Evolution then is the bridge across the Is/Ought divide. An eye has the purpose or goal of seeing. Once you have a goal or purpose, what you “ought” to do IS make those choices which have the highest probability of fulfilling that goal/purpose. If we can tease apart the exact function/purpose/goal of morality from exactly how it enhances evolutionary fitness, we will have an exact scientific description of morality — and the best method of determining that is the scientific method.
My understanding is that those of us who refer to the is/ought divide aren’t saying that a science of how humans feel about what humans call morality is impossible. It is possible, but it’s not the same thing as a science of objective good and bad. The is/ought divide is about whether one can derive moral ‘truths’ (oughts) from facts (ises), not about whether you can develop a good model of what people feel are moral truths. We’ll be able to do the latter with advances in technology, but no one can do the former without begging the question by slipping in an implicit moral basis through the back door. In this case I think the author of that blog post did that by assuming that fitness-enhancing moral intuitions are The Good And True ones.
“Objective” good and bad require an answer to the question “good and bad for what?”—OR—“what is the objective of objective good and bad?”
My answer to that question is the same as Eli’s—goals or volition.
My argument is that since a) having goals and volition is good for survival; b) cooperating is good for goals and volition; and c) morality appears to be about promoting cooperation—that human morality is evolving down the attractor that is “objective” good and bad for cooperation which is part of the attractor for what is good for goals and volition.
The EXplicit moral basis that I am PROCLAIMING (not slipping through the back door) is that cooperation is GOOD for goals and volition (i.e. the morality of an action is determined by it’s effect upon cooperation).
PLEASE come back and comment on the blog. This comment is good enough that I will be copying it there as well (especially since my karma has been zeroed out here).
I’m not sure that I understand your comment. I can understand the individual paragraphs taken one by one, but I don’t think I understand whatever its overall message is.
(On a side note, you needn’t worry about your karma for the time being; it can’t go any lower than 0, and you can still post comments with 0 karma.)
My bad. I was going by past experience with seeing other people’s karma drop to zero and made a flaky inference because I never saw it go below that myself.
Do me a favor and check out my blog at http://becominggaia.wordpress.com. I’ve clearly annoyed someone (and it’s quite clear whom) enough that all my posts quickly pick up enough of a negative score to be below the threshold. It’s a very effective censoring mechanism and, at this point, I really don’t see any reason why I should ever attempt to post here again. Nice “community”.
I don’t think you are getting voted down out of censorship. You are getting voted down for as far as I can tell four reasons: 1) You don’t explain yourself very well. 2) You repeatedly link to your blog in a borderline spammish fashion. Examples are here and here. In replies to the second one you were explicitly asked not to blogspam and yet continued to do so. 3) You’ve insulted people repeatedly (second link above) and personalized discussions. You’ve had posts which had no content other than to insult and complain about the community. At least one of those posts was in response to an actually reasoned statement. See this example- http://lesswrong.com/lw/2bi/open_thread_june_2010_part_2/251o 4) You’ve put non-existent quotes in quotation marks (second link in the spamming example has an example of this).
Yeah, I really disagree with this:
My understanding is that those of us who refer to the is/ought divide aren’t saying that a science of how humans feel about what humans call morality is impossible. It is possible, but it’s not the same thing as a science of objective good and bad. The is/ought divide is about whether one can derive moral ‘truths’ (oughts) from facts (ises), not about whether you can develop a good model of what people feel are moral truths. We’ll be able to do the latter with advances in technology, but no one can do the former without begging the question by slipping in an implicit moral basis through the back door. In this case I think the author of that blog post did that by assuming that fitness-enhancing moral intuitions are The Good And True ones.
“Objective” good and bad require an answer to the question “good and bad for what?”—OR—“what is the objective of objective good and bad?”
My answer to that question is the same as Eli’s—goals or volition.
My argument is that since a) having goals and volition is good for survival; b) cooperating is good for goals and volition; and c) morality appears to be about promoting cooperation—that human morality is evolving down the attractor that is “objective” good and bad for cooperation which is part of the attractor for what is good for goals and volition.
The EXplicit moral basis that I am PROCLAIMING (not slipping through the back door) is that cooperation is GOOD for goals and volition (i.e. the morality of an action is determined by it’s effect upon cooperation).
PLEASE come back and comment on the blog. This comment is good enough that I will be copying it there as well (especially since my karma has been zeroed out here).
(http://becominggaia.wordpress.com)
I’m not sure that I understand your comment. I can understand the individual paragraphs taken one by one, but I don’t think I understand whatever its overall message is.
(On a side note, you needn’t worry about your karma for the time being; it can’t go any lower than 0, and you can still post comments with 0 karma.)
It can go lower than 0; it just won’t display lower than 0.
Yup, I’ve been way down in the negative karma.
My bad. I was going by past experience with seeing other people’s karma drop to zero and made a flaky inference because I never saw it go below that myself.
Do me a favor and check out my blog at http://becominggaia.wordpress.com. I’ve clearly annoyed someone (and it’s quite clear whom) enough that all my posts quickly pick up enough of a negative score to be below the threshold. It’s a very effective censoring mechanism and, at this point, I really don’t see any reason why I should ever attempt to post here again. Nice “community”.
I don’t think you are getting voted down out of censorship. You are getting voted down for as far as I can tell four reasons: 1) You don’t explain yourself very well. 2) You repeatedly link to your blog in a borderline spammish fashion. Examples are here and here. In replies to the second one you were explicitly asked not to blogspam and yet continued to do so. 3) You’ve insulted people repeatedly (second link above) and personalized discussions. You’ve had posts which had no content other than to insult and complain about the community. At least one of those posts was in response to an actually reasoned statement. See this example- http://lesswrong.com/lw/2bi/open_thread_june_2010_part_2/251o 4) You’ve put non-existent quotes in quotation marks (second link in the spamming example has an example of this).
Brief feedback:
Your views are quite a bit like those of Stefan Pernar. http://rationalmorality.info/
However, they are not very much like those of the people here.
I expect that most of the people here just think you are confused and wrong.
You’re not making any sense to me.