One of us is misunderstanding the other, I don’t see how this follows from anything I’ve said.
If good is meaningless, how could there be an “ought”?
How do you get the concept of fitness without there being an ought (with existential, essential, and material/spiritual import) “pre”ceeding it?
Fitness, in evolutionary terms, is just likelihood of survival and reproduction. To say that some individual is fitter than another is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. We could make analogous claims about fire, e.g. whether a fire is likely to continue burning or be extinguished, to spread or remain contained. To say that a fire will continue burning is not to say that a fire should live. Similarly, to say that an individual is fit is not to say that it should live, only that it probably will.
The concept of ‘ought’, like the concepts of pleasure or pain or hunger or lust, are the result of a long chain of descriptively fitter individuals surviving. Pain made our ancestors fitter by influencing them to avoid the kinds of physical damage that threatened their survival or reproduction. Pleasure made our ancestors fitter by influencing them to seek out the kinds of things that supported survival and reproduction.
The core of my claim is thus a descriptive and not a moral one: the concept of a moral ‘ought’ is an instinctual sensation in humans that provided our ancestors some kind of fitness advantage over individuals who did not have that concept. That in itself isn’t a normative claim, I’m not saying we ‘ought’ to think of morality this way. I’m saying that, descriptively, from the evidence we have, it appear to be a correct description of the world.
To be clear, I do think normative claims follow from that descriptive claim (for example, that we ought to reproduce), but the initial claim is still descriptive.
To say it differently, I’m rejecting Hume’s Law: we can get ‘oughts’ from statements about what morality is.
Yet another little bit of proof that the distinction between national and international socialism is an academic one.
Historical materialism.
- Good is a positive effect on fitness.
This is what you are saying. I wonder why you shy away from it.
Which you have yet to define.
Let’s say evolved traits are sculptures and natural selection is the sculptor.
PZR: what is a sculpture?
Carleas: a sculptor makes it.
PZR: but what is it?
Carleas: he makes it with his hands.
PZR: yeah ok but what is it.
Carleas. I just told you a sculptor makes it with his hands.
PZR: go fuck urself.
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that you were positing as a theory that what makes feel good is good. I was saying that having children makes you feel good, thus you are concocting some convoluted circular theory that avoids the question in order to continue to hold it as good for the reason that it makes you feel good, without saying that this is the reason.
The whole reason you do all that is that you don’t agree that feeling good is an actual basis to define something as good.
Carleas, here’s a question. If an extinction-level asteroid (or a teeny tiny nanoparticle) collides with the Earth (or all DNA) and wipes out all biological life, is it because that life was not morally fit?
Follow-up question.
…would you characterize your principle as “Can implies ought”?
A little scary to me that you and I seem to have quite similar understandings of morality.
Your blind spots concerning race are a product of your indoctrination and your modern sensitivities.
Are you endorsing this, or merely describing.
I think this is descriptively true, but I’d argue that it’s a mistake when people do this: ‘good’ and ‘valuable’ have meanings that derive from their function, and they become incoherent when they are applied in ways that contradict that function.
I am describing how humans can place things like decency, or ideals, or freedom above their own survival.
Here is another follow-up question. If there are no persons, are there any consent structures to recognize? Is personhood impossible without biological life?
Follow-up to the follow-ups.
All matter, living (configured) or non, survives from one moment to the next.
Without even trying.
Is that good?
I think it’s more about the transition from meta-ethics to morality. There are a number of moral systems that I would reject that are (arguably) consistent with the function of our moral instincts.
That doesn’t follow. “A is in category B because of C” does not imply that “the category B is the set of things that satisfy C”.
You seem to want the necessary and sufficient criteria by which any act can be objectively judged to be good or not good, and I’m not trying to offer that.
Nevertheless, I’m making a strong and meaningful claim about what ‘good’ is.
To put in the A,B,C language I used above: you’re asking for the necessary and sufficient criteria for inclusion in B, and I’m not trying to offer that. My claim is the narrower claim that those criteria are defined by X,Y,Z, and we can determine that some things must be in B because of their relationship to X,Y, and Z. You don’t need a complete definition of B to evaluate that claim.
My claims clearly narrow down the set of things that ‘good’ could be, right? If it’s an “instinctual concept”, then it’s not mind-independent fact about the world or a divine decree.
I’m not sure what “morally fit” means. I also don’t know that that is a failure of evolutionary fitness, since you can’t really evolve to survive a one-off event, evolution needs a repeated game.
If there had been a debate about cooperating to build anti-asteroid systems and those systems were never built because people couldn’t figure out how to cooperate, that’s arguably a moral failure.
I’m not sure what a ‘consent structure’ is.
No, I think personhood can be instantiated in-silica, for example. But I don’t think a moral instinct is a requisite for personhood.
The behavior of matter is amoral (neither good nor bad, there is no moral valence to it at all, goodness and badness are not attributes of it).
You mean my learning and my overcoming obsolete animal tendencies?
Yes…no consent required…there is no individual without life. Life necessitates individuation to create pockets of ordering in the indifferent Flux, moving towards increasing chaos.
Linear time = from near-absote order (Yin/Yang) towards near-asolute chaos - infinity.
we move towards the absolute without ever attaining it.
Life needs to separate using a membrane, skin, an exoskeleton, to begin ordering itself. Becoming.
Multiplicity is existence. There is no singularity, other than in the mind, as a vague abstraction with no external referent.
…and no, it does not survive “without even trying.”
Life is agon - struggle.
The “trying” is constant, and uncertain.
Consent recognition is a moral issue even after survival is a non-issue?
Right before this you said you’re not sure what a consent structure is. A consent structure is a person. A moral instinct is basic to personhood — you could not recognize personhood (consent structure) without it. A person (moral, but neutral) is one who consents or refuses consent. A moral person (moral, but ruling their instincts to align with basic self=other) recognizes and respects (balances) the consents of every involved/impacted consent structure (also referred to as “stakeholders”).
So… when you’re talking about survival… you don’t mean of configured matter… you mean the configuration? Which came first? Can a configuration make a choice? Edit: p.s. to my snippet you’re answering… living/configured or non… is there any such thing as unconfigured matter?
That isn’t trying to live. It’s trying to delay death.
Even though we know we’re going to die.
What if we made peace with that, and focused on consent recognition? Living.
…giving two middle fingers to death, and making ourselves available for whatever happens…
…in line with self=other.
What if?
The crazy one has infected you with his ‘consent bullshyte.’
Consent is given by the powerful to the powerless.
Power is a measure of weakness.
There is no consent required in nature.
We are born, without someone asking us; we die without being asked.
Self never equals other… never.
Self doesn’t even equal itself in the past.
Making peace with death is essential to objective thinking.
Your anxiety has yet to be overcome.
Life feeds on life…no consent is offered or required.
Consent structures are given by the powerful.
Consent is stolen/disregarded by those powerless to their impulses.
Someone in possession of their own powers (the most powerful) sets free.
Crazy, eh?
Crazy good.
find out
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No you are not, as that would constitute what you said in only the previous paragraph you are not doing.
What you are doing is proposing certain conditions around which “the good” arises.
You have yet to say a word about what it is.
My 4 did follow your 2 and 3. Allow me to demonstrate:
Reproduction = R
Positive effect on survivability = S
Good = G
All we know is that R gives S. Because we know this, we know R is G. Therefore, G is S.
This is elementally obvious as a claim you are making.
The only element you are giving to determine whether anything is G is whether it is also S. You have given nothing else. Therefore obviously it is S that is G.
Otherwise, you are just saying: evolution, then survivability, then magic (turtles all the way down), then good.
To be more explicit:
Both national and international socialists believe that Darwinism is a religious doctrine, rather than a scientific hypothesis. For both, then, the logical conclusion from natural selection is that survivability = good. The national socialist will say it explicitly, and then in equal pseudo.scientific fashion proceed to call out genetic weaknesses which it would be “the good” according to Darwinist religion to stamp out. The internaitonal socialist tries to add some intervening steps that make the same concept a little more complicated.
Neither understands what evolution is, much less genetics. To the naitonal socialist’s credit, his is a much more honest take. To his and all our detriment, because what he is more honest about is a retarded system of ideas, it more directly gives retardation.
Materialism, national socialist or international socialist, adds an irrelevant element to any inquiry and then acts like it is the only element.
What is good?
What eats cows. Let’s say, as an example.
Does whether “good” arose within the context of spontaneously generating traits which endurance and mutability in time is determined by whether it can survive the environment it exists in have any bearing at all on whether it is or it isn’t that which eats cows?
No, honestly, tell I.
Every species has a niche, necessitating specific survival and reproductive strategies, naturally selected over time.
species form is a representation of this process - naturally selecting physical and mental traits that facilitate these specific survival and reproductive strategies - constantly changing over time, due to environmental pressures.
Cooperative survival and reproductive strategies necessitate specific physical and mental traits, particular to a species.
Humans are more confusing because they intervene and create environments in accordance with their ideals.
So, moral behaviours evident in many social species and species that practice heterosexual reproduction, become ingrained in their behavioural patterns.
Cooperation necessitates a limit to individual behaviours, otherwise it fails.
Now, because humans can intervene upon natural environments to shape them according to their needs/desires, guided by specific ideals, necessitates adjustments to these innate behaviours.
Genes/Memes…corresponding to Morals/Ethics so as to differentiate what is naturally selected and what is socially selected to facilitate complex human systems.
Morals and ethics have common grounds because man cannot contradict nature without suffering the consequences.
Despite this human interventions always produce side-effects that must be dealt with, in turn.
Monogamy is an example… necessitating an adjustment to human sexual behaviours. This has consequences…both positive and negative.
Nevertheless, ethical adjustments are common - with slight modifications - across all cultures, and they can be traced back to behavioural restrictions that are also found in many different species.
The common ground is that they all practice some variant of cooperative reproductive and survival strategies.