Wait a minute. This entire conversation begins with you conflating moral progress and directional evolution.
However, we don’t see very much devolution happening on this planet—which explains why I think moral progress is happening.
Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?
Then I say: what you call good biological changes other organisms would experience as negative changes and vice versa.
You throw out the thesis about evolution having a direction because life fills more and more niches and is more and more complex. If those are things that are important to you, great. But that doesn’t mean any particular organism should be excited about evolution or that there is a fact of the matter about things getting better. If you have the adaptations to survive in a complex, niche-saturated environment good for your DNA! If you don’t, you’re dead. If you like complexity things are getting better. If you don’t things are getting worse. But the ‘getting better’ or ‘getting worse’ is in your head. All that is really happening is that things are getting more complex.
And this is the point about the ‘shifting moral Zeitgeist’ (which is a perfectly fine turn of phrase btw, because it doesn’t imply the current moral Zeitgeist is any truer than the last one). Maybe you can identify trends in how values change but that doesn’t make the new values better. But since the moral Zeitgeist is defined by the moral beliefs most people hold, most people will always see moral history up to that point in time as progressive. Similarly, most young people will experience moral progress the rest of their lives as the old die out.
I think there is some kind of muddle occurring here.
I cited the material about directional evolution in response to the claim that: “Evolution does not have a direction.”
It was not to do with morality, it was to do with whether evolution is directional. I thought I made that pretty clear by quoting the specific point I was responding to.
Evolution is a gigantic optimization mechanism, a fitness maximizer. It operates in a relatively benign environment that permits cumulative evolution—thus the rather obvious evolutionary arrow.
Re: “Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?”
Ethics is part of biology, so there is at least some link. Beyond that, I am not sure what sort of analogy you are suggesting. Maybe in some evil parallel universe, morality gets progressively nastier over time. However, I am more concerned with the situation in the world we observe.
The section you quoted is out of context. I was actually explaining how the idea that “moral progress cannot fail to occur” was not a logical consequence of moral evolution—because of the possibility of moral devolution. It really is possible to look back and conclude that your ancestors had better moral standards.
There is no reason to associate complexity with moral progress.
Sure. The evidence for moral progress is rather different—e.g. see:
“Richard Dawkins—The Shifting Moral Zeitgeist”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz6B8BFkb4
Wait a minute. This entire conversation begins with you conflating moral progress and directional evolution.
Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?
Then I say: what you call good biological changes other organisms would experience as negative changes and vice versa.
You throw out the thesis about evolution having a direction because life fills more and more niches and is more and more complex. If those are things that are important to you, great. But that doesn’t mean any particular organism should be excited about evolution or that there is a fact of the matter about things getting better. If you have the adaptations to survive in a complex, niche-saturated environment good for your DNA! If you don’t, you’re dead. If you like complexity things are getting better. If you don’t things are getting worse. But the ‘getting better’ or ‘getting worse’ is in your head. All that is really happening is that things are getting more complex.
And this is the point about the ‘shifting moral Zeitgeist’ (which is a perfectly fine turn of phrase btw, because it doesn’t imply the current moral Zeitgeist is any truer than the last one). Maybe you can identify trends in how values change but that doesn’t make the new values better. But since the moral Zeitgeist is defined by the moral beliefs most people hold, most people will always see moral history up to that point in time as progressive. Similarly, most young people will experience moral progress the rest of their lives as the old die out.
I think there is some kind of muddle occurring here.
I cited the material about directional evolution in response to the claim that: “Evolution does not have a direction.”
It was not to do with morality, it was to do with whether evolution is directional. I thought I made that pretty clear by quoting the specific point I was responding to.
Evolution is a gigantic optimization mechanism, a fitness maximizer. It operates in a relatively benign environment that permits cumulative evolution—thus the rather obvious evolutionary arrow.
Re: “Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?”
Ethics is part of biology, so there is at least some link. Beyond that, I am not sure what sort of analogy you are suggesting. Maybe in some evil parallel universe, morality gets progressively nastier over time. However, I am more concerned with the situation in the world we observe.
The section you quoted is out of context. I was actually explaining how the idea that “moral progress cannot fail to occur” was not a logical consequence of moral evolution—because of the possibility of moral devolution. It really is possible to look back and conclude that your ancestors had better moral standards.
We have already discussed the issue of whether organisms can be expected to see history as moral progress on this thread, starting with:
“If drift were a good hypothesis, steps “forwards” (from our POV) would be about as common as steps “backwards”.”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1m5/savulescu_genetically_enhance_humanity_or_face/1ffn