writes:
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.
I think morality arose as a consequence of symbolic thinking which underlies
language. Humans can make up an absrtact notion of "good" to lump together
actions that seem to be beneficial. These began as the standard biological
drives (food, sex, family etc). But the next level of abstraction linked
these "goods" to other less obvious goods (the tribe, rain at the appropriate
time etc). At some point the notion of "good" can be linked to anything that
the individual thinks of as good. Typically these are culturaly things.
Further along, someone in the tribe figures out that if he/she can link
"good" to the maintanance of the status quo this will be good for the
leaders. Someone else can at some future point and challenge the assertion
that good is identical to what is good for the status quo. The good can be
expanded to include non-tribe members, non-humans etc.
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
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