Is there anyone who actually believes in moral darwinism under that self-description, or is it just a straw man position that people like to claim as the underpinning of the ideology of people they don’t like?
I think that the quote is best read as a critique of any appeal to nature. Maybe you don’t see such brazen appeals to nature in careful arguments, but they seem common enough in informal arguments.
Many people really do seem to think that you’ve made a substantive point about what we ought to do when you point out that something happens “in nature”. For example, I knew someone once who was uncomfortable with tolerating homosexuality, but who felt obliged to seriously reconsider his position when he learned that animals sometimes exhibit homosexual behavior. I was in the strange position of trying to explain why he ought not to be persuaded by that argument, even though it led him to what I thought was the right conclusion.
Did you then tell him about chimpanzee war, murder, and infanticide?
The appeal to nature is very common, and I’d rather get rid of that than change someone’s mind about same-sex behavior, which seems to be a terminal value difference anyway.
I think that the quote is best read as a critique of any appeal to nature. Maybe you don’t see such brazen appeals to nature in careful arguments, but they seem common enough in informal arguments.
Many people really do seem to think that you’ve made a substantive point about what we ought to do when you point out that something happens “in nature”. For example, I knew someone once who was uncomfortable with tolerating homosexuality, but who felt obliged to seriously reconsider his position when he learned that animals sometimes exhibit homosexual behavior. I was in the strange position of trying to explain why he ought not to be persuaded by that argument, even though it led him to what I thought was the right conclusion.
Did you then tell him about chimpanzee war, murder, and infanticide?
The appeal to nature is very common, and I’d rather get rid of that than change someone’s mind about same-sex behavior, which seems to be a terminal value difference anyway.