Forgive me, but I’m still not sure I understand. Not least because the last of my propositions seems awfully like what a utilitarian would say about utility, but you say (1) none of my propositions matches fitnessist claims and (2) fitnessism is a moral theory just like utilitarianism.
If I want to know whether someone’s a utilitarian, I ask questions like:
Do they tend to approve of actions conducive to higher overall utility, and disapprove of the reverse?
And are they largely unmoved by other would-be moral considerations (e.g., Kantian conceptions of duty, maximizing personal virtuousness) except in so far as they turn out to foster higher utility?
Do they themselves appear to be trying to act so as to increase overall utility?
Even when doing so conflicts with what would otherwise seem their own interests?
Do they try to get other people to act in ways that increase overall utility?
So, if “fitnessism” is the same kind of thing and you are a fitnessist, should I conclude that you …
… tend to approve of actions that increase the agent’s genetic fitness, and disapprove of ones that don’t;
… care little about other allegedly ethical principles, unless they match up with this;
… tend to act in ways that increase your own genetic fitness;
(… even if doing so makes your own life markedly less pleasant)
… try to get other people to do likewise?
For example:
Suppose I am a man, I am currently without a sexual partner, and I find myself in a position to rape a woman who, I happen to know, is inflexibly opposed to abortion; and I can do it with negligible risk of getting caught or injured. Would you say that I ought to do that?
Or suppose I am a woman and have no children yet, and I discover that I have a medical condition that means that getting pregnant has a 50% chance of killing me. Would you say that I should attempt to get pregnant anyway, that being the only way to pass on my genes?
Or suppose I am childless and infertile. Do you hold that I should not care at all what I do?
(Suppose, in each case, that I have no living relations close enough and in enough need of my help that I can do much for my inclusive fitness by focusing on them rather than on my own progeny.)
Would you, in those situations, be likely to act in the manner that maximizes your genetic fitness?
Perhaps I’m wrong in saying that a fitnessist should be expected to approve of other people’s fitness-maximizing actions, and to advocate fitness-maximization in others. After all, while a utilitarian is (allegedly, at least) trying to maximize a kinda-objective quantity that’s meant to be the same whoever is doing the maximizing, fitnessism (AIUI) explicitly says that your fitness is not my fitness and each of us is (should be?) maximizing our own. And often (usually?) your fitness and mine will conflict more than they concur.
But if so, then I find it hard to see fitnessism as an ethical theory. (I have the same problem with, e.g., hedonist egoism.) If being a fitnessist just means aiming to increase one’s own genetic fitness, isn’t it just a preference like liking to eat chocolate?
In what ways does fitnessism go beyond the following statement: “People (and other animals) have a tendency to act in ways that in evolutionary history have resulted in more copies of the genes they carry.”?
No worries! I appreciate that you ask questions. First I will make some clarifications about the four points in your previous comment.
The proposition: “People and/or other animals actually act so as to maximize genetic fitness” is, as you stated, not true. There is no disagreement about this.
We do not “get from there to” ethical fitnessism. In fact, we do not violate Hume’s law at all, i.e., we do not deduce any normative ethical statement from a set of only factual statements.
The statement that: “‘Acting so as to maximize genetic fitness’ is a principle that approximates actual people’s and cultures’ ethical systems, but unlike them has some kind of scientific underpinning” is also neither true nor claimed by ethical fitnessism.
The norm that: “We should act so as to maximize genetic fitness” is not really a fitnessist norm, since fitnessism prescribes actions for individuals (and not so much for “us”) and always specifies who’s fitness and what kind of fitness we are talking about, namely the behavioural fitness of the individual in question. Instead, please see my original response to DeVliegendeHollander’s comment on the definition of ethical fitnessism and the rightness criterion based on Dawkins’s central theorem of the extended phenotype. The question about the word ‘should’ was addressed in my previous comment to you.
I hope this made everything clearer.
Since I am a fitnessist you should conclude that I:
approve of actions that increase my behavioural fitness, and disapprove of ones that do not;
* care nothing about other ethical principles, unless they match up with this.
tend to act in ways that increase my behavioural fitness, even if doing so makes my own life markedly less pleasant.
tend to try to get other people to increase my own behavioural fitness.
Now to the examples:
Ethical fitnessism is actually not about having as many children as possible; rather it is about the long term survival of one’s behavioural genes. The long term survival of an individual’s behavioural genes can be achieved in many ways, especially considering that an individual shares behavioural genes with many other individuals. For instance, all humans are closely related to all (and socially dependant on many) other humans, making humans exceptionally important to each other, but even other species are important due to our common heritage and shared behavioural genes. So in your example you should also consider the harm and possible injury caused to the woman and the increased risk to your female relatives, friends and children, especially. Socially and reproductively successful humans, both men and women, share a common interest in curbing violence and upholding the rule of law. Moreover fitnessism does not tell us to simply follow the instincts which have evolved due to natural selection. Since we humans have radically changed our environment with the emergence of modern society and technology, and since we have such a decisive impact on the future of life on Earth, we have to think much further ahead and afar than other animals. To exploit other individuals for selfish short-term gains at the expense of what we hold dear and valuable in the long term, is morally wrong. Rather than maximizing the number of her own offspring, a fitnessist acts so as to increase the probability of the long-term existence of the body of organic life which we are all part of and related to.
It simply is not “the only way” for you to pass on your genes, since you are not an alien. As explained in the previous example you can support the survival of your behavioural genes in other related individuals.
Of course you should care! You are related to every other human on the planet. But if you instead truly are an alien and therefore are genetically unrelated to life on Earth, you should still try to survive for as long as possible, because that is the behaviour which is favoured by natural selection, since your genes are inside your own body.
Ethical fitnessism states that an individual should maximize the behavioural fitness of this individual, not short term but in endless time (if this is the behaviour which tends to be maximized as a consequence of natural selection). If my behavioural fitness is in conflict with yours or not is a matter of to which extent we share behavioural genes. Humans share genes to a great extent with each other, so I believe that humans’ indexical Darwinian self-interests coincide more than they are in conflict. This leads to a decision method which is not treated in the original link, namely fitnessist contractarianism, which is universalizable. Fitnessist contractarianism is explained in “Ethical Fitnessism. The Ethic of the Fittest Behaviour”, which is in Swedish, I am afraid. A short explanation is that it is a method for human social and political decision making when humans are acting in accordance with their own Darwinian self-interest. To find common ground for social and political decision making for closely related individuals, such as humans, is clearly possible. For example, avoiding nuclear war seems to benefit each individual’s behavioural fitness, just as the common prosperity of humans seems to do.
As for ethical fitnessism being a moral theory, I think your argument is based on meta-ethics, wherefore I recommend that you read the original blog post that I linked to, giving extra attention to part 2: “The Non-universalizable Ethic of the Predator and the Quarry”. Rightness criteria are indexical, but decision methods are universalizable.
Of course this is related to the scientific question if “objective” moral values exist or not. I believe that no such values exist, since no such values have ever been observed, nor are necessary to explain anything in the natural world. Using Occam’s razor, I deny their existence. Instead I believe that “subjective” moral values exist, since I believe that such values are observed every day, when for example studying the behaviour of humans or other living organisms.
Regarding your last question, ethical fitnessism states that an individual should maximize his or her own behavioural fitness. Ethical fitnessism prescribes how an individual should act, wherefore it is a normative ethical statement. But the statement:
People (and other animals) have a tendency to act in ways that in evolutionary history have resulted in more copies of the genes they carry.
If you hold a position that affects only your own actions and your opinions of them, I don’t see much reason for calling it an ethical system. I read the blog post; that second section defends acting on non-universalizable principles, but doesn’t so far as I can see defend thinking of them as moral principles and that’s what I’m casting doubt on.
For clarity: I am also a moral nonrealist, and my doubts about the moral-theory-ness of fitnessism aren’t because it doesn’t involve a claim that its values are Objectively Right And Good. Rather: I think a moral theory is something that guides moral judgements by an adherent, and one feature of moral judgements is that they are applied to other people as well as to oneself. Something that affects only its bearer’s own behaviour I would call a “preference” or a “motivation” or something of the kind, even if it gets expressed using the word “should”.
I agree that if the principle is “maximize long-term number of copies of genes that influence my behaviour” then the counterintuitive consequences I described don’t clearly follow. (I’m not sure they don’t follow, though. The answer may depend on exactly what you’re prepared to count as a “behavioural gene”.)
It’s true that most of my genes are shared with other human beings, even ones I wouldn’t normally think of as related to me. But it’s also true that a lot of my genes are shared with, say, pomegranates. Your restriction to “behavioural” genes doesn’t (I think) make that problem go away; only in popular magazine articles are there genes for behaviours in any very strong sense; how sure are you that there are no genes you share with (some or all) pomegranates that have an effect on your behaviour? If it turns out that there are some, would you start regarding it as an important obligation to increase the number of pomegranates (at a rate, perhaps, of 1000 pomegranates per human life)?
I suspect that if we pay attention (as you do) to the very long term, it actually matters rather little in practice what we care about there—in particular, it’s likely that much the same actions now maximize long-term human happiness, long-term human numbers, long-term number of books-or-equivalent written, etc. (A similar thing happens in computer game-playing: the further ahead you look, the less the details of your evaluation function matter.) So it may be hard to distinguish between fitnessism and almost anything else, in terms of the actual decisions it provokes...
As a fitnessist I certainly do not “hold a position that affects only [my] own actions and [my] opinions of them”. I not only evaluate my own actions, but have opinions of the actions performed by other individuals as well. These opinions are based on how other individuals affect the survival of my behavioural genes. In that sense I pass moral judgement on others, like they pass moral judgement on me.
The fundamental question for any moral theory to answer is “Which actions should be performed?” and ethical fitnessism fully answers that question, although in an indexical fashion. The central question to answer is “Which actions should I myself perform?”, since that question is relevant to what I directly am in control of, namely my own body. The actions of other individuals I can, furthermore, only affect by my own actions, for example by what I say.
The principle is actually not “maximize long-term number of copies of genes that influence my behaviour”. The survival of my behavioural genes is directly linked to how long they survive and only indirectly linked to how many they are.
What I am “prepared to count as a ‘behavioural gene’” is not really the issue, rather the issue is what science counts as a behavioural gene. The Extended Phenotype [O.U.P., 1982] gives a good idea.
There is no problem with being related to pomegranates. I do believe that humans share behavioral genes with them, but that does not mean that focusing on the production of pomegranates would maximize the survival of my behavioural genes. Such a production would seem to be a short-sighted and narrow-minded behaviour and probably not the behaviour which natural selection tends to maximize.
Perhaps there today does not seem to be much difference between maximizing the survival of one’s behavioural genes and maximizing “long-term human happiness” or “long-term human numbers”, but over time the difference will add up and show itself. For example, the difference would be apparent when we create new entertainment technology so well adapted to our prehistoric minds and bodies that there is no way for hedonists to resist the urge of such endless happiness, or when we evolve beyond humans, when my behavioural genes are carried on into new species.
On a theoretical level ethical fitnessism has stronger arguments than have the moral theories of maximizing long-term human happiness or long-term human numbers. Fitnessism lacks neither hedonism, altruism, intuitiveness, nor consideration of future generations, and is complete, consistent, to the purpose and non-dependent on indoctrination. The application of any other moral theory through its behaviour is per definition evolutionarily self-defeating and undermines its own long-term existence.
Forgive me, but I’m still not sure I understand. Not least because the last of my propositions seems awfully like what a utilitarian would say about utility, but you say (1) none of my propositions matches fitnessist claims and (2) fitnessism is a moral theory just like utilitarianism.
If I want to know whether someone’s a utilitarian, I ask questions like:
Do they tend to approve of actions conducive to higher overall utility, and disapprove of the reverse?
And are they largely unmoved by other would-be moral considerations (e.g., Kantian conceptions of duty, maximizing personal virtuousness) except in so far as they turn out to foster higher utility?
Do they themselves appear to be trying to act so as to increase overall utility?
Even when doing so conflicts with what would otherwise seem their own interests?
Do they try to get other people to act in ways that increase overall utility?
So, if “fitnessism” is the same kind of thing and you are a fitnessist, should I conclude that you …
… tend to approve of actions that increase the agent’s genetic fitness, and disapprove of ones that don’t;
… care little about other allegedly ethical principles, unless they match up with this;
… tend to act in ways that increase your own genetic fitness;
(… even if doing so makes your own life markedly less pleasant)
… try to get other people to do likewise?
For example:
Suppose I am a man, I am currently without a sexual partner, and I find myself in a position to rape a woman who, I happen to know, is inflexibly opposed to abortion; and I can do it with negligible risk of getting caught or injured. Would you say that I ought to do that?
Or suppose I am a woman and have no children yet, and I discover that I have a medical condition that means that getting pregnant has a 50% chance of killing me. Would you say that I should attempt to get pregnant anyway, that being the only way to pass on my genes?
Or suppose I am childless and infertile. Do you hold that I should not care at all what I do?
(Suppose, in each case, that I have no living relations close enough and in enough need of my help that I can do much for my inclusive fitness by focusing on them rather than on my own progeny.)
Would you, in those situations, be likely to act in the manner that maximizes your genetic fitness?
Perhaps I’m wrong in saying that a fitnessist should be expected to approve of other people’s fitness-maximizing actions, and to advocate fitness-maximization in others. After all, while a utilitarian is (allegedly, at least) trying to maximize a kinda-objective quantity that’s meant to be the same whoever is doing the maximizing, fitnessism (AIUI) explicitly says that your fitness is not my fitness and each of us is (should be?) maximizing our own. And often (usually?) your fitness and mine will conflict more than they concur.
But if so, then I find it hard to see fitnessism as an ethical theory. (I have the same problem with, e.g., hedonist egoism.) If being a fitnessist just means aiming to increase one’s own genetic fitness, isn’t it just a preference like liking to eat chocolate?
In what ways does fitnessism go beyond the following statement: “People (and other animals) have a tendency to act in ways that in evolutionary history have resulted in more copies of the genes they carry.”?
No worries! I appreciate that you ask questions. First I will make some clarifications about the four points in your previous comment.
The proposition: “People and/or other animals actually act so as to maximize genetic fitness” is, as you stated, not true. There is no disagreement about this.
We do not “get from there to” ethical fitnessism. In fact, we do not violate Hume’s law at all, i.e., we do not deduce any normative ethical statement from a set of only factual statements.
The statement that: “‘Acting so as to maximize genetic fitness’ is a principle that approximates actual people’s and cultures’ ethical systems, but unlike them has some kind of scientific underpinning” is also neither true nor claimed by ethical fitnessism.
The norm that: “We should act so as to maximize genetic fitness” is not really a fitnessist norm, since fitnessism prescribes actions for individuals (and not so much for “us”) and always specifies who’s fitness and what kind of fitness we are talking about, namely the behavioural fitness of the individual in question. Instead, please see my original response to DeVliegendeHollander’s comment on the definition of ethical fitnessism and the rightness criterion based on Dawkins’s central theorem of the extended phenotype. The question about the word ‘should’ was addressed in my previous comment to you.
I hope this made everything clearer.
Since I am a fitnessist you should conclude that I:
approve of actions that increase my behavioural fitness, and disapprove of ones that do not;
tend to act in ways that increase my behavioural fitness, even if doing so makes my own life markedly less pleasant.
tend to try to get other people to increase my own behavioural fitness.
Now to the examples:
Ethical fitnessism is actually not about having as many children as possible; rather it is about the long term survival of one’s behavioural genes. The long term survival of an individual’s behavioural genes can be achieved in many ways, especially considering that an individual shares behavioural genes with many other individuals. For instance, all humans are closely related to all (and socially dependant on many) other humans, making humans exceptionally important to each other, but even other species are important due to our common heritage and shared behavioural genes. So in your example you should also consider the harm and possible injury caused to the woman and the increased risk to your female relatives, friends and children, especially. Socially and reproductively successful humans, both men and women, share a common interest in curbing violence and upholding the rule of law. Moreover fitnessism does not tell us to simply follow the instincts which have evolved due to natural selection. Since we humans have radically changed our environment with the emergence of modern society and technology, and since we have such a decisive impact on the future of life on Earth, we have to think much further ahead and afar than other animals. To exploit other individuals for selfish short-term gains at the expense of what we hold dear and valuable in the long term, is morally wrong. Rather than maximizing the number of her own offspring, a fitnessist acts so as to increase the probability of the long-term existence of the body of organic life which we are all part of and related to.
It simply is not “the only way” for you to pass on your genes, since you are not an alien. As explained in the previous example you can support the survival of your behavioural genes in other related individuals.
Of course you should care! You are related to every other human on the planet. But if you instead truly are an alien and therefore are genetically unrelated to life on Earth, you should still try to survive for as long as possible, because that is the behaviour which is favoured by natural selection, since your genes are inside your own body.
Ethical fitnessism states that an individual should maximize the behavioural fitness of this individual, not short term but in endless time (if this is the behaviour which tends to be maximized as a consequence of natural selection). If my behavioural fitness is in conflict with yours or not is a matter of to which extent we share behavioural genes. Humans share genes to a great extent with each other, so I believe that humans’ indexical Darwinian self-interests coincide more than they are in conflict. This leads to a decision method which is not treated in the original link, namely fitnessist contractarianism, which is universalizable. Fitnessist contractarianism is explained in “Ethical Fitnessism. The Ethic of the Fittest Behaviour”, which is in Swedish, I am afraid. A short explanation is that it is a method for human social and political decision making when humans are acting in accordance with their own Darwinian self-interest. To find common ground for social and political decision making for closely related individuals, such as humans, is clearly possible. For example, avoiding nuclear war seems to benefit each individual’s behavioural fitness, just as the common prosperity of humans seems to do.
As for ethical fitnessism being a moral theory, I think your argument is based on meta-ethics, wherefore I recommend that you read the original blog post that I linked to, giving extra attention to part 2: “The Non-universalizable Ethic of the Predator and the Quarry”. Rightness criteria are indexical, but decision methods are universalizable.
Of course this is related to the scientific question if “objective” moral values exist or not. I believe that no such values exist, since no such values have ever been observed, nor are necessary to explain anything in the natural world. Using Occam’s razor, I deny their existence. Instead I believe that “subjective” moral values exist, since I believe that such values are observed every day, when for example studying the behaviour of humans or other living organisms.
Regarding your last question, ethical fitnessism states that an individual should maximize his or her own behavioural fitness. Ethical fitnessism prescribes how an individual should act, wherefore it is a normative ethical statement. But the statement:
is a factual statement.
If you hold a position that affects only your own actions and your opinions of them, I don’t see much reason for calling it an ethical system. I read the blog post; that second section defends acting on non-universalizable principles, but doesn’t so far as I can see defend thinking of them as moral principles and that’s what I’m casting doubt on.
For clarity: I am also a moral nonrealist, and my doubts about the moral-theory-ness of fitnessism aren’t because it doesn’t involve a claim that its values are Objectively Right And Good. Rather: I think a moral theory is something that guides moral judgements by an adherent, and one feature of moral judgements is that they are applied to other people as well as to oneself. Something that affects only its bearer’s own behaviour I would call a “preference” or a “motivation” or something of the kind, even if it gets expressed using the word “should”.
I agree that if the principle is “maximize long-term number of copies of genes that influence my behaviour” then the counterintuitive consequences I described don’t clearly follow. (I’m not sure they don’t follow, though. The answer may depend on exactly what you’re prepared to count as a “behavioural gene”.)
It’s true that most of my genes are shared with other human beings, even ones I wouldn’t normally think of as related to me. But it’s also true that a lot of my genes are shared with, say, pomegranates. Your restriction to “behavioural” genes doesn’t (I think) make that problem go away; only in popular magazine articles are there genes for behaviours in any very strong sense; how sure are you that there are no genes you share with (some or all) pomegranates that have an effect on your behaviour? If it turns out that there are some, would you start regarding it as an important obligation to increase the number of pomegranates (at a rate, perhaps, of 1000 pomegranates per human life)?
I suspect that if we pay attention (as you do) to the very long term, it actually matters rather little in practice what we care about there—in particular, it’s likely that much the same actions now maximize long-term human happiness, long-term human numbers, long-term number of books-or-equivalent written, etc. (A similar thing happens in computer game-playing: the further ahead you look, the less the details of your evaluation function matter.) So it may be hard to distinguish between fitnessism and almost anything else, in terms of the actual decisions it provokes...
As a fitnessist I certainly do not “hold a position that affects only [my] own actions and [my] opinions of them”. I not only evaluate my own actions, but have opinions of the actions performed by other individuals as well. These opinions are based on how other individuals affect the survival of my behavioural genes. In that sense I pass moral judgement on others, like they pass moral judgement on me.
The fundamental question for any moral theory to answer is “Which actions should be performed?” and ethical fitnessism fully answers that question, although in an indexical fashion. The central question to answer is “Which actions should I myself perform?”, since that question is relevant to what I directly am in control of, namely my own body. The actions of other individuals I can, furthermore, only affect by my own actions, for example by what I say.
The principle is actually not “maximize long-term number of copies of genes that influence my behaviour”. The survival of my behavioural genes is directly linked to how long they survive and only indirectly linked to how many they are.
What I am “prepared to count as a ‘behavioural gene’” is not really the issue, rather the issue is what science counts as a behavioural gene. The Extended Phenotype [O.U.P., 1982] gives a good idea.
There is no problem with being related to pomegranates. I do believe that humans share behavioral genes with them, but that does not mean that focusing on the production of pomegranates would maximize the survival of my behavioural genes. Such a production would seem to be a short-sighted and narrow-minded behaviour and probably not the behaviour which natural selection tends to maximize.
Perhaps there today does not seem to be much difference between maximizing the survival of one’s behavioural genes and maximizing “long-term human happiness” or “long-term human numbers”, but over time the difference will add up and show itself. For example, the difference would be apparent when we create new entertainment technology so well adapted to our prehistoric minds and bodies that there is no way for hedonists to resist the urge of such endless happiness, or when we evolve beyond humans, when my behavioural genes are carried on into new species.
On a theoretical level ethical fitnessism has stronger arguments than have the moral theories of maximizing long-term human happiness or long-term human numbers. Fitnessism lacks neither hedonism, altruism, intuitiveness, nor consideration of future generations, and is complete, consistent, to the purpose and non-dependent on indoctrination. The application of any other moral theory through its behaviour is per definition evolutionarily self-defeating and undermines its own long-term existence.
Seconded.