lucifer_sam

Nope. Morals are not evolutionary in design. They represent a higher level of cognition that follows from the recognition of other beings as disparate self-consciousnesses. Outside of primates, there are very few animals capable of making this distinction.

And in fact some "morals" that we've adopted today are completely anti-evolutionary: humanitarianism, for one. Humanitarianism is helpful when it allows for sustaining a genetic profile of a certain group of people, but there is no evolutionary reason why we should feel pity for humans who exist outside our sphere of genetic influence. When we sacrifice personal resources to the aid of peoples that are so far removed genetically, we create a situation in which evolution can stagnate.

Which is a dominating factor in why people have so much difficulty grasping subjective morality. Your morals are a product of your experience, nothing more. If rape was the only means by which people procreated in your society (as it is in some fundamentalist Muslim countries), chances are you'd be a rapist too.

I've read Dawkins, Hobbes, Darwin, Malthus, and plenty more. I still suggest reading Genealogy of Morals, or at least a criticism of morality that isn't written by a rabid believer in ethics, it might help normalize a lot of that frustration you seem to have with people that live outside that right-and-wrong box.

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Guybrush

If you see starving children on TV, your "biology" doesn't know that these people are in fact far away on a different continent. We didn't evolve to social situations where we've seen people far away suffer like we might today on the telly. When we saw people suffer, they were close by, and thus we tend to react as if they're part of our "sphere".

Really, I thought that would be obvious.

edit :

Even if biology morals don't serve your selfishness well in today's society doesn't mean they didn't evolve. Environment's changed fast so you should try and put yourself in the "caveman's" shoes before you use examples like this.

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lucifer_sam

This is EXACTLY the reason why morality is subjective. Had I not to see those children suffering on the telly, I probably wouldn't harbor those same feelings.

You talk about having human experience from the subjective perspective, but all of your arguments seem to allude to a moral basis which is true for everyone.

I'd like to start a new thread on this, it's far more interesting to me than the "eat meat, don't eat meat" subject of discourse.

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Guybrush

What I'm saying is that most of us tend to feel similarly in similar situations. If someone steals from you, you get upset. We don't like it if our romantic partners cheat on us with someone else. We don't like the idea of having children with our parents or siblings. We don't like it when a friend breaks a promise. This manifests itselfs as feelings, perhaps of anger or disgust which again guide our moral judgment.

These feelings which motivate our behaviours have evolved. That doesn't mean we all possess the optimal behaviour for any situation as evolution creates diversity and the optimal strategy is ever changing. But, it does mean that most of us are somehow inheritors of successful feelings and behaviours from the past, successful meaning that the people who possessed them generally managed to have fertile children who survived long enough to have children of their own.

On a related site note, the animal kingdom is full of societal norms. A starving vampire bat begging another bat for blood may not recieve any if the bat being begged to recognizes the beggar as someone who didn't return the favour earlier. In a wolf pack, a wolf may not be allowed to approach a kill before the alpha wolf has had the first pickings. A chimpanzee society is full of societal norms. Most would agree that these animals probably don't reflect on their behaviour, but rather just react to their environment. As social mammals, it just doesn't make sense that we don't have these kind of behaviours.

If you want an easy read, you can check out some of this : Evolution of morality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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You should also realize that this understanding of morality is, compared to the history of moral theory, quite fresh. People like Nietzche didn't know the modern science of behaviour which has come a long way the last few decades.

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lucifer_sam

Right. We are predisposed to those behaviors because it ensures continued success of the species. But that doesn't mean that everyone has the same basis for determining those behaviors -- it is YOUR experience that lends you to them.

I almost feel like we're arguing the same thing, it's just a matter of interpreting those evolutionarily adaptive behaviors as evidence for an "objective" morality that I see as a logical fallacy.

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Guybrush

I make a statement claiming "morals are not entirely subjective" and by so saying, I'm making a case for the total objectivity of morality?

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highoctane93

idk but this post may be one of the best i have read in a long time. somehow i missed it and im glad that i took time to go back through this forum and read replys! =) i really appreciate how you ended this Batlord!!!

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MoonlitSunshine

I think it's more that it's fairly true to say that for a basic set of desires, all humans want roughly the same things. There are variations when it comes to the more complex matters, but most of us want to live, comfortably, and feel secure in our possessions. The argument between the two of you seems horribly similar to the correlation/causation argument. It would certainly seem that morals are not subjective, by virtue of the fact that so many people share the same morals, but consider a similar situation:

Imagine there is a substance (like chocolate) that (virtually) everyone likes. Now, we know that taste and "liking" something is very, very subjective. There most certainly no objective list of things that taste good and things that taste bad. However, the fact that everyone like chocolate could lead to the assumption that the fact that chocolate tastes good is objective, rather than unanimously subjective. In this case, everyone wants the same things. The morals aren't necessarily objective (there is no overriding list of morals), but the simple fact that (almost) everyone's needs agree gives and impression of at least temporary objectivity.

Now, I'm not going to say that I'm right here, that's just my point of view, satisfying as it is to know that philosophers have felt the same way before me (I should really get around to reading philosophy more often, it might save me the time of discovering the conclusions myself :/), but ironically even the question of the objectivity of morals is relatively subjective. You may well be correct, tore, in that morals "evolved" in tandem with natural selection, but for the benefit of this discussion, they lead to virtually the same conclusion. It's really a question of how objective you feel "objective" needs to be (everything we see is subjective to our own experiences, impossible to be truly "objective" in the sense of being outside the system looking in as we cannot be outside existence, but to define objective by that level is useless, so one needs to define what the critical value of subjectivity is such that less subjectivity is relatively objective (or close enough as not to matter).



That is to say: morals and the discussion thereon is great, but if the argument of both sides reaches the same effective conclusion (with differing definitions of objective) then for the benefit of defining the "morality" of eating meat, it is safe to say that we agree that arguing the morality of it is moot seeing as morals effectively evolved, either as a biological or societal (or both) construct, and what is immoral to one is moral to another? Cause that's basically what I'm getting at. I feel I have a moral obligation not to mistreat an animal or torture it, but I have no problem with swiftly ending its life as painlessly as possible in order to have a satisfyingly meat-filled dinner. However, I can understand how others might disagree on that moral, and will do my best to allow for their moral beliefs, provided they are also willing to come to a moral compromise. i.e., I want to eat meat, and will always prefer to have meat in my food, but if you are eating at my house I will always make allowances for that, provide as good a vegetarian/vegan meal as I can manage, and I won't murder an animal on the table in front of you. And when I go to your house, I won't complain if the meal is vegetarian, because it would be rude of me to assume otherwise.

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lucifer_sam

In other words, common courtesy. What an incendiary thought!

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highoctane93

EXACTLY!!!!!! lol

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