“Morality” centrally refers to a set of beliefs and practices only attested in humans, …
Morality does also apply to non-human organisms, for example close human relatives such as chimpanzees and why not alien life on other planets or future successors to humans?
… so any attempts to found morality in the behaviour of non human animals requires a translation stage.
Ethical fitnessism is not founded on the behaviour of non-human organisms. Please see the definition of ethical fitnessism in my original comment to DeVliegendeHollander.
No, they probably value something that can be cashed out in fitness promoting terms, like continued survival, or enhanced attractiveness based on resources.
Exactly!
Ethical fitnessism is more intuitive than any other established moral theory, since it is practiced more, not only by other animals, but by humans to, not only in prehistoric times, but in modern times as well.
You wonder why we need the fitness component, when we already have the contract component.
All contractarianism is necessarily based on self-interest. Traditional contractarianism is based on the self-interest of living humans. That is why it is criticised for disregarding future human generations and even other animals. Fitnessist contractarianism is based on the Darwinian self-interest, which is the intrinsic value of ethical fitnessism. Therefore it does not disregard future generations.
Ethics per se does not have any function.
I find that hard to understand. The practices of ethics reduces wasteful conflict, and allows people to satisfy their preferences.
Of course the practice of ethics has a function! But ethics per se does not; it gives a purpose.
The example of the predator and the quarry illustrates the nature and origin of self-interest and of conflict between incompatible moral values. Above all, it illustrates the indexicality of ethics.
We are certainly not defining mugging as moral. The idea is not to make your morals as practised as possible, but to make morals realistic, adapted and possible to practice. Ethical fitnessism is well practiced and gives guidance in all situations. Hedonistic utilitarianism, for instance, suffers greatly from being practically impossible to practice.
Since humans share behavioural genes with other animals they are also taken into consideration in fitnessist contractarianism, unlike the case in traditional contractarianism.
The issue of “ethics per se” is by no means especially complicated nor unimportant. There flourishes a common misunderstanding that the function of ethics is to make people behave better, that ethics serves a purpose. On the contrary, the case is that ethics gives you the meaning of ‘better’. Ethics gives the purpose. When you have worked out what the purpose is, and what better means, you can work out how you want people to behave. This distinction is crucial because many people never seem to have actually understood the normative ethical problem. How ought I to behave? How ought I to behave when I am all alone? How ought I to behave if I so am the last human alive? Not “What may I do?”, but what ought I to do? Instead they think that ethics only is concerned with which rules society should enforce and which moral indoctrination people should be subjected to. This reconnects to Sam Harris and his Moral Landscape Challenge. Harris does not see the intrinsic, only the instrumental. But please, everything is not the decision method; the rightness criterion is also to be considered. In this discussion thread contributors seem to take ethics in itself for granted and to be focused on the social and universalizable function of ethics. But please, hold your horses! How did we just get passed the first and central problem? Not only Sam Harris writes as if ethics per se is to be neglected and by-passed.