“Similarly with those who hear of evolutionary psychology and conclude that the meaning of life is to increase reproductive fitness—hasn’t science demonstrated that this is the purpose of all biological organisms, after all?”
“I call this a “teleological capture”—where someone comes to believe that the telos of X is Y, relative to some agent, or optimization process, or maybe just statistical tendency, from which it follows that any human or other agent who does X must have a purpose of Y in mind.”
I think the second paragraph, and specifically the phrase, “in mind,” probably paints the wrong picture of the people that hold the first paragraph to be true. They most likely think that increasing reproductive fitness is entirely implicit within the organisms behaviour. Not, “in mind,” which would imply a concious goal.
Anyway yes I can see that teleological capture is problematic. However I can’t do away with it completely. It seems the only way to be able to try and fix things. Let us say that I started to become besotted with a reborn doll to the extent that I didn’t interact with other people. Should I try to stop myself loving the doll? If I ask what love is for, then it seems I should. This seems useful in my book, similarly asking what hunger and my desire for sweet things is for (from an evolutionary point of view) enables me to see that curbing them would be a good idea.
Now I am not consistent in my application of the view (I’m generally nice to people because it seems right to be nice to people), but the corner cases such as should I spend lots of money and attention on a cat (which I find adorable) it gives me something to steer by.
I haven’t yet seen how your platonic morality can fill the void left by excising the ability to correct emotions and desires to the purpose for which they evolved.
“Similarly with those who hear of evolutionary psychology and conclude that the meaning of life is to increase reproductive fitness—hasn’t science demonstrated that this is the purpose of all biological organisms, after all?”
“I call this a “teleological capture”—where someone comes to believe that the telos of X is Y, relative to some agent, or optimization process, or maybe just statistical tendency, from which it follows that any human or other agent who does X must have a purpose of Y in mind.”
I think the second paragraph, and specifically the phrase, “in mind,” probably paints the wrong picture of the people that hold the first paragraph to be true. They most likely think that increasing reproductive fitness is entirely implicit within the organisms behaviour. Not, “in mind,” which would imply a concious goal.
Anyway yes I can see that teleological capture is problematic. However I can’t do away with it completely. It seems the only way to be able to try and fix things. Let us say that I started to become besotted with a reborn doll to the extent that I didn’t interact with other people. Should I try to stop myself loving the doll? If I ask what love is for, then it seems I should. This seems useful in my book, similarly asking what hunger and my desire for sweet things is for (from an evolutionary point of view) enables me to see that curbing them would be a good idea.
Now I am not consistent in my application of the view (I’m generally nice to people because it seems right to be nice to people), but the corner cases such as should I spend lots of money and attention on a cat (which I find adorable) it gives me something to steer by.
I haven’t yet seen how your platonic morality can fill the void left by excising the ability to correct emotions and desires to the purpose for which they evolved.