From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2001 - 10:36:02 MDT
Russell Blackford wrote:
>
> Mike said
>
> >The problem is that science (specifically sociobiology) continues to
> >prove these theorists wrong.
>
> 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.
Only if they ignore things like Bayesian theory, which can demonstrate
in a social context that when individuals act outwardly altruistic for
personal reasons, more individuals in the system benefit most than when
individuals do not act altruistically. One reason the subjectivists hate
Bayesian theory is that it demonstrates the similarity between the free
market and the social milieu so well.
>
> 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.
Biological evolution, you mean. One should not fall into the trap of
simply treating humanity as a species driven only by biological
evolution in a genetic framework. Since technology has been a part of
our species since the beginning, it is important to also consider how
technology and other forms of information outside of the genetic milieu.
This is where other objective facts of reality come into play: how the
earth formed and deposited resources at points around its surface, how
the climate has evolved, and how other species have developed.
The problem that subjectivists have is much like the problems that
theists have with accepting the idea that the human mind is anything but
an organic computer running a program: the system they observe is too
complex for them to comprehend the objective basis for its operation in
its entirety, and end up grasping at tiny scraps of rather flighty and
evanescent pieces of the puzzle.
Just because a jig saw puzzle unsolved is a pile of pieces does not mean
that every piece does not have its objective place in the overall
design.
>
> 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.
I'll have to read that. I suggest reading things like Jared Diamond's
"Guns, Germs, and Steel", which presents a rather persuasive argument
for an objective basis for the preeminence of western concepts.
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