Why is torturing babies wrong?
"Reason says, because of evolutionary grease".
Well I guess that's a view.
That's not how evolution works. And hey, I thought you were a fan of Kant. He used reason to determine morality. Now it's a bad idea?
Are you empathetic? Yeah, me too. Comes in handy, doesn't it. You a parent? Yeah, me too. That emotional bond, eh? Now those are evolved concepts. They are evolutionary beneficial. Rather obviously. So if you see a child being harmed you can imagine their pain. And you can envisage your child feeling that pain. And you most definitely don't want that to happen. It's entirely natural. So harming children is a bad idea on those two levels at least. And if you actually
feel that it's a bad idea, rather than sitting down with a pen and some paper and sketching a logic diagram to work out the possible outcomes of allowing it then you'll reject it automatically.
Those people who did that, those people who
felt that it was somehow wrong, rather than have to reason it out, well their kids outlived those of people who were a bit slow on the uptake.
It's like love. An evolutionary development that allows pair bonding to survive. What? It's just part of our genetic make up? No way! Well, yes. That's exactly what it is. But knowing what it is doesn't make it feel any less than it does. Doesn't make it
feel any less real. So feeling that it's wrong to harm children is likewise an evolutionary development. But it still
feels entirely natural.
It's like Feynman (say hi to my avatar) when he said that knowing the molecular and biological structure of a rose and knowing how the light reflect off the petals at a certain wavelength and how the molecules trigger sense organs in the nose and transmit that to certain parts of the brain...all of that adds to the wonder of a rose. How it looks and smells. It doesn't detract from it.
Same with evolution.
