Eisegetes: ”Moral” is a category of meaning whose content we determine through social negotiations, produced by some combination of each person’s inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers, and the views and attitudes expressed more generally throughout their society.
From a practical POV, without any ambitions to look under the hood, we can just draw this “ordinary language defense line”, as I’d call it. Where it gets interesting from an Evolutionary Psychology POV is exactly those “inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers”. The part about “social negotiations” is just so much noise mixed into the underlying signal.
Unfortunately, as I believe we have shown, there is a circularity trap here: When we try to partition our biases into categories (e.g. “moral” and “amoral”), the partitioning depends on the definition, which depends on the partitioning, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I’ll try a resolution further down.
Oh, I think a large subset of moral choices are moral precisely because they do benefit our genes—we say that someone who is a good parent is moral, not immoral, despite the genetic advantages conferred by being a good parent.
Well, this is where I used to prod people with my personal definition. I’d say that good parenting is just Evolutionary Good Sense (TM), so there’s no need to muddy the water by sticking the label “moral” to it. Ordinary language does, but I think it’s noise (or rather, in this case, a systematic error; more below).
I think some common denominators are altruism (favoring tribe over self, with tribe defined at various scales), virtuous motives, prudence, and compassion. Note that these are all features that relate to our role as social animals—you could say that morality is a conceptual outgrowth of survival strategies that rely on group action (and hence, become a way to avoid collective action problems and other examples of individual rationality that are suboptimal when viewed from the group’s perspective).
I think the ordinary language definition of moral is useless for Evolutionary Psychology and must either be radically redefined in this context or dropped alltogether and replaced by something new (with the benefit of avoiding a mixup with the ordinary language sense of the word).
If we take for granted that we are the product of evolutionary processes fed by random variations, we can claim that (to a first approximation) everything about us is there because it furthers its own survival. Specifically, our genetic makeup is the way it is because it tends to produce successful survival machines.
1) Personal egoism exists because it is a useful and simple approximation of gene egoism.
2) For important instances of personal egoism going against gene egoism, we have built-in exceptions (e.g. altrusim towards own children and some other social adaptions).
3) But biasing behaviour using evolutionary adaption is slow. Therefore it would be useful to provide a survival machine with a mechanism that is able to override personal egoism using culturally transmitted bias. This proclaimed mechanism is at the core of my definition of morality (and, incidentally, a reasonable source of group selection effects).
4) Traditional definitions of morality are flawed because they confuse/conflate 2 and 3 and oppose them to 1. This duality is deeply mistaken, and must be rooted out if we are to make any headway in understanding ourselves.
Btw, the fun thing about 3 is that it does not only allow us to overcome personal egoism biases (1) but also inclusive fitness biases (2). So morality is exactly that thing that allows us to laugh in the face of our selfish genes and commit truly altrustic acts.
It is an adaption to override adaptions.
Eisegetes:
”Moral” is a category of meaning whose content we determine through social negotiations, produced by some combination of each person’s inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers, and the views and attitudes expressed more generally throughout their society.
From a practical POV, without any ambitions to look under the hood, we can just draw this “ordinary language defense line”, as I’d call it. Where it gets interesting from an Evolutionary Psychology POV is exactly those “inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers”. The part about “social negotiations” is just so much noise mixed into the underlying signal.
Unfortunately, as I believe we have shown, there is a circularity trap here: When we try to partition our biases into categories (e.g. “moral” and “amoral”), the partitioning depends on the definition, which depends on the partitioning, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I’ll try a resolution further down.
Oh, I think a large subset of moral choices are moral precisely because they do benefit our genes—we say that someone who is a good parent is moral, not immoral, despite the genetic advantages conferred by being a good parent.
Well, this is where I used to prod people with my personal definition. I’d say that good parenting is just Evolutionary Good Sense (TM), so there’s no need to muddy the water by sticking the label “moral” to it. Ordinary language does, but I think it’s noise (or rather, in this case, a systematic error; more below).
I think some common denominators are altruism (favoring tribe over self, with tribe defined at various scales), virtuous motives, prudence, and compassion. Note that these are all features that relate to our role as social animals—you could say that morality is a conceptual outgrowth of survival strategies that rely on group action (and hence, become a way to avoid collective action problems and other examples of individual rationality that are suboptimal when viewed from the group’s perspective).
I think the ordinary language definition of moral is useless for Evolutionary Psychology and must either be radically redefined in this context or dropped alltogether and replaced by something new (with the benefit of avoiding a mixup with the ordinary language sense of the word).
If we take for granted that we are the product of evolutionary processes fed by random variations, we can claim that (to a first approximation) everything about us is there because it furthers its own survival. Specifically, our genetic makeup is the way it is because it tends to produce successful survival machines.
1) Personal egoism exists because it is a useful and simple approximation of gene egoism.
2) For important instances of personal egoism going against gene egoism, we have built-in exceptions (e.g. altrusim towards own children and some other social adaptions).
3) But biasing behaviour using evolutionary adaption is slow. Therefore it would be useful to provide a survival machine with a mechanism that is able to override personal egoism using culturally transmitted bias. This proclaimed mechanism is at the core of my definition of morality (and, incidentally, a reasonable source of group selection effects).
4) Traditional definitions of morality are flawed because they confuse/conflate 2 and 3 and oppose them to 1. This duality is deeply mistaken, and must be rooted out if we are to make any headway in understanding ourselves.
Btw, the fun thing about 3 is that it does not only allow us to overcome personal egoism biases (1) but also inclusive fitness biases (2). So morality is exactly that thing that allows us to laugh in the face of our selfish genes and commit truly altrustic acts.
It is an adaption to override adaptions.
Regards, Frank