K

Longbow:

What conclusions did I draw? Are you not drawing any conclusions about morals that require them to be more than descriptions of evolved behaviors?

What? I'm not sure what you're saying, but I know that something isn't for all intents and purposes true until it is shown to be false.

I never did and never would make a claim like that. I personally don't believe any action has an absolute morality or immorality to it. I simply agree with the assertion of the OP that what we generally call morals are simply behaviors that gave our ancestors added survivability by allowing them to function as members of society.

So now I have drawn a conclusion based on my belief in the genetic origin of morality. Namely, that there is no absolute yardstick for morality. However, I only brought this conclusion in because of the false claim you provided for me.

Do you really not assume anything about morality? If not, then what can you possibly say about the subject? How exactly do you treat morality as not limited to genetics without assuming that it is not?

Primal

Drug abuse is an evolved trait even though it is self-destructive and different cultures have different views of drug use and different drugs they take(as well as ways of taking them).

How then can we know its an evolved trait:

1) Animal precursors. Similiar self-destructive behavior to drug use can be found among animals. Chimps for example can become addicted to booze. Rats to cocaine.

2) Rationale behind the claim. What can makedrug use an advantage via evolution?

Image, basically organisms have to tell quickly whether or not they have good genes to prospective mates. If the displays are easy to duplicate that will preclude much cheating in the system. It is by being costly that such cheating does not occur. For example, sporting a long colorful, tail as a bird; this behavior can be very costly for those who are slow, weak and dull witted. Too costly to sport such a long tail and survive long.

Hence drug use is the same, sure it may cause health problems but it quickly sends the message "look, I can use dangerous chemicals and be ok, this means I have very good genes".

Though nowadays, the behavior is maladaptive and has taken on a life of its own if our cultural climate. Even when drug abuse harms chances for being sexually selected, people take drugs because they are addicted. People also take drugs just for the hell of it as well. Hence drug use has it's origins in evolution but with culture, has outgrown it's origins; to the point even of losing it's original purpose.

3) Drug use is cross cultural. There may be one or two minority cultures that do not contain drug use (though I doubt it). But they remian that; exceptions, not the rule. Like people who are born color blind. This means that there are cross cultural reasons for drug use.

Applying these same standards to morality

1) Are there any precursors, no matter how primitive, in other animals? In fact there are, pack animals seem to not stab eachother in the back reguarlarly, vampire bats display altruistic behaviors, chimps have been observed helping out their sick mothers etc.


2) Is there any biological rationale? Obviously there is, a band represents an enviroment with selective pressures. These pressures are other memebers who are more likely to trust/like/cooperate with you if you are moral/honest/kind/loyal, however if you are not this and are instead dishonest/disloyal/malicious etc. You will be selected against by the group.
Also most bands are in some way related to eachother, this means sacrificing yourself to save the band for example would mean you are helping some of your genes pass on. For example, an adult dying to save three kids is a Darwinian success story as each kid has about half the adults genes, so the adult has made a fifty percent gain by such an act.

3) Morality tends to be cross cultural. Morals may come in all shapes and sizes but all cultures tend to have some sort of morals that they go by.

Of course I would say some culture and enviroment effects morals. Much like these things do sexuality. Sex is instinctive, but who one is raised with effects who one finds attractive (rats who grow up with lemon scented sibling prefer lemon scented females) and who one has incest taboos against (rats will prefer strangers to sister, first cousins to sisters, people raised in a communal style "Kabbutz" since birth with other kids rarely marry into that Kabbutz). The underlying drive is instinctive but the paremeters or finer details of the drive are set at a certain age, and open for a certain window of time. At age six it seems, incest taboos are set. Such traits are called exegenetic, like a duck seeing the first large moving thing as mom, and then turning that instinct off fof the rest of its life.

Morality like other evolved traits can take on a life of its own, one far distant from its original Darwinian purpose, like drug use.

Also keep in mind that an evolved behavior is not automatically genetic determinism. Evolution makes no sense without a discussion of enviroment and many instincts are enviroment sensitive (exegentic).

Longbow

Whatever I do or don't assume, I do not first have to disprove your little theory before I move on to my own. I certainly have an awful lot to say about morality. At no point, though, am I particularly bound to show that morals are not traits. Behaviors are traits. Unless you can make the (rather novel) identification of morals as merely whether or not someone acts a certain way, then I certainly don't have to address such a view.

Longbow

You aren't talking about morality. You are talking about behavior that people make moral evaluations about. So for instance, all the discussion about drug use being evolutionarily selected for is completely non sequitur to any relevant moral issue.

You do touch on at least marginally relevant points about all cultures having mores (you aren't talking about morals, actually) concerning drugs. That is, they all have beliefs about what is or isn't moral with regard to drug use as well as and primarily social norms about it. While this at least broaches the subject of morality, it is also more or less irrelevant.

That a social norm is universal among societies really doesn't mean anything. As an analogy almost universally, mathematicians are literate and use some sort of language to communicate their ideas about mathematics. That in no way implies that math is about written language. The use of "x" as a variable in formulas and equations is nearly universal. That doesn't mean that equations are profoundly about the letter "x".

This whole idea of evolutionary ethics is really just jumping the gun. You are looking for a quick "scientific" looking answer to very difficult questions. You guys should spend more time at least thinking about what someone is really trying to say when they utter a moral sentence and otherwise should try to force every subject into a "science".

Primal

I really do not see any difference between the two.

Kharakov

Longbow-

Morals also means moral practices (behaviors) or habits of conduct.

For example: That person has loose morals.

Translation: That person does not engage in moral conduct. That person does not engage in moral behavior.

Translation does not = : That person has loose physics.


The term morality can mean a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct. For example: christian morality, religious morality...

Different cultures have different moralitys. Primal is right.

I certainly think that nitpicking <trolling> (especially when one is wrong) is an amoral act to engage in on a discussion board.

Kharakov

K

Longbow:

No, you certainly don't. Just as I don't have to disprove objective morality to reach conclusions regarding the genetic nature of morality.

But you did try to shoot the OP down while at the same time trying to say that you were making no claims regarding the genetic nature of morality. If you really aren't making any claims in this area, why the response to the OP?

bd-from-kg

Fred Flintstonensis says:

But this is nonsense. Strictly speaking "morals" refers to ideas - i.e., to how behaviors are evaluated - as Longbow points out, but it's true that it is sometimes used to refer to behaviors themselves, as Kharakov says. So let's look at both interpretations in turn.

While there is pretty good evidence that behaviors (or at least predispositions to certain kinds of behaviors) can be controlled more or less directly by genes (and thus can be subject to natural selection) there is no evidence whatsoever that ideas can be directly controlled by genes, and this is very strong (practically conclusive) evidence that any particular set of ideas (including the kinds of ideas that fall under the heading of "morality") cannot be selected for. But if ideas cannot be selected for, they cannot evolve, except in the loose metaphorical sense in which customs, musical styles, and clothing fashions are often said to evolve.

Now let's look at the second interpretation, in which by "morals" we mean "moral behavior". As K says:

This is perfectly true, but it doesn’t support the idea that "morals evolved" in the least; in fact, it basically refutes it. Let me expand on this, since it is the subject of an immense amount of confused thinking by a lot of people.

In some cases, in specific respects, social behavior is indeed selected for. In far more respects, basically selfish behavior is selected for. This is exactly what is to be expected given that what is selected for is the individual’s genes, not the group’s, much less the species’. Thus, to the extent that social cooperation is necessary in order for the group (and thus one’s own descendants) to survive, social behavior will be selected for. But behavior that favors the spread of one’s own genes at the expense of others in the group will also be selected for. Which of course is exactly what we see.

Thus a great many types of behavior – some purely selfish, some that promote the welfare of one’s family, and others that promote the welfare of one’s tribe – seem to be widespread in humans and thus seem likely to have a genetic basis. From these one can select some of the latter, which are generally (though not always) the kinds of behavior generally described as “moral”, ignoring all of the other “innate” types of behavior that would not generally be described as “moral”, and declare “See! Morals evolved!”. Well, of course[/i] many of the types of behavior that have become widespread have evolved, and some (actually a small minority of these) can reasonably be called “moral”. So what? All types of behaviors with a genetic basis have evolved. But lots of these are not moral, and there are lots of moral behaviors that have clearly not evolved (and are therefore uncommon). Thus we have lots of examples of (1) behaviors that are moral and have evolved. (2) behaviors that are nonmoral and have evolved, (3) behaviors that are moral and have not evolved, and (4) behaviors that are nonmoral and have not evolved. Far from showing any kind of close connection between moral behavior and evolution, these facts strongly suggest that there is little if any relationship between the two.

Now if an alien from Arcturus (who knew nothing of human behavior) were asked to guess whether a particular type of behavior had evolved in humans, the information that it is moral would be pretty much useless; the morality or immorality of a type of behavior has almost no predictive value with respect to the question of whether it would have been selected for. But what about the opposite question? Does that fact that a type of behavior has evolved have any bearing on the question of whether it is moral? Clearly not. Thus, suppose that you were considering the question of whether a certain type of behavior (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, abortion, marital infidelity, you-name-it) is immoral, and suppose that someone argued thusly: ”The crucial question here is whether this type of behavior is favored by natural selection – i.e., whether it tends to result in the spread of the genes of individuals who exhibit it. If it does, then the behavior is moral; if it isn’t, it’s immoral”. Can you imagine such an argument being met with anything but contempt and ridicule? Because everyone understands that whether a particular type of behavior tends to propagate the agent’s genes is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it’s moral.

Here’s another way to make the same point. Suppose that you believed that a disposition to help the handicapped (or to approve of such behavior) had been selected for, and that it was moral. Now suppose that you learned that on the contrary, such behavior had not been selected for; that on the contrary natural selection tended to favor individuals who killed handicapped people and took everything they had. Would you reason, “ I guess I was wrong; it’s not moral after all to help the handicapped; the moral thing is to kill them and take their belongings”? Or suppose you believed that a disposition to save a stranger’s drowning child (at least when it involved little risk to oneself) had been selected for and was moral, and you then learned that this kind of behavior had not been selected for; that natural selection favored individuals who never did anything of this sort and disapproved of those who did. Would you then conclude that it was really immoral after all? To ask such questions is to answer them. No one really believes that whether a certain kind of behavior (or a tendency to approve of it) is selected for has anything to do with whether it is moral. The one question is completely unrelated to the other.

In summary: (1) moral behavior as such did not evolve, nor did a tendency to approve of moral behavior, and (2) whether a behavior (or a disposition to approve of it) is favored by natural selection has nothing to do with whether it is moral. These two facts would seem to dispose of the thesis that morals evolved. But unfortunately this idea seems to be a hardy perennial that will never die no matter how often it is killed.

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

K

bd-from-kg:

I think the difference between your version of morals and mine are the scope. When I say that I believe that morals evolved, I mean that empathy and the other emotions that allow us to work together with each other (which I believe are the root of our morals) evolved as a survivability enhancement. Individuals that acted in purely antisocial (generally called immoral) ways were less likely to survive AND pass on their genes. Human offspring take a LONG time to reach maturity and require a great deal of guidance along the way. Simply forcefully reproducing is not enough to guarantee the survival of genes.

I do not believe that ideas like not selling alchohol on Sunday morning evolved. Rather, I believe they are non-survivability-related offshoots of the basic moral behavior that did evolve.

I would say that grabbing evolved as an aid to survivability. Catching a baseball is a non-survivability-related offshoot of that basic ability to grab.

Kharakov

DNA (human) : a set of basic rules of conduct for every cell in the human body to follow

morality (specific society) : a set of basic ideas of what is right and wrong that is used to guide human behavior in a society

If a cell in the human body does not follow the basic genetic code of the body, it has a chance of:
a) dying
b) being killed by another cell (t cell)
c) becoming cancerous (therefore spreading its bad genes throughout the body)


If a person behaves against the basic rules of morality of a society, they have a chance of:
a) dying
b) being removed from the society so they do not have a adverse effect upon the society
c) having an adverse effect upon society, and spreading amoral conduct among the masses, which leads to the break down of that society (read: social death due to cancer)

Morality (memes) and genetics (genes) are both guidelines for different levels of evolution. It is wrong to say that certain genes evolved while discounting the evolutionary nature of morals.

It seems apparent to me that one type of morals will emerge in control of a majority of the resources, just as one branch of genes has emerged to control a majority of the resources. There is a moral food chain, much like the genetic food chain.

Kharakov