Just one moment...gotta polish up my horns if I'm gonna play devil's
advocate... ;-)
> Marvin:
> >Trial and error, basically, on the levels of species evolution and of
> >cultural evolution.
Dan:
> Well I have a problem understanding that. We agree that there is nothing
> teleological about evolution, right? So, what in it determines what is good
> and bad? Are you arguing that the definition of good is improving the
> probability of our species, or a subset thereof to continue to exist?
> Anything that fulfills this is good, anything that detracts from it is bad,
> and everything else is neutral?
Yes, no, no, and no. First we need to make sure we don't conflate two
separate issues. Issue 1: what is the origin of moral behavior, or, more
precisely, what is the origin of behavior informed by a moral sense? Issue
2: what is Good, or, what standards ought moral behavior strive to meet?
Regarding issue 1...
Moral systems are artifacts of human culture, like art and music and
political theories. Moral feelings, I'm speculating, are a product of
both biologicial and cultural evolution. Biological, because we are
species of community-living mammals; cultural, because at some point in
history we must have started to translate our biological instincts into
language, where they could be examined and modified. Cultural too because
I think we learn a lot of our moral responses from our parents (and from
whatever authority enjoys compulsory power) in a visceral way, i.e.
through punishment and example, and I can't see how our species'
moral instincts could be a product of anything but an evolutionary process
in which human intelligence and human proto-culture evolve side-by-side,
each influencing the other until at some point in prehistory the evolution
of the brain slows dramatically while the development of culture and
language accelerates and takes over.
In purely cultural terms, history appears to demonstrate that moral
systems and political systems evolve in a mutually influencing way as
people invent and adopt new standards in an attempt to prevent the repeat
of past disasters and also to justify future goals and ambitions, and to
create identity.
Regarding issue 2...
...which is the really thorny one, of course.
While the definition of "good" would not be set by evolution, by
definition the moral instincts that we inherit are the ones that have
allowed the species to survive *and* the ones that allowed certain subsets
of our ancestors to overcome or integrate other subsets. Issues of good
and evil probably wouldn't arise until we had sufficient language skills
to recognize and question the rules by which we live as rules that one can
obey or not. Once that happens the need to justify and categorize rules
and behaviors occurs, and that process happens as a part of the mythmaking
by which we invent gods and origin stories and so on (a bit like I'm doing
here, or a bit like what Jefferson does when he asserts that God makes
men with certain inalienable rights).
But that still doesn't address the question of what *is* good. If you
take away the appeal to absolute authority, i.e. God or Platonic Forms or
Pure Reason (or even maximum universal utility), then you're forced to
admit that the definition of "good" is pretty much what we make of it.
Values aren't given to us, we have to create them and then suffer the
consequences (or reap the rewards). Consequently, the only standard for
evaluating values is us. Scary.
Dan:
> I'd be happy to. But, to make it easy for both of us, let me start with a
> quick question. How familiar are you with indeterminacy in QM, with what
> I've written on Bell's theorem, and spacelike correlations? We'll start
> with those.
My knowledge of QM is utterly laymanlike. I read "In Search of
Schrodinger's Cat" a long time ago, but I'm sure it didn't all stick. I'm
aware of Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, which states (roughly, I
assume) that you can't know both the velocity and the position of a
particle at the same time. I'm not familiar with Bell's theorem or with
spacelike correlations.
The kicker, of course, will be to explain how a noumenal aspect for
physical objects translates into a moral imperative.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
