On net, conformity worked ‘for us’ in the past, because we are here, our ancestors made it. This is just the anthropomorphic principle—those who were too maladapted to conformity got weeded out and can’t voice their grievances about it today. It’s important to recognize how anyone in the present cannot rely on this, many will fall prey to bad memes like always, all the way back to the beginning of our big brains.
NicksName
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The whole field of meta-ethics is bogus and produces verbiage that isn’t helpful. The last paragraph here hits the nail on the head, an interlocutor can grant basically anything about morality, as long as there isn’t an enforcement mechanism it’s simply irrelevant. Any non supernatural enforcement mechanism just turns compliance/non-compliance into a game theoretic problem. Even if there was a supernatural enforcement mechanism—people would just cooperate out of calculation, in which case morality and altruism get divorced and morality loses it’s emotional appeal and just reduces to individual selfishness, if you think long enough about it, which chokes the motivation to care about morality in the first place.
Your points 1, 2 and 4 rely on the assumption of hedonism, points 2, 3 and 4 rely on the assumption of altruism, the author rejects both:
https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2024/06/hedonic-utilitarianism.html
3. Not gaming nature’s system – what would that mean? Could it be to try to have as many children or something like that? After that this is what nature wanted to ensure when it endowed us with our proxy emotions. I’m not sure it’s better.
Right, having as many children as possible is exactly what it means, now you can reject your natural “purpose” if you want, but it’s futile, in the grand scheme of things, you will just be replaced by those who more effectively act out their natural “purpose”.
Not disagreeing with anything there, perhaps I should have added a bit more to the ‘cannot rely on this’ part. It will only be after the fact, from the perspective of a being in some present looking at the past, that they can say this or that did or didn’t work in a pretty abstract sense, its the fundamental fallacy of conservatism or traditionalism to assume that we just have to repeat or go back to what worked in retrospective. It’s a tempting illusion of any perspective looking at the past, that has a tendency to overlook all the beings that didn’t make it. We are the winners of history if you will, but only up until this point, just by virtue of being here, in a weak sense we are these people by having inherited their genes, yet a lot of those winners will be dead ends, like in any generation.
Yea, you can only define ‘it works’ with respect to some value standard, reproduction is a sort of lowest common denominator, you don’t have to value reproduction obviously, but if you don’t reproduce your values tend to die with you, at least over the long run, so it’s part of any bottom line. Their genes continue in us, those genes that lead to conformity/disobedience in these and those circumstances. It’s a trite routine to point out how our environment changed a lot, but it’s really important in this case. Just doing what everyone does and used to do unthinkingly, out of convergent herd mentality, is going to result in a lot of trouble, like the essay elaborated. We need new conscious and rational solutions that will work with our out of sync, anachronistic brains, that’s the huge challenge of modernity.