I thought it was a sort of mundane statement that morality is a set of evolved heuristics that make cooperation rather than defection possible, even when it is ostensibly against the person’s interests in the moment.
Basically, a resolution of the Parfit’s hitchhiker problem is inducing morality into the setup: it is immoral not to pick up a dying hitchhiker, and it is dishonorable to renege on the promise to pay. If you dig into the decision-theoretic logic of it, you can figure out that in repeated Parfit’s hitchhiker setup you are better off picking up/paying up, but humans are not great at that, so evolutionarily we ended up with morality as a crutch.
I thought it was a sort of mundane statement that morality is a set of evolved heuristics that make cooperation rather than defection possible, even when it is ostensibly against the person’s interests in the moment.
Evolutionary, and other naturalistic accounts, aren’t quite a slam dunk, because they leave the open question—the question of what is actually moral, beyond what you have been told is moral—open. A society might tell its members to pillage and enslave other socieities, and that would be good for the society, but it can still be criticised from a universalistic perspective.
The question of what is the prevailing, de facto morality is different to the question of what is the best-adapated form of the prevailing morality, given the constraints a society is under. But that question itself is itself different to the question of the ideal morality without any material constraints—but note that such morality could be a “luxury belief”, an unimplementable ideal.
I thought it was a sort of mundane statement that morality is a set of evolved heuristics that make cooperation rather than defection possible, even when it is ostensibly against the person’s interests in the moment.
Basically, a resolution of the Parfit’s hitchhiker problem is inducing morality into the setup: it is immoral not to pick up a dying hitchhiker, and it is dishonorable to renege on the promise to pay. If you dig into the decision-theoretic logic of it, you can figure out that in repeated Parfit’s hitchhiker setup you are better off picking up/paying up, but humans are not great at that, so evolutionarily we ended up with morality as a crutch.
Evolutionary, and other naturalistic accounts, aren’t quite a slam dunk, because they leave the open question—the question of what is actually moral, beyond what you have been told is moral—open. A society might tell its members to pillage and enslave other socieities, and that would be good for the society, but it can still be criticised from a universalistic perspective.
The question of what is the prevailing, de facto morality is different to the question of what is the best-adapated form of the prevailing morality, given the constraints a society is under. But that question itself is itself different to the question of the ideal morality without any material constraints—but note that such morality could be a “luxury belief”, an unimplementable ideal.
that is what a moral realist would say
To say there is a question is not to insist it has an answer.