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.
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.