Alexiev wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2024 4:50 pm
The problems with "objective morality" based on evolutionary factors are legion. They include:
1) Such theories often don't explain (or even address) cultural differences. Why, if morality is objective, do moral rules differ dramatically?
No they don't.
They have similar moral principles because they all want to survive and to expand.
Cultures are also driven by the desire to survive and reproduce.
Where they differ is how to make this possible.
They differ in ideals or in what they consider an 'ideal man'.
2) They involve the logical error of assuming the antecedent. Darwinian evolution suggests that if a trait improves descendant-leaving success, it will tend to spread. It is a logical error to assume that if a trait has spread, it must have improved descendant-leaving success.
Reproduction proves adaptation to changing environments.
The error is yours.
A mutation, producing a trait, is either advantageous, neutral, or disadvantageous.
Good/Bad refer to this, relative to an objective, an ideal man.
All value-judgements are triangulations within an in different world, or within a manmade environment with an underlying objective/ideal.
3) As used by most naive proponents, such an explanation is not falsifiable. For example, you ignore my example of some cousin marriages being prohibited, while others are encouraged. This would seem to falsify the notion that incest rules are based on the biological risk of close relatives having children.
Here the probability of a mutation is in question.
Inbreeding is practiced by taking the risk of higher disadvantageous mutations arising.
In nature offspring do reproduce their parents playing the odds of survival by producing as many offspring as possible so that a few may survive.
Natural selection takes over.
But within manmade systems, where sheltering is present, such culling is absent so unfit mutations propagate and compound, until a type of individual arises which is entirely dependent on the collective and entirely unable to survive outside its protections.
That's when all sorts of strange mutations begin to manifest strange traits, sexual impulses, psyhcologies....etc.
Modern fArt represents this in such alternate universes as Marvel and DC....
4) Finally, evolutionary psychology doesn't explain anything. LIke many reductionist approaches complex issues, it sounds scientific, but smells phony. The way to understand culture is by studying culture. Morals vary, and their variance is best studied by examining the history of moral rules in a culture, not by postulating broad generalizations about their biological impact. Effects are not causes. Even if (as is not the case) incestuous sex leads to deformed children (an effect), we cannot assume that such an effect is the cause of the rule. Once again, that constitutes the error of assuming the antecedent.
[/quote]To understand culture you study the species that creates it.
Culture is the end product of centuries of specific populations interacting within specific environments.
Culture represents this relationship.
Past made present.
Cultures do not emerge out of nothing and nowhere.
Studying culture is like studying species' physical and mental traits as they interact with the world - behaviours.
Genes to Memes.
The body is a manifestation of an individual's entire past. Every individual life form is this past made present.
Nature = sum of all past nurturing.
Memory is a method of transmitting what has been proven to be advantageous - DNA.
Cultural memories are transmitted semiotically, promoting and valuing a specific kind of man. A specific kind of citizen.
If such a man is viable or not is determined by an indifferent factor: reality, or nature as it is called.
Nature is what determines if a cultural ideal is attainable or advantageous.
Nihilistic ideologies promote unrealistic ideals and so they must deceive - preaching what they are unable to practice, because this would lead to death.
So, many nihilistic ideologies have developed excuses or ways to justify why they cannot practice what they preach.
In Abrahamism one of the methods is through this idea of a 'fallen state' or 'sin',
As I've noted, nihilism inverts reality, remains theoretical because its ideals have no external referents, and they are all methods of mass control - political tools.
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"Reductionist" is what romantic idealists call anyone who brings concepts "down to earth" destroying their unsubstantiated claims.
Nihilistic idealists tend to build 'castles in their noetic skies' validating them colelctively.....
With no references outside their collective intersubjective psychosis they try to dismiss anything that reminds them of their naivete of being 'base' or 'unsophisticated'.....
Using this tactic any absurdity can be declared to be just as plausible as any other, as long as it maintains some self-referential cohesion, and is emotionally gratifying, i.e., popular.
It is a modern marketing ploy used to sell products and to sell candidates, exploiting human frailty, anxiety, and idiocy.
Metaphysics has become such a ploy.
Metaphysics completely detached form physis or contradicting experienced reality - seducing minds that desperately want to escape existence into an alternate reality.
Here collectivity is the rule.
Intersubjective delusions based on reciprocity, or the Goden Rule.
This is evident in the current Transexual madness.
Collectives are obligated to support an individual's delusions if they wish to be supported in their own.
No empiricism....no external standard is tolerated.
All must become a 'social construct'.
I'm confused.