If there is nothing beyond the material universe, judgments of right and wrong are no more informative than pan-hoots.
says “news” at Uncommon Descent. Well, I have no idea what a pan-hoot is, but presumably it is a not-informative thing.
Denyse (I assume it is she) writes this as her very odd (to my mind) response to a piece of very old news (11 years old!) – some rather touching thoughts by David Attenborough reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (not that “news” gives a primary citation):
It might seem unusual that so many of his viewers insist on an Edenic worldview when Attenborough has spent 50 years showing them something very different indeed. Even more unusual, and not a little frustrating for Attenborough, is that viewers reject, often aggressively, his expositions on evolution in favour of Creationism.
“It is something I get frequent letters about,” he says. “They always start with sweet reasonableness, you know, ‘We love your programs, isn’t nature marvellous’, and so on. But they always go on to say, ‘We do wonder why it is that you don’t give credit to the almighty God who created each one of these species individually.’
“My response,” he says, “is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’.”
It’s a very good question. It’s not an argument against Design (as it is often implied to be) its a simple question:, IF we found evidence parasitic worms were designed, why would we identify their designer with an all-merciful God?
But Denyse does not attempt to answer it. Instead we have this very odd assertion that “if the boy is just an evolved primate” that there would be “nothing noteworthy about his fate” – that somehow, failing to conclude that a Designer designed the worm logically entails not finding anything noteworthy about the child whose blindness is caused by it.
Because, apparently, “judgements of right and wrong are no more informative than pan-hoots” unless there is “something beyond the material world”.
Why? If a worm can result from material causation, why can’t moral judgements? Sure, Denyse doesn’t accept the former, by why assume that someone who does, must somehow logically reject the latter? Why should a material human being not be as concerned about the fall of a sparrow – or the blinding of a boy – as a deity from “beyond the material world”?
Blas,
You miss the point. You were arguing that IF the capacity for empathy is evolved, it must lead to calculation wrt the number of offspring it gains, and be dismissed if the answer is low. I was refuting that; IF the capacity for empathy evolved, it implies no more conscious calculation than does anything else.
Does a tree calculate how much pollen to eject, or a bird the optimum clutch size?
Blas,
Probably, yes.
Maybe I expressed myself in the wrong way, I never mean that evolution or lost of empathy is conscious. I mean that if empathy is evolved should give reproductive advantage and if it doesn´t we are going to lose the capacity of empathy. Darwinian process, never fail.
Then been selfish is a matter of the genes you have. So you are going to be or not to be selfish because of your genes.
A population can evolve the capacity to make decisions, because being able to make decisions improves the chances of reproductive success.
That doesn’t mean that all offspring will make the same decision. If they did, it wouldn’t be decision-making!
Blas,
It is never a simple either-or, particular in a sophisticated reasoning species such as ourselves. Nature and nurture and all that. Empathy can be learned, but we try to extract what is innate. “How would you like it?”, we tell a child, but we are assuming there is a latent capacity to empathise within them that can be focussed upon the question. Some individuals genuinely lack that sense.
Nonetheless, I think the fundamental capacity is innate. As is the imitative capacity – we respond to role models.
Ethically difficult to investigate experimentally and provide a categorical answer.
Blas,
Not necessarily. As I say above, a combination of inclination and environmental influence.
It’s not an assumption. It’s the inevitable conclusion of materialist morality, as I’ve argued before on this site extensively.
It is only **if** we assume an actual, exterior, objective moral baseline exists, and only **if** we assume we have some means to access it (even if imperfectly) that we can rationally claim that our actions, regardless of what they are and regardless of what they attempt to accomplish and regardless of whatever we assign as a guiding principle, are not selfish.
Under materialist morality, your morality is subjective. That means it is yours – morality based on your feelings. On your emotions. On what you happen to think is important when it comes to morality. Thus, all your moral behavior, even if in the service of some social good, still services only your own view that morality **is** about servicing the social good (and also defining what “good” means according to how you feel about it).
I didn’t say getting a vasectomy was more reasonable than not getting one. I didn’t say eliminating my empathy was more reasonable than submitting to it. I said it is as reasonable. If I prefer non-empathy, that’s good. If you prefer empathy, that’s good. It’s all good, because morality is subjective under materialism.
My considered view is that under Darwinism, there is no moral reason for me not to eliminate my empathy in order to facilitate my capacity to harm others in service of my desire to enjoy life in the way I see fit. Is there a moral reason, under Darwinism, for me to listen to my empathy if I don’t want to?
When you say decision making do you mean free will? Do you mean that humans evolved free will? Or that we evolved decision-making based on the chemystry of our brain?
If a “materialist” is someone who believes all of the following:
(1) everything that normal mature human beings do, think, and experience could, at least in principle, be described in biological terms;
(2) everything that can be described in biological terms could, at least in principle, be described in the language of basic subatomic particles;
(3) everything that basic subatomic particles do is causally determined
then I would have to regard myself as an anti-materialist, because I think that (1), (2), and (3) are all false. I am highly confident in the falsity of (1) and (2), and I’ll argue that point. I don’t have an argument (3), but it just doesn’t smell right to me — partly because, the more we get down to quantum weirdness, the less reliable our pre-theoretic intuitions about “causation” and “determinism”.
You still haven´t give me a reason for not be selfish.
I meant what I wrote: decision-making.
That is, the ability to make flexible informed decisions as to how to act in order to maximise the probability of achieving goals. Goal-selection itself is also an aspect of decision-making.
And yes, I think that ability evolved, just like the ability to fly.
Give me a reason to be selfish.
It is natural to me. You are an innate generous people?
I was watching a documentary about the mass killings of communists and communist sympathizers in Indonesia in the ’60’s. They were interviewing the actual killers. These guys walked around completely without remorse, regret or sense of having done wrong as they danced, sung, laughed and reminisced about how they would round people up and extort money, torture and beat them to death. They killed hundreds, if not thousands.
On camera, they walked around obviously respected and feared. They went into places of business and demanded protection money. They walked into the office of politicians who were only to happy to pose with them, politicians who still worked hand-in-hand with mafia-type militias that rooted out and killed socialists and communists.
The kept referring to themselves as “free men” and spoke in terms of the strong surviving and thriving while the weak were killed and paid for their lifestyles.
Under Darwinism, though, this is just the subjective social order of the culture. They considered it a moral necessity to kill communists and socialists. They consider it their moral right to rule by might and fear. Darwinism offers no argument against them, and in fact must endorse it as being as moral as any other self-ascribed, subjective moral system.
Darwinism gives them no reason to consider that their views are wrong.
That is nothing more than an illusion. You immagine goals for your life but there is no goals. As your genes are already passed there is no another goal.
Uhhhh … really? Reasons to be selfish: to get what I want, to have what I want, to do what I want, to have things the way I want them, so that I can better enjoy my life.
Blas,
Your conscience still not sufficient?
William J. Murray,
What stops you? Fear of damnation?
And as before, I argue that your argument is completely circular.
It rests on the assumption that the only reasonable morality for a “materialist” is one in which one values one’s own welfare over that of others.
But when I ask you why a materialist should value her own welfare over that of others, you say, that it is the inevitable conclusion of materialist morality.
You never ever support that assertion. It’s like it’s so hard-wired into your thinking that you can’t see how it could be otherwise.
You assert things like this:
I don’t find that self-evidently true at all. I don’t think anyone can confidently claim that their actions are “not selfish”, but certainly are only doing the nominally “unselfish” thing because to do otherwise would necessitate unpleasant “necessary consequences” doesn’t seem like particularly “unselfish” motivation at all.
I’d say that actions motivated by concern for the welfare of others rather than by concern for oneself are the very paradigm of “unselfish” actions. And all that is required to do such things “rationally” is to place a value on the welfare of others. And that is as possible for a “materialist” as it is for someone who thinks that it’s what some deity wants, or is somehow written into the fabric of the cosmos in the form of karmic consequences.
All morality is subjective, period. Yours is just as subjective as mine – no more, no less. It’s just you have chosen (to use your word) to think that it isn’t, and that doing the objectively wrong thing will result in something bad happening.
I cut out the middle man – I think that something is wrong if it results in something bad happening to someone, and it’s just as bad whether the someone is me or someone else.
Seems perfectly rational to me, and doesn’t require going through cosmic hoops to work out what.
It just involves a bit of fact-finding. Which is the best we can do to make our conclusions a little less “subjective” and more evidence-based than they would otherwise be.
OK, why are those any different from these reasons:
to get what you want, to have what you want, to do what you want, to have things the way you want them, so that you can better enjoy your life.
What’s so special about valuing what benefits me, rather than valuing what benefits you?
Why is the first more “reasonable” than the second?
You are still mistaking my goals for something else’s “goal” (in this case “evolution’s”).
That’s the same mistake as people make when they say that if there is no God, life has no purpose. Which is a non-sequitur. God might have some ulterior motive in making me – that might be my “purpose” as far as God is concerned. but I might have a quite different purpose in living – to find things out, make the world a better place, have fun, raise a happy child. All of those things are purposes whether or not some putative God has some other.
Consider this:
An employer has a purpose for an work- to do the work he wants done.
The worker has a purpose in working – to earn money for her family.
Take away the employer, and let the worker be self-employed: does the worker now have no purpose?
Lizzie, Blas, and everyone:
It’s not a matter of being selfish.
I refrain from hurting other people because I’m selfish.
Perhaps I’m a bit weird, but I can remember instances of hurting other people from childhood, and it torments me. I’m not talking about casual fights and such. I’m talking about thoughtless things I did that, if portrayed in a movie, could make me look evil. Just being mean or saying mean things to vulnerable kids.
I avoid repeating this kind of thing not because I’m selfless or virtuous, but because it hurts me.
I think the great majority of people avoid hurting other people.
Moral and ethical education of children is not so much a matter of instilling empathy as it is teaching how to apply it. Most people like other people and want to be liked. Being successful at that is complicated and requires education, but the motive is inborn.
With exceptions. I’d argue it exists ion a spectrum, like most traits.
You are continuuing to argue a straw man. I didn’t make the claim that one is more reasonable than the other. I made the claim that under materialism, selfishness is all you ultimately have, and that under materialism, being openly selfish is as good as anything else.
William J. Murray,
Illustrating your fundamental confusion about both evolutionary theory and the nature of the concept ‘subjective’.
I’ll join you in that, except that I prefer to say that I am a non-materialist. I’m not a culture warrior on materialism, so the “anti” part seems a bit too strong.
Purposes you acquire and pursue as you exist is not the same thing as a purpose for your existence.
Under Darwinism, there is no “purpose” for your existence because there is no teleology involved in your manufacture. “You” are just a happenstance collection of mud and synapses that computes various goals as a result of the interaction of the programming and the environment, as likely to produce the purposes of a Dahmer as a Gandhi.
Right. And so “selfish”, defined thus, becomes an infinitely regressive concept. We do what brings us what we value. And we value something if we regret its loss.
So all acts are “selfish” under that definition – we do what “suits us”, whether what “suits us” is the welfare of others or the welfare of ourselves.
But that is as true for “objective” morality as any other. To be kind because we think God wants it is no more or less selfish, in that sense than being kind because we know we will be miserable if we aren’t.
So “selfish” becomes coterminous with “motivated”. We are motivated by reward. We do what rewards us. So we’ve lost a perfectly good word.
So let’s get it back – and use “selfish” to mean “acts for which I am the first order beneficiary”, and “altruistic” for “acts for which someone else is the first order beneficiary”.
Now everything is square again. And there is no reason for materialists not to value first-order benefit for others over first-order benefit for themselves. And therefore no reason for materialists not be concerned, and try to help, parasite-blinded boys in Africa.
That’s why I maintain that morality, for humans as a social species, is intrinsically about altruism. It’s the set of principles that enables us, by seeking the best for all, and by punishing those who “cheat”, leads to a positive-sum game, and ultimately our own best interests.
Sure that means that “altruism” is ultimately based on “selfishness” but it also means first-order selfishness is a less ultimately self-rewarding strategy than first-order unselfishness.
And it makes perfectly good sense, humans have discovered it independently over and over, and it almost certainly arises from our evolved capacities to empathise, live in mutually beneficial social groups, raise children who are born helpless and remain dependent for years, use symbolic language, construct abstractions such as legal systems and moral frameworks, and prioritise long-term and distal benefits over immediate rewards to our selves.
In that case, define “selfish” as you are using it here.
Precisely. And so not having the second does not preclude the first.
The word “objective” is the real problem here, I think.
And my considered view is that under
Darwinismtheism, there is no moral reason for me not to eliminate my empathy in order to facilitate my capacity to harm others in service ofmy desire to enjoy life in the way I see fitthe deity I believe in. Is there a moral reason, underDarwinismtheism, for me to listen to my empathy ifI don’t want tofollowing the deity I believe in calls for me to inflict harm on others?If we were a solitary species, without parental care, ‘selfishness’, of the kind WJM and Blas believe is the only logical consequence of ‘Darwinism’, would be a likely characteristic of that species. We aren’t that species.
It is possible to model the cost-benefit relations of altruistic and selfish behaviours, in various competitive (ie ‘Darwinistic’) scenarios. This has been done. Purely selfish strategies never come out on top, even measured solely in the currency of gene copies. Selfishness in a social species is not ‘Darwinian’.
There is a significant literature. One could do worse than start with “The Selfish Gene”. It’s not a manifesto.
Rather than objective, I would say time-tested.
Written ironically, spoken earnestly.
Lizzie,
Well, yes – the relative concepts subjective/objective, I thought of saying!
“That’s why I maintain that morality, for humans as a social species, is intrinsically about altruism [because I say so.] It’s the set of principles [which we assert] that enables us [via self-proclaimed might makes right], by seeking the best [as we define it] for all [whether they agree or not], and by punishing those who “cheat” [because we have the power to do so and disagree with them], leads to a positive-sum [according to my values] game, and ultimately our own best [as I see fit] interests.”
Illuminated it for you.
The problem is that under materialism, first-order selfishness and second-order selfishness are, in principle, the same thing, only made to appear different via semantics. You are not serving anything external; you are only serving your internal preferences because you happen to have them.
It’s only a problem if you try to redefine it as “consensus view”.
While (3) is indeed false, particles are but observed entities. It is better to talk of fields or the wavefunction of the universe. Under the Many Worlds interpretation of QM, which I am not saying is correct but is taken seriously by many physicists, the wavefunction is deterministic.
Who said it did? Blas said:
The Darwinistic goal “for” your life can only be said to be “passing along your genes”. Other than that, there is no Darwinistic goal “for” your life, there are only goals you, as a computed organism, happen to pick up and process “in” your life.
So how do you define it?
Merriam-Webster definition of “objective”:
b : of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind <objective reality> <our reveries … are significantly and repeatedly shaped by our transactions with the objective world — Marvin Reznikoff> — compare subjective 3a
c of a symptom of disease : perceptible to persons other than the affected individual — compare subjective 4c
d : involving or deriving from sense perception or experience with actual objects, conditions, or phenomena <objective awareness> <objective data>
b of a test : limited to choices of fixed alternatives and reducing subjective factors to a minimum
— ob·jec·tiv·i·ty
Exactly. But there’s nothing illusional or delusional about those. And they have the advantage of being my own.
No. seems my conscience is mute. What says yours?
Come out of your computer and instead to look to models look at real life and tellme that shelfish is a loosing strategy.
Selfish is a losing strategy. And I’ve seen more shitty people than you can imagine.
Lizzie, I know you sre good to live in your own world, but what you are saying do not make any sense. You can choose to define or imagine some kind of personal goals, but that do not change the fact that you Lizzie are nothing more than a self replicator that exists only because a FUCA started to replicate and your only ultimate “goal” that you can suscribe is pass your genes trough in oreder human population can evolve. The other things are just make up.
Well,tell that to the indian americans that helped the british pioneers.
That’s a matter of how you define those terms and how those definitions relate to the axioms in place that support them. As far as you having “your own” purpose and it being an “advantage”, that’s like rock spewed from a volcano saying it has it’s own shape as opposed to a marble statue carved by an intelligent designer. Is it really your “own” shape? Is it really an “advantage”?
Honestly I am sometimes completely bewildered as to where you are coming from!
No, saying I have my own purpose is NOT in the tiniest least bit “like rock spewed from a volcano saying it has it’s own shape”. Unlike both the rock and Michelangelos’s David, I am a living being, and, by virtue or that, capable of conceiving and enacting a purpose!
You don’t seriously think that “under Darwinism” a human being is equivalent to a lump of stone, do you?
Blas,
I hate myself for this but … being shellfish has proven a highly successful survival strategy. Brrrrrr-bish!