I think I’d agree with everything you said up until the last sentence. Our brains are, after all, what we do our thinking with. So everything good and bad about them should be studied in detail. I’m sure you’d scoff if I turned your statement around on other poorly evolved human features. Like, say, there’s no point in studying the stupid mechanism of the human eye, and that the eye is completely irrelevant to the subject of optics.
Nature exerts selective pressure against organisms that have a poor perception of their surroundings, but there is no equivalent selective pressure when it comes to morality. This is the reason why the difference between the human eye and the lion eye is not as significant as the difference between the human intuitions about morality and the lion’s intuitions about morality.
If evolution made the perception of the surroundings as wildly variable as that of morality across different species, I would have made an argument saying that we should not trust what we perceive and we should not bother to learn how our senses work. Similarly, if evolution had exerted selective pressure against immoral organisms, I would have agreed that we should trust our intuitions.
Nature exerts selective pressure against organisms that have a poor perception of their surroundings, but there is no equivalent selective pressure when it comes to morality.
What an absolutely wild theory!
Humans domination of the planet is totally mediated by the astonishing level of cooperation between humans. Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist even reports evidence that the ability to trade is an evolutionary adaptation of humans that is more unique to humans even than language is. Humans are able to live together in densities without killing each other in numbers orders of magnitude higher than other primates.
The evolutionarily value of an effective moral system seems overwhelmingly obvious to me, so it will be hard for me o realize where we might disagree.
My claims are: it is human morality that is the basic set of rules for humans to interact. With the right morality, our interaction leads to superior cooperation, superior productivity, and superior numbers. Any one of these would be enough to give the humans with the right morality an evolutionary advantage over humans with a less effective morality. For example if we didn’t have a highly developed respect for property, you couldn’t hire workers to do as many things: you would spend too much protecting your property from them. If we didn’t have such an orientation against doing violence against each other except under pretty limited circumstances, again, cooperative efforts would suffer a lot.
This is the reason why the difference between the human eye and the lion eye is not as significant as the difference between the human intuitions about morality and the lion’s intuitions about morality.
It certainly seems the case that our moral intutions align much better with dogs and primates than with lions.
But plenty of humans have decimated their enemies, and armies even till this day tend to rape every woman in sight.
But of course evolution made perception of the surroundings as wildly variable as morality. There are creatures with zero perception, and creatures with better vision (or heat perception, or magnetic or electric, or hearing or touch...) than we’ll ever have. Even if humans were the only species with morality, arguing about variability doesn’t hold much weight. How many things metabolize in arsenic? There’s all kinds of singular evolutions that this argument seems to be unable to handle just because of the singularity of the case.
I think I’d agree with everything you said up until the last sentence. Our brains are, after all, what we do our thinking with. So everything good and bad about them should be studied in detail. I’m sure you’d scoff if I turned your statement around on other poorly evolved human features. Like, say, there’s no point in studying the stupid mechanism of the human eye, and that the eye is completely irrelevant to the subject of optics.
Nature exerts selective pressure against organisms that have a poor perception of their surroundings, but there is no equivalent selective pressure when it comes to morality. This is the reason why the difference between the human eye and the lion eye is not as significant as the difference between the human intuitions about morality and the lion’s intuitions about morality.
If evolution made the perception of the surroundings as wildly variable as that of morality across different species, I would have made an argument saying that we should not trust what we perceive and we should not bother to learn how our senses work. Similarly, if evolution had exerted selective pressure against immoral organisms, I would have agreed that we should trust our intuitions.
What an absolutely wild theory!
Humans domination of the planet is totally mediated by the astonishing level of cooperation between humans. Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist even reports evidence that the ability to trade is an evolutionary adaptation of humans that is more unique to humans even than language is. Humans are able to live together in densities without killing each other in numbers orders of magnitude higher than other primates.
The evolutionarily value of an effective moral system seems overwhelmingly obvious to me, so it will be hard for me o realize where we might disagree.
My claims are: it is human morality that is the basic set of rules for humans to interact. With the right morality, our interaction leads to superior cooperation, superior productivity, and superior numbers. Any one of these would be enough to give the humans with the right morality an evolutionary advantage over humans with a less effective morality. For example if we didn’t have a highly developed respect for property, you couldn’t hire workers to do as many things: you would spend too much protecting your property from them. If we didn’t have such an orientation against doing violence against each other except under pretty limited circumstances, again, cooperative efforts would suffer a lot.
It certainly seems the case that our moral intutions align much better with dogs and primates than with lions.
But plenty of humans have decimated their enemies, and armies even till this day tend to rape every woman in sight.
But of course evolution made perception of the surroundings as wildly variable as morality. There are creatures with zero perception, and creatures with better vision (or heat perception, or magnetic or electric, or hearing or touch...) than we’ll ever have. Even if humans were the only species with morality, arguing about variability doesn’t hold much weight. How many things metabolize in arsenic? There’s all kinds of singular evolutions that this argument seems to be unable to handle just because of the singularity of the case.