Found a brief summary of Ree’s book—guess they knew each other!
he Origin of the Moral Sensations was largely written in the autumn of 1877 in Sorrento, where Rée and Nietzsche both worked by invitation of Malwida von Meysenbug. The book sought to answer two questions. First, Rée attempted to explain the occurrence of altruistic feelings in human beings. Second, Rée tried to explain the interpretive process which denoted altruistic feelings as moral. Reiterating the conclusions of Psychological Observations, Rée claimed altruism was an innate human drive that over the course of centuries has been strengthened by selection.
Main point: Ree was interested in altruism, and believed it was an evolutionary selected for instinct.
Published in 1877, The Origin of the Moral Sensations was Rée’s second book. Its standpoint, Rée announced in the foreword, was inductive. Rée first observed the empirical phenomena he thought constituted man’s moral nature and then looked into their origin. Rée proceeded from the premise that we feel that some actions to be good and others to be evil. From the latter came the guilty conscience. Rée also followed many philosophers in rejecting free will. The error of free will, Rée claims, lies behind the development of the feeling of justice:
Main point: I can see why Nietzsche reacted badly to these arguments, but wasn’t offended by them. Ree worked backwards from categories of morals he’d made up, so that was kind of an issue, in his searching for an explanation to back up his assumptions. If you don’t have good judgment on these things, like Niezsche did, this can get ridiculous very quickly. He also seems to think our sense of morality is something we emotionally feel about actions, which seems not the best assumption, and that the guilty conscience comes after these intuitions instead of being intertwined? It was probably more sophisticated than that in the book. But we’re unable to control these feelings, and shouldn’t feel guilty, because we can’t choose anyway, but we feel we choose the wrong thing, and that when this happens, it has to be remedied—so we crave justice. It’s not clear if these are reasoning errors or more like evolutionary intuitive/emotional errors.
“The feeling of justice thus arises out of two errors, namely, because the punishments inflicted by authorities and educators appear as acts of retribution, and because people believe in the freedom of the will.”
Oh. Okay. So basically since kids are yelled at and told they are responsible for doing bad things, they assume this is true and they deserve what they have coming. This seems kind of all over the place. Authority figures feel some actions are bad, and treat kids as thought that is the case and they can choose not to do them, and this is credible to the kids because they also innately feel these actions are bad and that they have choice. Therefore they see the punishment as necessary and logical.
Rée rejected metaphysical explanations of good and evil; he thought that the best explanations were those of offered by Darwin and Lamarck, who had traced moral phenomena back to their natural causes. Rée argued that our moral sentiments were the result of changes that had occurred over the course of many generations. Like Lamarck and Darwin, Rée argued that acquired habits could be passed to later generations as innate characteristics. As an acquired habit, altruistic behavior eventually became an innate characteristic. Altruistic behavior was so beneficial, Rée claimed, that it came to be praised unconditionally, as something good in itself, apart from its outcomes.
This sounds like it would be “moral foundations theory” or something, but this really doesn’t seem to have developed reasoning about which traits would evolve from certain natural causes. Maybe the summary just doesn’t bother to say. But he doesn’t seem able to come up with the idea that altruism would have evolutionary benefits, although it doesn’t seem like this idea would have been hard to generate even at the time, as animals cooperate. Actually, I think I misunderstood, and he did make some evolutionary argument. But basically we found altruistic people so attractive that even when unnecessary, it was selected for—overly altruistic people were selected for, even if it led to bad outcomes, because it is itself an impressive virtue. I can see why Nietzsche would freak out about this.
Main point: Ree was interested in altruism, and believed it was an evolutionary selected for instinct.
Main point: I can see why Nietzsche reacted badly to these arguments, but wasn’t offended by them. Ree worked backwards from categories of morals he’d made up, so that was kind of an issue, in his searching for an explanation to back up his assumptions. If you don’t have good judgment on these things, like Niezsche did, this can get ridiculous very quickly. He also seems to think our sense of morality is something we emotionally feel about actions, which seems not the best assumption, and that the guilty conscience comes after these intuitions instead of being intertwined? It was probably more sophisticated than that in the book. But we’re unable to control these feelings, and shouldn’t feel guilty, because we can’t choose anyway, but we feel we choose the wrong thing, and that when this happens, it has to be remedied—so we crave justice. It’s not clear if these are reasoning errors or more like evolutionary intuitive/emotional errors.
Oh. Okay. So basically since kids are yelled at and told they are responsible for doing bad things, they assume this is true and they deserve what they have coming. This seems kind of all over the place. Authority figures feel some actions are bad, and treat kids as thought that is the case and they can choose not to do them, and this is credible to the kids because they also innately feel these actions are bad and that they have choice. Therefore they see the punishment as necessary and logical.
This sounds like it would be “moral foundations theory” or something, but this really doesn’t seem to have developed reasoning about which traits would evolve from certain natural causes. Maybe the summary just doesn’t bother to say. But he doesn’t seem able to come up with the idea that altruism would have evolutionary benefits, although it doesn’t seem like this idea would have been hard to generate even at the time, as animals cooperate. Actually, I think I misunderstood, and he did make some evolutionary argument. But basically we found altruistic people so attractive that even when unnecessary, it was selected for—overly altruistic people were selected for, even if it led to bad outcomes, because it is itself an impressive virtue. I can see why Nietzsche would freak out about this.