fill a current “need” of the organism. They are blind and they lack foresight, so they also can’t anticipate future needs. In this sense, they can reasonably be described as random. They can also be thought of as “random” in the sense that they are not automatically helpful; a new mutation may turn out to be beneficial or harmful or neutral.

However:

Step 2, natural selection, is not random at all. In fact, it is the diametric opposite of randomness. In this step, mutations that turn out to be beneficial to the organism are more likely to make it into the next generation precisely because they aid the organism’s survival or reproduction. Mutations that are harmful are less likely to make it into the next generation precisely because they lower the organism’s likelihood of survival or reproduction. If you give it a moment’s thought, you will see that this is the opposite of a random relationship. If something is random, it is inherently unpredictable and not orderly. Natural selection is the opposite. It is logical and predictable: the likelihood that a mutation will make it into the next generation depends, in a predictable way, on its effects on survival and reproduction. Beneficial mutations tend to get passed on, whereas detrimental ones are weeded out. This is a constrained and orderly relationship – the opposite of “randomness”.

The core mistake is that people sometimes confuse mutations (which are random) with natural selection (which is not random). Evolution is a process in which randomly mutated genes pass through the highly non-random sieve of natural selection.

It is worth noting that one of the other evolutionary forces, genetic drift, is random, and can cause evolutionary change. The key mistake is to think that natural selection, or evolution as a whole, is random.

And because natural selection is quintessentially non-random, the functional products it shapes – such as the porcupine’s quill, the bombardier beetle’s defensive abilities, and the jewel wasp’s science-fictionesque hijacking of the cockroach’s mind – are also highly non-random.

So, yes: biological triumphs like the eye, the placenta, and the octopus’s three hearts could not have evolved by chance. And indeed, they didn’t. Mutation is random, but natural selection is not.

phyllo wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2026 8:34 pm
The core mistake is that people sometimes confuse mutations (which are random) with natural selection (which is not random). Evolution is a process in which randomly mutated genes pass through the highly non-random sieve of natural selection.