The 'Morals' of Evolution

Great Debates
1

In another thread I found Maeglian made the following remark:

Now, I’m not sure exactly what “the argument from evolution” is supposed to be, so I’m not even sure what I can comment about that right off, but seeing as it has to do with evolution-- and probably some facet of preferential valuation-- I suppose it warrants a debate all its own.

As well, calling something “morally and factually bankrupt” is a pretty strong statement, so I’m sure that we should be able to ferret this out quickly and move on. :smiley:

Anyone care to enlighten me on what this argument is and why it sucks so bad, and even how the hell it applied to the other thread?

From my interpretation, evolution is “morally bankrupt” period since it doesn’t have anything to do with morals. Are we perhaps discussing using evolutionary processes as justification for morality?

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Stupid quotes messing up the title. It was supposed to be The “Morals” of Evolution.

sigh

[I edited the title slightly. I hope it meets with your approval-Czarcasm]

[Edited by Czarcasm on 08-18-2001 at 08:06 AM]

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I’m going to have to cop the blame for starting this one eris. Nen has asserted that all life, whether human, animal, carrot or viral is of exactly equal value. I was attempting to draw out her reasoning behind this and the argument ran somehing like this:

It wasn’t intended to be an argument from evolution so much as an attempt to define a standard for valuation.

I guess the ‘argument from evolution’, such as it was, is that if we remove Gods and ‘a-greater-purpose-for-humankind-and-the-universe’ from the equation the only objective reason I can see for anyone to attempt to make laws that impinge on the will of others is propagation of their own genes. If this is our only objective, and hence sole logical, reason for making laws then this must be the only standard by which we can measure the relative value of any two objects under the law. Any other standard is necessarily subjective and hence illogical. So yeah, it’s got to do with preferential valuation.

And of course an argument from evolution is morally bankrupt. That’s the whole point. Unless someone can introduce evidence of God any argument from morality is necessarily subjective.

There might be a debate in here somewhere, but I certainly didn’t intend to start one, just introduce some objective facts.

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erislover said:

Well, depending on what, exactly, you mean, I would have to argue with that. For evolution is how we got our morals, after all.

I just read that experiments have shown that our brains evolved such that we put ourselves into somebody else’s position when we are trying to imagine another person doing something. Empathy. From empathy comes morals. This is particularly interesting because so many religionists have come into the SDMB over time and asked those of us who aren’t how we decide good and evil, and many of us have answered “empathy.” The science supports what we’ve been saying.

Just as a bit of explanation, the experiments involved watching brain activity in subjects when they were asked to imagine themselves doing certain activities. Then they were asked to imagine others doing the same activity, and the same part of the brain lit up along with the others, indictaing that we put ourselves in another person’s position when imagining them doing something.

So anyway, this all seems a bit off-subject, but the point is that evolution has provided us with the morals we use every day. That may not have been the point you were trying to make, but I think it’s appropriate to point out anyway.

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A brief introductory note - I am a long-time lurker and partner of Francesca, who often posts in MPSIMS but only lurks in GD.

It seems to me that people are confusing two notions, that of an immoral theory and non-moral theory. Evolution is a non-moral theory about the origin of biodiversity and makes no comment on the morality of action whatsoever. Therefore the theory of evolution is only morally bankrupt in the sense that it makes no commitment to morality in any way.
Evolution is a scientific theory: it offers only an account of the world in terms of observable phenomena and therefore cannot be criticised from a moral perspective.

This is a completely different question from the origin of our moral beliefs which may have developed with our evolutionary development. The standard account of the origin of moral beliefs is that higher primates developed compassion or “empathy” for their fellow primates because it benefitted both the individuals and the propagation of the species. These feelings of compassion developed into explicit codes of morality as social structures became more complex.

Contemporary moral philosopher Bernard Williams notes that it is a fallacy to judge the value of our beliefs on the method of their origin (the so-called genetic fallacy). For example, empathy is no less sincere for having been developed due to natural selection.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. I cannot see any logical tie between a moral theory being non-theistic (which is not the same as atheistic) and it being subjective. I’m not clear on how you drew such a conclusion. Kant argued that morality originated in the very nature of what it is to be a rational being and was inherently universal, i.e objective in the strongest possible terms, and his theory does not invoke God in any way. He went as far to say that we could legitimately evaluate the actions of someone such as Jesus Christ (assuming he was the Son of God) by his (Kant’s) moral system. Other philosophers who do not require God to justify an objective morality include Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, Confucius, Hume, and Hobbes.

Richard Holloway, the Bishop of Edinburgh, has written a book called Godless Morality, in which he argues that morality must come from a non-theistic basis.

Plato raised serious questions about the validity of invoking God in any question of morality, in the dialogue Euthyphro. I paraphrase: If an action is deemed right because God condones it, it must be for one of two reasons: either because God has a special insight into Right and wrong, or just because God wills it. If the first is true, then right and wrong are independent of God’s existence, if the latter then right and wrong do not apear to exist at all, and all morality is merely obedience to the Creator, and concepts such as suffering and justice go out the window.

This being the case, the only hope for a truly objective morality is one which does not bring in God at all.

Alex/Mr Fran

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Where did you read this? I’d love to serve this up over at The Pizza Parlor.

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I believe it was one of the shorter articles (near the front) in the most recent <i>Discover</i> magazine. But I read several magazines per week, so it could have been in the science section somewhere else. I’ll try to remember to check.

Of course, you know they will have answers to this anyway: “It doesn’t prove anything. It just means God made us that way so we could better understand other people.”

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Could empathy come from multiple origins?

-Soup

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Exactly my point. Evolution is amoral and non-subjective and as such a logical basis for moral and legal decisions. As soon as we introduce morality that is based on something other than observable phenomena it becomes subjective.

Its quite simple really. The definition of subjective reads “Proceeding from or taking place in a person’s mind rather than the external world”. Since all morals proceed from and take place in a persons mind they are necessarily subjective. You can’t measure a moral, or photograph it or anything else. It’s no more real than a memory and as such is subjective. That doesn’t mean that morals aren’t universal and that we can’t use them for evaluation purposes as Kant proposed, after all we use memories for evaluation purposes constantly and it doesn’t get much more subjective than that. What it does mean is that any such evaluation would itself be subjective as a result. For such an evalution to be non-subjective you would have to be able give a unit of measure of morality that is independantly verifiable. I assume Kant never managed to define exactly how many kilograms more moral than JC he was, or how many Hertz less moral Hobbes was. Being non-theistic does not make something objective, just as being theistic doesn’t make it subjective (although it always has done to date AFAIK).

I’ve got to disagree alex. The only hope for a truly objective morality is one which proceeds from something in the real world. Anything else would be subjective by definition. That’s why preservation of a society’s genetic legacy is the only non-subjective basis for morality (actually a legal system) I can imagine. I can conceivably measure how many of my society’s genes any act of law or morality will preserve or destroy and evaluate it that way.

If we could independantly verify and quantify God there is no reason a morality based on God wouldn’t be objective. Just for the excercise can you see any reason why the following God based morality is subjective?
We find God and conclusively prove She exists.
We put sensors on Her and measure the amount of divinity coming off Her.
Every act commited by every human causes this divinty reading to alter.
We could then use this reading to say that the higher the divinity goes the more ‘good’ the act, and conversely the more divinity it depresses the more ‘evil’ the act.
There is nothing subjective that I can see about that aside from the necessarily subjective nature of deciding which direction should be good and which bad.

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“Our Empathic Brain”, Josie Glausiusz, page 15 Discover September 2002.

But I think that Soup_du_jour has a point; saying that A causes B doesn’t necessarily prove that B comes only from A.

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Not all things that take place in the brain are necessarily subjective. Consider our use of maths and logic. There is nothing in the world that is mathematics, but it nonetheless remains an objective thing.

Let me make myself clearer: Though there is no observable phemonmena that correlate with mathematical laws, because these laws are discovered a priori they are as objective as anything can be. If someone shows me a proof that 2+2=4, I can’t reply by saying that from my piont of view 2+2=5. If I don’t agree with 2+2=4 it is because I have failed to grasp the meaning of the proof. The same applies to logical laws.

(I don’t agree with most of Kant but I’ll continue to use him as an example.) Kant thought morality had the same foundation as logic and maths, i.e. pure (objective) rationality. To act morally was just to act rationally.
In response to your God counterexample: I obviously haven’t explained myself properly. Even if you did have an empirical method for testing actions against God’s pleasure/displeasure, this still wouldn’t settle the matter. Why does God condone the actions She does? Either:

  1. She just likes them. No particular reason. She just gets a kick out of forbidding murder, the eating of pork or whatever. In which case it is logically possoble that she condone actions which might cause great suffering, leading us to think ‘Hmm, I know God wants me to do this, but it doesn’t feel right…’. (For example: You discover that sacrificing babies in the name of God increases her divinity. Do you think ‘Killing babies is fine’ or ‘This God is crazy and/or evil’?) This sort of moral law is nothing less than obedience to a more powerful being.

Admittedly this doesn’t seem likely. Surely God would only condone good actions? Which leads us to…

  1. She likes actions which do good things, like helping people and ending suffering. But if this is the case then there seems to be a pre-existing concept of what a right action is. If God hates suffering it is because suffering is bad. In which case morality is independent from God’s existence.

One objection might be that God could condone ‘bad’ actions if they later led to good consequences. But this just means the ‘goodness’ of the action is postponed, and we are led back to option number 2.

The whole point being that morality can never be justified by reference to any higher power. What makes an action good/right or bad/wrong is surely the very nature of the act and its consequences, not whether God or the State forbids it.

Hope this forms some sort of coherent argument

Alex.

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The romans threw the prisoners to the wild beasts and said ‘thats ok’ we say ‘that is not ok’.

Whose morals are you talking about ?

Morals seem to be cultural.

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David B, yes, we received our ability to moralize from evolution, but I don’t feel that we got any specific moral valuation from evolution. That is, we cannot use evolution as a process in understanding moral valuations. Much like we cannot use the creation of paints to predict and explain a master oil painting.

dude, I don’t think it really matters, in this case, where morals come from so long as they aren’t discernable from evolutionary processes.

But now I’m wondering, does anyone feel that we may turn around and use evolutionary arguments as justifications for action? What’s wrong with “social darwinism”?

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How dare people say smart & pretty people are doing better than stupid ugly people, thats not nice at all…

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What are you talking about, dude?

I’m pretty sure you meant “September, 2001.”

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Why can’t moral values come from evolution?

All life has the twin drives of survival and reproduction which is what evolution is all about. Why don’t we take that as the bases for morality? That which enhances ones chances of survival and reproduction is moral, that which decreases survival and reproductive chances is immoral.

A few examples:

Thou shalt not murder. If you murder someone, others start to see you as a threat to their survival and people have a tendency to remove threats. Not conducive to your own survival therefore immoral.

Thou shalt not steal. People become irate and violent when you take things away from them. Getting people angry at you does not improve your survival chances.

Thou shalt have no other god. The more cohesive a society is the more they are able to resist outside agression. Being a part of that society helps your survival chances. It is to your advantage to maintain the unity of the group by eliminating dissenters.

What about lying? Well if it is your wife asking if a dress makes her look fat, then lying is deffinatly moral.

Birth controll at first glance would appear to be immoral, for obvious reasons. It reduces reproduction. But unlimited population growth can lead to famine, disease and a subsuquent population collapse. So it can be argued that birth controll is moral.

In this scenario ethics is not a set of hard and fast rules but rather a method of determining right and wrong. The problems are knowing what variables need to be taken into account, and how far into the future you need to project your calculations.

Some might argue that this is social darwinism and a philosophy of greed. I don’t think so. It requires you to look at the consiquences of your actions. It leads to the conclusion that helping others is good, because cooperation is allways a winning stratagy.

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I’d like to reiterate (=explain more clearly) my earlier point about how the genesis of moral values being separate from their justification.

On the one hand, if we have an instinct for cooperation that results from natural selection, but expresses itself in compassionate feelings for your fellow humans, that does not necessarily make the feeling itself selfish, even if it developed only as a survival trait.

Equally, if we have an instinct to use whatever natural resources we feel like (because it happens to benefit the species) that doesn’t mean we can justify it on those grounds.

The origin of a desire is not what makes it right or wrong. It is the actual nature of the desire itself and its consequences.

Sorry if I’m repeating myself but I probably didn’t make myself very well understood.

I think much of what we call morality came form evolutionary developments, just as how we perceived objects did. However we eventually developed empirical science and philosophy to better explore our perception of things and test them against reality. Moral philosophy does a similar thing with our moral instincts: looks at the ideas for consistency and coherence.

Accepted moral codes certainly are cultural. But if the basis of morality is, say, that an action is right/wrong depending on the amount of suffering it causes then that isn’t cultural at all.

I think.

More later perhaps.

Alex

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Posted by Alex B
I’d like to reiterate (=explain more clearly) my earlier point about how the genesis of moral values being separate from their justification.

I don’t think you can separate moral values from their justification. The justification is what makes them moral.

You have the genesis of a value. It is tried. It is either retained or is selected out, either through reason or through evolution. Those that are selected out have no justification and therefore are not moral. Those that are retained are moral because the results proved them to be moral.

I don’t think you can have morality with out an end result you are striving to achieve. Morality is the measure of how well you are achieving the goal. The goal drives you to take actions and the actions are judged by how well they help you achieve the goal.

I think you almost said the same thing here:

Quote:_________________________
“The origin of a desire is not what makes it right or wrong. It is the actual nature of the desire itself and its consequences.”

The origin causes the desire and the desire is right or wrong based on it’s consequences, ie. how well it achieves it’s goal, the origin.

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What people say versus what they do… like famous rich people saying ‘everyone should give more money to my favourite charity’…mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

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Shimrod, you said

I agree with you. I didn’t say you can separate values from their justification, I said you can separate the genesis of values from their justification. In other words: if a particular value we have, say that life is precious, comes from the evolutionary process, that origin does not justify the value.

If moral values come from a religion, we cannot condemn the values just because we reject the other beliefs of the religion. Instead we evaluate those values independently; examine what someone who holds them actually believes.

I’m still not sure we’re all on the same page here, so I might come back to this.

Alex