Morality consists of courses of action to achieve a goal or goals, and the goal or goals themselves. Game theory, evolutionary biology, and other areas of study can help choose courses of action, and they can explain why we have the goals we have, but they can’t explain why we “ought” to have a given goal or goals. If you believe that a god created everything except itself, but including morality, then said god presumably can ground morality simply by virtue of having created it.
Game theory, evolutionary biology, and other areas of study can help choose courses of action, and they can explain why we have the goals we have, but they can’t explain why we “ought” to have a given goal or goals.
Yeah, that is the dominant view, but Gauthier actually attempts to answer the question “why be moral?” (not only the question of “what is moral?”) using game-theoretic concepts. In short, his answer is that being moral is rational. I don’t remember whether or not he tries to answer the question “why be rational?”; I haven’t read Morals by Agreement in years.
There are (at least) two meaning for “why ought we be moral”:
“Why should an entity without goals choose to follow goals”, or, more generally, “Why should an entity without goals choose [anything]”,
and, “Why should an entity with a top level goal of X discard this in favor of a top level goal of Y.”
I can imagine answers to the second question (it could be that explicitly replacing X with Y results in achieving X better than if you don’t; this is one driver of extremism in many areas), but it seems clear that the first question admits of no attack.
Morality consists of courses of action to achieve a goal or goals, and the goal or goals themselves. Game theory, evolutionary biology, and other areas of study can help choose courses of action, and they can explain why we have the goals we have, but they can’t explain why we “ought” to have a given goal or goals. If you believe that a god created everything except itself, but including morality, then said god presumably can ground morality simply by virtue of having created it.
Yeah, that is the dominant view, but Gauthier actually attempts to answer the question “why be moral?” (not only the question of “what is moral?”) using game-theoretic concepts. In short, his answer is that being moral is rational. I don’t remember whether or not he tries to answer the question “why be rational?”; I haven’t read Morals by Agreement in years.
There are (at least) two meaning for “why ought we be moral”:
“Why should an entity without goals choose to follow goals”, or, more generally, “Why should an entity without goals choose [anything]”,
and, “Why should an entity with a top level goal of X discard this in favor of a top level goal of Y.”
I can imagine answers to the second question (it could be that explicitly replacing X with Y results in achieving X better than if you don’t; this is one driver of extremism in many areas), but it seems clear that the first question admits of no attack.
An entity without goals would not be reading Gauthier’s book.