luvluv

If naturalism is true and evolution is true, what is the problem with social darwinism? Are we potentially threatening the eventual survival of the species by allowing less succesful elements the ability to survive and reproduce (through public health care, the welfare state, etc.). Does the survival and well being of the inferior outweigh morally the promotion into existence of the superior?

If this is the case, then isn't the emotion of compassion a mistake of nature? Certainly we could have moral feelings and the ability to cooperate without the emotion of compassion for the less fortunate. Compassion, it seems to me, works against evolution by continuing the breeding of the unsuccesful.

So, from a naturalistic standpoint, what is the problem with Social darwinism?

<Jack Black from High Fidelity>

"SUB-QUESTION":

If morals are subjective, and evolution is true, why couldn't white supremacy be true? It's clear that whites are more succesful than some of the other races. From a naturalistic, evolutionary standpoint, we have no reason to believe that one race, or population group, could not have evolved superior mental capacity over another given the presence of the right selective pressures. Is their a naturalistic reason why white supremacy is wrong? Even if the case is not true at this time, or even if it were not true of whites (maybe asians are superior) why could there not be a race that, intellectually at least, was genuinely superior to other races?

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

Autonemesis

What is the problem with curing disease?
What is the problem with clothing?
What is the problem with avoiding inclement weather?
What is the problem with rescuing people from a burning building?
What is the problem with global communication?
What is the problem with educating children?
What is the problem with capturing criminals and trying them for their crimes?
What is the problem with sanitation?
What is the problem with keeping pets?
What is the problem with nursing premature infants to health?
What is the problem with mass transit?

What is the problem with understanding that satisfying compassionate urges and improving living conditions for oneself and one's neighbors is its own reward, worthy all by itself because we humans value it? The problem with Social Darwinism is that it doesn't seem to foster maximal satisfaction of compassionate urges, but rather quite the opposite. What other explanation is needed?

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

Philosoft

Social Darwinism usually depends on a particular society that unequally favors one group over another. If a society is structured such that one group is historically downtrodden, then I would call the practice of Social Darwinism within "bad." If you can somehow separate the debilitating effects of society itself from the inherent shortcomings of the individuals, then you might have the beginning of a case.

theyeti

Problem #1: Evolution is not about the "survival of the species". Darwinian evolution predicts that individual organisms should strive to maximize inclusive fitness, regarless of what it does to the rest of the species. This is why some speices resort to cannabalism, and others (including our own) often kill their conspecifics over territory or mating rights. The only evolutionary logic that applies here is whether or not we live in a society that we deem beneficial to our current needs, not whether or not that society would be conducive to a "master race" way in the future. Most of us find it more appealing to live in a society that helps the less fortuante, because we ourselves may be among the less fortunate at some point in time. And moreover, no one really likes the consequences of having legions of people near starvation. It's not only aesthetically undesirable, it can be quite dangerous. That's really all there is to it -- it's to our advantage to help the less fortunate.

Problem #2: "Superior" and "inferior" are a relative terms which are value laden, and thus meaningless in evolutionary terms. High inclusive fitness is the closest thing to "superior" as you use it here, but this is completely dependent on the environment, and evolutionary biologists do not attach any subjective value to it. Thus, there is no validity to the suggestion that we should "like" those who do well and dislike those who don't. By definition, the "superior" ones are those that do the best, and the ones that do the best depend on the environment that our society sets up. According to Darwinism, the best strategy for a given environment is the one that will prevail given enough time. So insofar as we control certain aspects of the evironment, we have the ability to choose what qualities are "superior" and "inferior". It makes little sense that we should take the qualities that made a cave man sucessful and apply them today. So what we do find is that some people, given the modern environment, do better than other. But this just begs the question of why would society need to help out those that are already doing just fine? Just because they are doing well doesn't mean that there is something objectively "superior" about them that we should laud.

Oftentimes, people do well in society by cheating, lying, or bullying. Just because that makes them sucessful does not mean that those behaviors are "right". To claim so is to invoke the <a href="http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#natural" target="_blank">naturalistic fallacy</a>. Conversely, many who do poorly do so because they're unlucky, non-ambitious, discriminated against, humble, or are born into bad circumstances. There's nothing genetically "wrong" with these people, and even if there were, it does not flow logically from the theory of evolution that we should make their lot in life worse. The objective ability to measure a person's sucess does not justify a subjective value judgement on them one way or the other.

Problem #3: Darwinian theories of evolution are descriptive; they are not prescriptive! This might sound obvious, but even many anti-creationists can't get this through their heads. Like any scientific theory, the job of Darwinism is to give us an explanation of why humans are the way we are. It doesn't tell us how we should be. The fact is that humans have compassion -- this is an observable fact. Thus the job of Darwinism is to explain why we have compassion, not to make a moral judgement about it. The conclusion that follows from the theory is that compassion is good for us, because it facilitates our existance as a cohesive society. We do better as individuals when we cooperate in a social setting than we would on our own, for reasons which I hope are obvious. Feelings of compassion no doubt start with family members, and it is strongly to our advantage, from a Darwinian view point, to protect and aid those closely related to us. From there it is a small step to apply those feeling towards everyone else. It would make no sense for Darwinian theories to tell us that a well recognized feature of human emotion, like compassion, was a mistake.

Unless you are the unsucessful. The faulty premise here is that everyone who runs into problems does so because they're somehow "inferior". As explained above, it doesn't work that way. Furthermore, the implication is that social programs that help out the less fortunate are there to "level the playing field" between the sucessful and the unsucessful. It doesn't work that way either. No program could possibly do such a thing except under a communist state, and those haven't tended to work out very well. Social programs are more often intended as a safety net that protects less fortunate people from the most serious consequences of poverty.

Futhermore, I don't understand why "cooperation" and "helping out the less fortunate" are seen as somehow different things. If helping out your friends when they're in need is not cooperation, I don't know what is.

What is the problem with it from a Biblical standpoint? Social Darwinism does not flow logically at all from any naturalistic theory of evolution, including Darwinism. It is a normative theory that is separate from scientific theories of why we are the way we are. If one wishes to defend it, they must do so on its own moral merits, not on the scientific facts. As it is, even if we assume that people are entirely self-serving, it still makes sense to give help to the needy. The only people who would not benefit are the very wealthy elites who have enough resources to totally ignore and fight off the impoverished masses. Guess who likes Social Darwinism?

That brings me to another point, which is that conservative Xtian complaints about the evils of Darwinism are almost alway jaw-droppingly hypocritical, as they themselves are most likely to want to dismantle social programs and screw over the less fortunate. What Social Darwinism really is is a rationalization for greed; it most certainly is not the cause of greed -- that's been around forever. Conservatives in the early 20th century latched on to the idea because it seemed to give them an intellectual rationale for what their ignoble instincts had been telling them do for a long time -- get filthy rich and stay that way by keeping others down. People just love it when you tell them that their self-serving behavior is actually good for the world, which is why they often believe it when all evidence says otherwise.

Darwinesque type arguments were popular among conservatives throughout the 20th century until recently. To a certain extent they make sense, insofar as if you remove people's incentive for hard work, they tend not to want to work very hard. IMO, this kind of critique can be appropriately applied to communism and other forms of extreme socialism. But this has always caused a strain within the conservative movement because of the Bible thumpers who hate Darwin with a passion, but also hate Marx equally. Now enter the neo-conservative movement. Bereft of any consistent philosophy, and only concerned with gaining power and defeating "liberals" regardless of the merit of their policies, the neo-cons found a populist solution. Incredibly, they now use the Bible to justify their greed. As hard as it is to believe, the Bible is now being used to justify tax cuts for the rich, the dismantlement of social programs, the removal of consumer protections, and other ultra-conservative causes that previoulsy only be rationalized through Social Darwinism. For example, see Howard Ahmanson's article, <a href="http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/97jan_feb/ahmanson.html" target="_blank"> Three New Testament Roots of Economic Liberty
</a>. By "Economic Libery", Ahmanson means robber-baron capitalism, the kind that makes a multi-millionare like himself even richer at the expense of others. Ahmanson is also the primary <a href="http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7003.htm" target="_blank">fund provider</a> for the Discovery Insitute, the right-wing think tank pushing "Intelligent Design" and blaming Darwinism for, yep, robber-baron capitalism, along with everything else that's gone wrong since 1859. So is Ahmanson "superior" for having obtained his vast wealth? Does he deserve such fruits as a reward for all his hard work? Hardly -- he inherited it.

theyeti

RogerLeeCooke

"Successful" is relative to the environment. We don't know for sure which traits are going to be important in the future. Male ferocity was a great asset at times in the past, when groups were threatened by vicious animals or neighbors. Now that weapons have become so destructive, aggressiveness is counterproductive. However, it's hard to see how Down's syndrome (for example) could enhance the survival of the species, and I don't favor reproductive "rights" for people incapable of caring for their own offspring. To that extent, I probably am a social Darwinist. But there are sound political reasons for not wanting the government to decide anything on eugenic principles. You can't trust the government to use such principles exclusively; politics is bound to get intermixed, with a danger to civil rights.

Both fit and unfit benefit from compassion. I like it.

What follows if there are inborn differences of intelligence? Are there not other human qualities of importance equal to intelligence? At this point I think we need emotional maturity more than we need intelligence. White supremacy is a political position; it is incapable of being true or false in the ordinary factual sense. Either you like it or you hate it. I hate it.


[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ][/QB][/QUOTE]

luvluv

I actually made a point of qualifying superiority as being mental superiority. So it seems that we admit the possibility of one race of people being smarter than another race, as some breeds of dog, for instance, are smarter than others. What would be the problem with such a group, if it could demonstrate it's superior intelligence, demanding a right to rule. What is the problem with White man's Burden under the auspices of naturalism? (Or Asian Man's burden or whoever can establish themselves as having superior intelligence).

What I guess I'm asking is, if we say that morals are arbitrary and subjective, then just as a person could decide they value sex or various other forms of their own personal good as being their governing value, couldn't a person also be justified in considering themselves members of a superior race? Christian theism posits that all humans are created in the image of God and therefore have an equal worth and value, and much of Christ's teaching centered around our supposed duty to the unfortunate (parable of the Good Samaritan, the sheep and the goats, etc.). So that would form the basis of the Christian objection to Social Darwinism and racism.

But if people have no intrinsic value, why should we care about them? Certainly, we have been socialized to care about people but we have only come to value them through evolutionary accidents and the influence of various forms of theism (as we have come to respect the incest taboo). Why can't we recognize that the intrinsic value we place upon every person is simply socialized into us? What is the reason for hanging onto it?

Autonemesis

Stop right there. Morals are subjective, but hardly arbitrary. No one chooses their "10 Commandments" randomly from a hat. There are reasons why murder is to be condemned that only murderers would disagree with. If I have to point out those reasons to you, then I question your fitness for civilized society. The rest of your argument fails on this unwarranted assertion that subjectivness implies arbitrariness.

Isn't it enough that we do? Why can't we take that as axiomatic? Sounds like a fine basis to choose for building a civilized society: each person is as worthwhile as the next. What is your objection to this ideal?

Lack of any reason for discarding it.

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

luvluv

From the standpoint of Social Darwinism there are plenty of reasons for discarding the intrinsic value of humans, or placing it lower on our list of priorities. Lower taxes, greater wealth allowing me greater acces to health care in non-public healthcare systems, etc. Why should I not value my money and my own happiness over the well-being of others when the two conflict? Values may not be arbitrary but it is certainly reasonable to choose one's own well-being over the well-being of another. If that other persons well being requires expenditures of my money that I am not willing to part with, I would be totally justified in allowing him to continue to suffer since, despite whatever we are socialized to believe, he has no more instrinsic value than your stray dog.

luvluv

We can admit, at least, that certain races are certainly smarter than others, correct? At least, there's no naturalistic reason why this should not be the case. It is true of every other species (crows, for example, are thought to be much smarter than most other birds) so why could it not be true for humans?

Doubting Didymus

Darwinism only says that the displacement of the weak by the strong DOES happen. It does not say that it SHOULD happen, or even that it is good for the species for it to happen in the way you describe.

I think you are correct in saying that we should do the best possible thing for the human species. If you think that the best thing to do would be to establish a mater race and murder unfit people, then you just go ahead and try it. Those of us who believe that the evolution of the species would not benifit one bit from murder and bigotry will stop you.

The social darwinist misconception comes from believing that evolution pushed a species toward being 'better', more desirable, etc. This is completely untrue. If a species of murderous immoral scum would survive better that us, then evolution would push us that way. Possibly the best thing we can do for the species is to actually avoid unguided evolution.