Darwin On Moral Intelligence
Vincent di Norcia applies his mental powers to Darwin’s moral theory.
This is true. Historically hundreds and hundreds of cultures [big and small] have come up with their own more or less one-size-fits-all moral transcripts. And it does work in providing the community with “rules of behavior” that act as a fundament for depositing “I”. First “the gods”. Then a God, the God. Later these were replaced in some parts of the world by secular facsimiles. Political ideologies and the like.
And, of course, there have been those down through the ages who “deduced” philosophical arguments into existence. The Intellectual scaffolding from which all rational men and women could “theoretically” note their actual obligations when confronting conflicting value judgments.
In truth, none of this really changed just because the economic base allowed for the existence of the surplus labor we call philosophers. The need for “rules of behaviors” in any community is just plain commonsense. And these rules revolved more around the arguments from folks like Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marvin Harris and Karl Marx than from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant.
Altruism, like egotism is hard wired into the human brain. What brings them out is embedded in any number specific contexts.
The results speak for themselves for most of us. We go about the business of interacting with others from day to day to day given any number of rules accepted by all parties. And, in fact, to the extent that the objectivists are able to persuade large swaths of the population to accept their own moral narratives and political agendas, those rules can be made to seem as natural as breathing in and out.
But what are those rules? And who decides they should be the rules? And who is able to enforce them? How about “normal functioning social life” in the midst of a world wide pandemic? Or in times of war or economic calamity? Or, for any number of reasons, your personal life goes through a tumultuous change? Situations in which you are forced to take a closer look at how morality comes to be what it is in the world around you.
Situations in which you see the way things are and you don’t like them. Situations that need to be changed. But changed to what?