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Edited by die wily:
6/3/2013 8:02:27 PM
7
Establishment of a General Moral Theory?
Here's what I've got:
What strikes me as a tautology is that the placement of moral value is dependent on the preferences of the placer. When you establish empirically that the placer and his preferences have been molded by the history of Earth, you realize that humanity has a fundamental, inbred desire to aid through action both the personal and general perpetuation of humans and human-like things.
We also have, through simple action, grown general modi operandi -- the justifications for which are, at their very most refined, contingent purely on the empirical data we have managed to accumulate -- for satisfying our fundamental human biases.
Some of these policies, like rogue tree branches, take needlessly indirect paths to light or turn uselessly back around on us. These policies are "evils" to diagnose, correct, and in severe cases, amputate. This process of diagnosis is morality, and this process of correction is practical agency.
Thoughts?
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11 RepliesEdited by Bolt: 6/3/2013 8:23:31 PMBased on the faulty assumption that morality serves to perpetuate the species. The only textbooks you'll find that in are on mysticism. While Evolution (your "molding") does select for actions that benefit the species, the things that benefit the species aren't static. Consider bisexuality; there are a number of anthropological explanations given for why it may be beneficial to a society (extra-help, alliances, etc.). However, when the AIDS epidemic occurred, it is clear that "moral acceptance" of bisexuality got a lot more people killed. It's analogous to why sickle-cell anemia in Africa invalidates eugenics. By any normal definition, it's a disadvantage, yet because of malaria, only the people that had it survived. Eugenics only makes sense if we can always know preemptively what will be beneficial, which we can't. There can never be a general morality because there can never be a general set of beneficial traits (general in the sense that they can always be beneficial). Only if we become prophetic, or powerful enough to be unaffected by changes in our environment, could we begin to seek perfect morality or perfect genetics. Of course, we can already see that the question is moot, as we would have already found a set that defies evolution, and if it was possible to tweak even one thing in that set, we'd have multiple sets of evolutionarily "perfect" morals, making the notion of the existence a "general" set clearly false.
