Darwin On Moral Intelligence
Vincent di Norcia applies his mental powers to Darwin’s moral theory.
Here’s what I reconfigure this into: subsistence, survivial.
As with all other creatures on earth, the human species of necessity must acquire the means to sustain its very existence: food, water, shelter, defense, the capacity to reproduce.
But: Unlike all other creatures, the human species has acquired this extraordinary capacity to communicate all of this through language able to convey the sort of memetic complexities that are simply unknown to lions and tigers and bears.
Or even to our closest relatives the chimps. After all, how many philosophy forums do they have? So, we have the same basic needs as all other creatures, but we also have the capacity to “think up” particular “rules of behavior” to regulate our wants and needs. Let’s call this morality.
But: how social are we?
Again, unlike other creatures, the manner in which we make distinctions between “I” and “we” and “them” involves considerably more variables. Variables that become entangled in historical and cultural contexts. Variables that evolved into the modern industrial state…and now the postmodern industrial state.
What of, “well-marked social instincts” that “inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience” then?
Yes, you know what’s coming: We’ll need a context of course.
Something that dogs never get around to broaching.
Improved? Or, rather, became far more complicated given the gap in evolution between the human brain and the chimp brain and the monkey brain and the brains of all the “lower” creatures. And what is the word that most separates us from them? How about this one: memes. And then, memetically, the gap between human interactions on the level of the “village” and on the level of the “postmodern industrial state”.