Lorikeet wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 10:33 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 2:51 pm
I'm sorry -- I don't understand this claim. It might be right, in some sense, but it's too vague. Can you clear it up for me?
Morality, like free-will, is about the act.....
Kant didn't think so. He thought it was about the process of making the decision. Aristotle didn't think so: he thought it was about the habitual character of the actor. And that's the two major opponents of what you're seeming to plug for, which is utilitarianism of some kind.
Moral behaviour: loving behaviour, compassion, tolerance etc.
"Behaviour" is the act. But "loving" is an emotion or a motivation. "Compassion" is a feeling, but not an intellectual one. And "tolerance" is not a universal good: one can be guilty of "tolerating" evil. So again, this seems far from clear sailing as a case.
Then they aren't moral at all...merely pragmatic. And since they "evolve," why couldn't a moral imperative
against abortion, or
for war, or making prostitution and slavery "moral," also "evolve" out of them in the future? How do we know where this haphazard process of "moral evolution" is leading us, before we get there?
Even god is pragmatic.
How could that be so?
Moral evolution, like evolution itself, is guided by natural processes.
Then it isn't "moral." It's only a "natural process." Nobody calls earthquakes, floods and fires "moral." Likewise, "evolution" is supposed to be just a natural process...and you can be quite sure it has no opinions at all about how morality should go.
So...your theory is that a prohibition which almosts all ancient societies have, and is as near to universal as can be, is actually driven by the primitive native's awareness that it will produce birth defects? How would all these ancient societies even know about genetics?
What?
Do animals have to know about genetics to act in the manner that distinguishes them?
They're not moral. If they were, they'd have a moral code of some kind. They don't. All they have is instinct. We may foolishly project
our own feelings onto them sometimes, but when a lion kills a gazelle, it's not because lions are immoral. It's just what lions do, and what they have to do.
Then why is war one of the most persistent facts of history? That theory would suggest it would be the first thing to "evolve out" of our moral beliefs. But clearly, not only did that not happen, but it isn't even happening today...at least, not in Ukraine, Israel, Iran...
Inter-group violence is destabilizing.
Violence towards other groups is not.
War is natural.
Well, then, does nothing make war immoral? If "nature" or "natural processes," as you said before, lead us to make war, then how can there be anything wrong with war at all -- whether on the international scale or within small groups?
Not only human go to war.
Other species do, as well.
Well, you may think that army ants or wasps do, but they really don't. We can't call what they do "war," because war is the deliberate organizing of means to occasion the destruction of a rival population, and only humans really do that. What army ants do is just instinct, again.
This is also part of natural selection.
You're speaking like a Social Darwinist, now: applying survival-of-the-fittest to human beings. There's nothing moral about that, obviously, either way.
If it's founded on no objective reality, then it IS arbitrary, by definition. But you also said that they are "not fabricated by men, nor socially engineered." So where do they come from, and why are we obligated to follow them?
Objective reality.
The flux of existence.
We have no moral duty to perpetuation "the flux of existence," and "objective reality" is quite able to take care of itself. So we can't derive any moral duty from either.
The world has no cares, no interests, not ends.
Then "morality" is not an element in it, beyond a delusion that one kind of creature, humans, happens to experience.
Aren't you saying that "evolution" is an "objective reality," and that morality is founded on some sort of evolutionary imperative? In that case, you have to be arguing that morality is founded on the objective reality of evolution, don't you?
Isn't that what I've done?
Oh, I see: you meant "on" and you wrote "no." That was confusing.
Evolutionary psychology goes a long way into explaining why humans and all life, acts as it does.
But it can't provide any justification for morality. Even if we take it for a fact that human cognition is "evolving" in some particular direction, we have no way of judging whether that direction is "moral" or not. It might be merely pragmatic. It might lead us to do something evil that was still "useful" to us in some way. It might actually be leading us to extinction, too. We'd never know where it was leading us. To know that, we'd need a meta-moral system, something above the particular "morality" we happened to be believing in, something objective that would enable us to assess whether our "moral" beliefs were genuinely moral at all, or amoral, or immoral, or even morally suicidal. And what would that meta-moral basis for that judgment be?
