From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Thu Nov 18 1999 - 18:12:26 MST
>> [Axelrod] discovered
>> that the best way to do that is often to play nice; that does
>> nothing to support whether "playing nice" is or isn't a worthy
>> goal in its own right.
>
> The worthiness of "playing nice" relates to how it effectively promotes
> any population that practices it. From an evolutionary standpoint,
> populations that play nice succeed (reproduce and thrive) more than
> populations that do not play nice.
You're making the further unstated assumption that the success of a
population is good; i.e., you are defining moral worth as equivalent
to success of the species. That's as good a desire as any, but there's
certainly nothing more fundamentally "right" about success than any
other human desire. There _is_ something unique about one goal that
might make it a good premise on which to base ethical arguments: the
continued existence of the ethical actor. Individual survival (of the
entity exercising moral choice--whatever its physical form) is unique
in that it is the only goal that is a necessary condition of all other
possible goals. Taking it as a premise can lead to some useful
conclusions, but alas, I don't think it is fruitful enough to produce
ethical systems as complete as we want. Species survival might well
be a richer source of ethical premises, but I'm not yet convinced that
there's real value in it.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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