Thanks for your patience and your excellent replies, they have helped my to develop my thinking on this topic and I appreciate the critique.
I think there’s a number of levels on which we can define it, which I’ll discuss in a minute, and there’s room to debate the appropriate locus of survival as it relates to morality. But I think that debate is separate from whether morality does relate to survival. Morality exists because of its effect on past generations; it seems clear that there is no morality independent of humans, no moral field that we’re sensing but rather a moral intuition (i.e. innate brain configurations) that influences our behaviors in ways that supported our ancestors in producing us.
But, as promised, some thoughts on ‘survival’:
First, individual gene-line survival means an organism not dying until it produces offspring who are likely to not-die until they produce offspring.
At a group or society level, survival means the group continues to exist. It’s a little vaguer here because the ‘group’ isn’t is somewhat amorphous, and there aren’t discrete generations for reproduction, but a constant production and death of constituent members.
Defining the survival of any thing inherits the problems in defining that thing, i.e. the “can’t step in the same river twice” problems. Moreover, where morality functions on the substrate-independent level of our existence (thoughts), it isn’t clear whether the survival it requires is the survival of the substrate or the survival of the survival of the programs that run on it. Would morality support the transhumanist idea that we should abandon our bodies and upload our consciousness to silicon? Even if we take functional morality ias true, I don’t know that that question is settled.
I do think that morality must operate on the meta-organism, rather than the organism, i.e. society rather than the individual. Morality, as a functional trait, works between individuals, so oughts can only be coherent in relation to and support of the tribe or collective. And I have a sketch of an idea that that entails that we should prefer the pattern over the substrate, since the beast society exists continuously as its substrate is born and dies in an endless churn.
But that is a weak and fuzzy position, and in any case beyond the scope here.
Sure, but some morality is just wrong. Anti-natalism specifically is pretty clearly wrong, but that statement rests on the functional morality I’m advancing here.
If what you’re asking for is which morality is the functional morality, I actually think that too is beyond the scope of this discussion. “There is an objective morality that we can discover” is a different claim from “X is the objective morality”. I’m making the former claim here, and arguing that we should use the criteria of functionality to evaluate claims about the latter, but I am not making a specific claim about the latter.
I don’t disagree with this idea or those in the surrounding paragraph, but let me make an analogy.
Once, on a hot summer night, I awoke with intense nausea. I laid in bed feeling wretched for a minute staring at the ceiling, and the nausea passed. I closed my eyes to sleep again and soon again felt intense nausea. I opened my eyes, and shortly the nausea passed again. I did this a few more times as my rational faculties slowly kicked in, and then noticed that my bed was vibrating slightly. A fan that I’d placed at the foot of the bed was touching the bed frame, and creating a barely perceptible vibration. I put it together that the nausea was in fact motion sickness. I moved the fan, the bed stopped shaking, and I slept the rest of the night without incident.
The point here is that motion sickness is an evolved response to certain feelings of motion. In particular, our brains are concerned that certain unnatural sensations of motion are actually the result of eating something toxic. The nausea is a response that, if taken to its logical end, will cause us to purge what we’ve eaten, in the hopes that any toxins will be purged with it. In the evolutionary context, that’s a useful response. But we did not evolve in the presence of beds and fans, and so the way we’ve evolved misleads us into thinking we’re ill when in fact we’re perfectly fine.
A similar thing can happen with morality, and understanding morality as a product of evolution, as a mental trait that evolved in a specific context and suited to that context, and not necessarily to this context, may let us “move the fan” of morality, i.e. shed moral claims that are clearly at odds with what morality was meant to do. Given a few thousand years and a few hundred generations of life in this context, we should expect evolution to get us there on its own, but we don’t have the luxury of that.
So, yes, we are this way, there is some information in our emotions and moral intuitions and we should pay attention to them, just as we should take nausea seriously. But we can examine them in other ways at the same time. We can appreciate the ways in which evolution’s result is inadequate to its purpose, and rely on the other results of evolution (rationality and the view from nowhere) to exert a countervailing drive.
You yourself make a few similar points further down, and I basically agree with them: our moral intuitions and emotions are not for nothing, they can be better than our reason for making decisions in certain cases, and we should treat them as real and expected and important in our decision making. But we should also treat them as subject to rational refutation. And when reason and emotion conflict in making statements of fact about the world, reason should prevail (though perhaps you don’t agree with that).
Yes, I think that’s right. But so too are cardiac surgeons deciding not to work with hearts the way we evolved to work with hearts. The project of moral philosophy, as I understand it, must involve some very unusual treatment of moral intuitions, ones that are obscene to our evolved first impression in the way that delivering a baby by C-section is obscene to someone who only understands it as stabbing a pregnant woman in the belly.
And as I said above in reply to Jakob, there’s no contradiction in the most true description of a phenomenon being nigh useless in our everyday lives. In the game of go, there is a saying, “If you want to go left, go right”, meaning that going directly for the play we want is not the best way of achieving the play we want. But that is not to say that moving left is wrong, just that moving right is the best way to achieve moving left. So too, being a naive consequentialist may be the best way to achieve the functional ends I advocate here. Still, though, I would argue that the functional ends are the ends, and if it could be shown that different naive system better achieved them, it would be damning of naive consequentialism.
There may be an argument that functional morality is actively counterproductive to its own stated ends. I don’t know what to make of self-defeating truths, but I don’t think functional morality is one. I see no tension between understanding and discussing functional morality and still practicing more common moral systems as rules of thumb on a day-to-day basis.
I don’t think this problem is unique to a rationally-grounded moral system. Emotions too can be a basis for hubris; emotion-based religions are some of the most pompous and unjustifiably self-assured systems of belief that we’ve ever seen. We should not be overconfident.
But reason’s advantage is that it scales: we can use reason to analyse other modes of thought, and even reason itself. Through, we can identify situations where relying on intuition is better than relying on deliberate reflection. We can’t do that emotionally. We can rationally examine emotion, and while we can feel things about reason, we can’t get very far with it.
How do we know any evolved trait isn’t a spandrel? We can look at whether morality influences reproductive success, whether it imposes costs that would require a benefit to offset, whether it’s been selected against in isolated populations, etc. I think all these things suggest that it isn’t a spandrel, that it’s been selected for as part of an evolved reproductive strategy:
- Amoral people tend to suffer socially. Psychopaths can and do succeed, but they depend on the moral behavior of others, and they are also employing a high risk, high reward strategy (many psychopaths are killed or imprisoned, but many others are managers or politicians).
- Morality entails evolutionary costs, e.g. forgoing actions with clear immediate reproductive benefits like theft or resources, murder of rivals, or rape of fertile women. That suggests that it has attendant benefits, and that forgoing these provides a reproductive benefit in the long term, e.g. reciprocal giving and social support, not being murdered, and better mating opportunities long term.
- To my knowledge, morality exists in all human populations, including isolated populations. The isolation may not have been sufficiently long to permit evolutionary divergence, but given the presence of psychopaths it seems that the genes for amorality were there to be selected for and haven’t come to dominate any society.
Consider the example of motion sickness, or of sugar, or of any other evolved predispositions what we can rationally understand to be actively counter to the reasons for which they evolved. We have intuitions that motion not dependent on our moving our limbs means we’ve been poisoned and need to purge, and that sugar and fat are good and we should eat them all as much as possible. But we know that these are false, that our evolved tendencies are misleading us, and they are misleading us because of the context in which we evolved in which such motion did mean poison, and sugar was a precious resource.
So too did morality evolve in that context, ought-ness is derived from our evolutionary past, and we can look at it in that light. Without reference to its evolved purpose, it has no meaning. If we take the position that the evolved meaning of morality is not relevant, it seems the only alternative is moral nihilism.
EDIT, 7/14: words, formatting. Deletions indicated by strike-through, additions underlined…