Xeluan

I occasionally post over at the Intelligent Design discussion board located at http://www.arn.org. I foolishly got tried to stimulate discussion on whether materialists can logically derive an ethical framework (based on an OP regarding suicide). Below is part of a post where I took the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tit-For-Tat strategy and some evolutionary results as a starting point for such a framework.

I would appreciate comments, informed criticism and wonderful compliments on my ideas. The thread never went anywhere (If you are bored read it at http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultim...;f=12;t=000509) though I was trying to fully explain my position in the hope that a decent discussion regarding the OP would result. I post as Zed if you haven't worked it out.

Mods, I hope this belongs in MF&P but feel free to move it to E/C or whereever if this is not the right forum.

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I really don’t see what is logical in assuming that if the materlialist position is true there is no foundation for an ethical/moral code.

Playing the materialist I look to science to provide an answer. Scrounging around, I stumble onto game theory, more specifically the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma analyses cooperation. There are two players in the game and each move they can either cooperate or defect.

You can try it for yourself at http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/playground/pd.html. I suggest first off pretend that you are a supposed materialist with the idea that “anything goes” in a godless world. The strategy is one of extreme self-interest. That you never cooperate.

Done that? Now try a mixture if cooperation and competition. When you have done that go for cooperating everytime. What you should find is that cooperation leads to the greatest accumulation of gold. This is because you opponent, Serendip, has chose to cooperate on EVERY move. This strategy, called “Tit for Tat” seems to be the optimal strategy. It is based on the work of Robert Axelrod. You can find all you want to know about Axelrod’s work at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/r...h_papers.html.

So from a economics/mathematical perspective I have a foundation for ethics. It appears that if I am nice then I get the optimal results for my actions and it behooves me to encourage others to be nice as well. If I compete (and if others do as well) then the outcome is suboptimal. Logically, it seems that cooperation leads to the best results.

Not satisfied with simple game theory, some have looked at nature to see what she does. It is not surprising that altruistic strategies exist in nature. For some background

ftp://ftp.vub.ac.be/pub/projects/Pri...ooperation.txt
http://brembs.net/ipd/ipd.html
http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/~strone01/altruism.html

And do not forget Axelrod’s work again.

Now our materialist can either to choose to act ethically (by which I mean cooperating with others) using either game theory as their basis or extending game theory into evolutionary models and using nature as a guide. Our materialist also understands that as humans are social animals and as such cooperation is the key to getting along.

And while this short summary does not do justice the ideas involved it does show that the basics for an ethical framework can be developed from a strict materialist view.

God Fearing Atheist

You should look at Gauthier, Narveson, Danielson and particularly Binmore's work. Its all Rational Choice/Game Theoretic stuff, with Binmore having a distinct evolutionary perspective.

-GFA

Xeluan

Looks like some interesting reading to be done. Thanks GFA.

Nikolai

Very nice post http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/playground/pd.html apears to be broken... Maybe its just me thought. Also, thought I believe that the game thoery can show evolution of ethics it cannot provide a moral framework for a person. Why? Simply, it relies on punishment/reward to determine behavior.

Imagine: you live in a dictatorship and the leader asks you to destroy a village. The rewards are great, the risk of not complying is even greater, and there is no evident advantage of not going throught with the order. Clearly, the moral thing to do would be to prevent destruction of village even at personal loss. But why?

Kevbo

Well, if the warlord is ordering the destruction of a village that is no threat to you, he is violating the principle of cooperation for mutual advantage. If the village represents a clear and present danger to your survival, it may not be immoral to destroy it if it is foiling mutual cooperation.

God Fearing Atheist

To be a bit more specific, I was thinking:

Binmore's "Game Theory and the Social Contract"

Gauthier's "Morals by Agreement"

Narveson's "Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice"

The essay by Danielson in "Contractarianism and Rational Choice" called "Closing the compliance dilemma: How it's rational to be moral in a Lamarckain world", and his book Artifical Morality (which, for some reason, I cant seem to find on Amazon).

-GFA

Xeluan

Thanks again for the specific reccomendations GFA. I was googling (TM) for the authors and uncovered some interesting articles.

Regarding Nikolai's moral dillemma I think there is a point there with regards to moral framework but to be honest I haven't developed my views enough yet to comfortably address that point. My OP was more about developing a ethical framework solely from non-theological sources. I gladly admit that I have much more thinking to do.

Regarding destruction of villages however, I think Kevbo has a point. It said dictator was benevolent and there was a war going on and said villagers were out for blood then not destroying the village would harm the society that I belonged to. I find these questions only ask more questions which is not a bad thing.

Alonzo Fyfe

Professional ethicists tend to give absolutely no credibility to this type of derivation of ethics, because it commits a fallacy discovered by David Hume over 200 years ago.

The fallacy concerns the derivation of 'is' from 'ought'.

Such a derivation can show that there is a reason for certain types of altruistic behavior or sentiments. But to say that this is an 'ethical' theory requires something more -- it requires the support for the proposition that we OUGHT to be altruistic.

Hume pointed out that since this "ought" relationship between propositions is not the same thing as an 'is' relationship, anybody attempting to derive 'ought' from 'is' needs to explain the relationship.

To illustrate the problem with respect to evolution, if one can come up with a good story to show that those who commit rape have a certain evolutionary advantage (or had a particular evolutionary advantage in the recent past) -- would that make rape morally permissible?

If one can provide an evolutionary explanation to racism -- promoting the well-being of those who 'look like' the individual and condemning those who 'look different' as a reliable way of promoting one's genes, would this make racism obligatory?

The answer to these last two examples is: Of course not. Being able to tell an evolutionary tale about some characteristic does not allow one to automatically conclude that the characteristic is one that we OUGHT to have, only that it is a characteristic that we DO have. But maybe it is a characteristic we OUGHT TO get rid of.

Note: This does NOT say that game theory has nothing to say about ethics. Game theory is relevant, but it requires certain assumptions. It involves assumptions that ethics is somehow essentially concerned with making everybody better off, and game theory tells us how we can do this. However, all of this can be handled without even once mentioning evolution. It is evolution that is irrelevant (or, at best, tangentically relevant) to ethics, not game theory.

Xeluan

Excellent. I understand the fallacy but from what I read in regards to evolution and ethics, philosphers such as Micheal Ruse and Peter Singer are arguing that ethics can be derived from evolutionary theory.

From what I understand the argument is that is a genetic predisposition if found to certain behaviour then it will affect ethics. For example, if we find that addiction has a genetic compoment, should we lock addicts in jails as seems to current trend or do we acknowledge that they may be not be in full control of their actions. If so then is harm reduction the moral option as opposed to punishment for addicts?

One question I have is there any essential difference between the is/ought fallacy and the naturalistic fallacy? There seems to be a bit of overlap.

Quote:

It is evolution that is irrelevant (or, at best, tangentically relevant) to ethics, not game theory.

From what I have encountered I disagree. I'm a not fully convinced on all the claims that usually grouped under sociobilogy and evolutionary psychology but there are people involved in using evolutionary theory as a basis for ethics and making a cogent argument for some degree of connection between the two.

For example, http://www.kli.ac.at/theorylab/Keyword/E/EEth.html lists papers/books on the subject.

This interview with Singer touches on the is/ought fallacy and how Singer deals with it regarding evolution and ethics:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/...int.php?num=11

Finally some reading I have found on evolution and ethics:
http://my.pclink.com/~allchin/papers/sans.htm
http://www.evolutionaryethics.com

There are good arguments on both sides. At this stage to dismiss evolution as being irrelvelant to ethics misses out on quite a lot of valid arguments opposing the idea.

Alonzo Fyfe

Michael Ruse ignores the is/ought fallacy and attempts to "derive" ethics from evolutionary theory. The professional ethicists (moral philosophers) I have known simply shake their heads in frustration over trying to explain it to him.

(Note: Michael Ruse's response to the is-ought fallacy is to claim that he is does NOT treat 'ought' and 'is' as having identical means -- but this is not what the fallacy claims, so his defense misses the mark.)

As for Peter Singer -- his approach is significantly different. Singer calls himself a 'preference utilitarian', I call myself a 'motive utilitarian' -- and there is no significant difference between the two theories. In this, evolution does have something to say about what those preferences or desires happen to be. However, Peter Singer accepts the fact that the evolution of a preference does not make it morally right or good. Goodness or rightness consists in 'something else'.

Ethics is concerned with people generally getting more of what they want. And, yes, evolution has important things to say about what we want. But, it still does not follow that because we have an evolutionary story to tell about wanting to have something, that it is morally permissible.

For example, male lions, when they take over a new pride, kill all of the cubs. Male humans may have some evolutionary tendency to have sex with their step-children. Does that make it right? Of course not. You can't argue from the fact that there may be a genetic story behind some trait that, therefore, it is right.


This is what I meant by 'tangentically relevant'. But notice physics affects ethics in the same way as evolution. We don't argue that a person SHOULD -- by force of will (e.g., by 'using the force') -- pull a child from a burning building and deposit him safely on the ground. Because he can't. We lack the capacity to do so.

But this is something totally different from saying that 'hey, look, we may very well have evolved a disposition to follow what game theorists call a tit-for-tat strategy, therefore we OUGHT to follow what game theorists call a tit-for-tat strategy.'

The former types of claims are fully acceptable within ethics, and have been for centuries. It would be foolish to say that ethics can command people to do what the laws of nature do not allow. In ethics, this is captured by the principle 'ought' implies 'can' (or 'cannot' implies 'it is not the case that one ought'). This has ALWAYS been a central principle of ethics, even before evolution was discovered.

But this is not deriving 'ought' from 'is'. This is not the type of argument that game theorists keep trying to run.

By way of illustrating the same point, can you imagine a society in which genetic tests determine what we may and may not do? "Jim has the genetic disposition to have sex with his step daughters, so me may do so -- but Bill does not have the genetic disposition, so he goes to prison for life."



There is an overlap, but there is an essential difference.

The 'is/ought' fallacy consists of taking a stack of premises containing 'is' relationships (e.g., 'man is a rational animal', or 'humans evolved a disposition to follow a tit-for-tat strategy' or 'humans males evolved a disposition to have sex with their stepdaughters') and from this asserting an 'ought' conclusion (e.g., 'man ought to be rational', 'humans ought to follow a tit-for-tat strategy', or 'human males ought to have sex with their step daughters').

You should be able to see the problem.

The 'naturalistic fallacy' consists of claiming that moral properties can be reduced to some set of natural properties.

G.E. Moore, who coined the phrase 'naturallistic fallacy', applied it to people who said such things as "pleasure is good" and "happiness is good". He argued that good cannot be reduced to some sort of natural property, and argued for his position using the "open question argument'. The 'open question argument' says that pleasure cannot be good, for example, because the question "X is pleasurable, but is it good?" remains an 'open question'.

G.E. Moore's 'open question argument' has come under fire because of the problem of opacity. What we can imagine is no limit on what is real. And, personally, though I see the is/ought fallacy of being a legitimate concern, I have a serious problem with the naturalistic fallacy. Natural properties are the only type of properties that exist. 'Good' must be reducable to some sort of natural property -- or it does not exist at all (because 'supernatural' properties do not exist).


Yes, and there are people involved in using a bible as a basis for ethics -- in fact, the latter significantly outnumber those trying to use evolutionary theory. This does not give the practice any type of logical validity.

The 'is/ought' fallacy remains a problem -- and no evolutionary theorist that I have ever had contact with has provided a satisfactory way of dealing with this problem.