From: David G. McDivitt (dmcdivitt@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2001 - 09:37:49 MDT
I agree with what Russell says with one additional thought. Ethics and
morality are fully valid within whatever environment a person finds self
"in". What person can go through life with no sense of identity,
heritage, culture, or even some hint of bias with regard to internal
programming? Cognitively, it is possible for a person to see where he
is, what he is, and how much of that he may want to change or keep. This
does not mean a person shall do that, or even should, but it is
possible.
Arguments saying non realists want to throw out all morality, all
foundations, and all things sacred simply are so much posturing which
sabotages intellectual dialog. Realize we are talking about intellect
and how we create knowledge; not about the specific things knowledge
describes, and for this reason realists and non realists talk past each
other more often than not.
Reality is a logical construct having implied context and significance.
People are either in sync on that level or they are not. When people are
not in sync should we beat them and force them to be? Do their thoughts
have any validity at all? Yes. Their thoughts have validity to them just
as our thoughts have validity to each of us individually.
There is no reality unless there is authority to enforce it whether
intellectually, socially, morally, or scientifically. Use of reality
statements in a debate, rather than recital of logical premises to
support an opinion, are in effect calls for authority, only, and non
intellectual.
>From: "Russell Blackford" <RussellBlackford@bigpond.com>
>Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 09:41:59 +1000
>
>I *think* Mike meant theorists who deny that there are objective moral
>properties. Sociobiology does no such thing. At the most, it shows that
>there is a "human nature" in the sense that there is a tendency for
>different kinds of human beings (eg sexes, ages) to act in certain ways in
>certain environments, and that these tendencies are genetically hard-wired
>into us by the experience of our ancestors in the evolutionary environments.
>That is an interesting datum, but it goes nowhere near to establishing the
>existence of objective moral properties. Indeed, there are respectable
>arguments that it actually reinforces subjectivist theories of ethics: moral
>rules are just subjective to our evolutionary coding.
>
>Mike would also be familiar the idea that we have an incentive to *change*
>our inherited evolutionary coding because it gives us dispositions that may
>have increased our inclusive fitness in the evolutionary environment but are
>arguably detrimental to our well-being in modern, high-technology
>environments. Evolution, of course, does not care about an organism's
>well-being but only about its inclusive fitness.
>
>Peter Singer has a very good book on the relationship between
>sociobiological claims and ethics. IIRC correctly its title is something
>like _The Expanding Circle_. He's come back to this issue a lot in his
>recent work.
>
>Russell
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