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I agree. But then we have to decide on what you want the state of affairs to be (the tragedy of the commons springs to mind). So if equality of wealth is the state of affairs then what you ought to do in that case is different if capitalism is the state of affairs.
Isn't that relativism by another name?
The most readily accessible and comprehensive discussion of the issue is The evolution of rape: The fitness benefits and costs of a forced-sex mating strategy in an evolutionary context by Apostolou which explains how it seems to have evolved as a way of circumventing parental choice.
Nope, relativism denies that there is a real right and wrong and instead is about frameworks and cultural contexts dictating what is wrong in that particular relative frame. Contextualism/situationalism recognizes that there is an objective right and wrong but that what it is isn't always cut and dry and similar actions could lead to opposite conclusions depending on local factors.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well...that's then down to me. So three times is definitely not going to happen. I'm looking for a conversation.
There's no fooling, but conversations require negotiation. Not simply demanding your terms be met.
I offered debate, just putting you on the hot seat instead of allowing you to interrogate me. I presented arguments, you refused to engage and simply tried to bulldoze with questions that were distracting from the thread of our conversation.
Seems to me that rather than being excluded, the hornet's nest got shaken up and atheists came crawling out trying to make it about me rather than defending their positions. Excluded? hardly.
I'm not someone who believes that. Lots of things have been and are socially enforced which I think are wrong. What is wrong is entirely up to me, not anyone else. So what society in general decides is irrelevant to my belief that something is wrong or right.
And as a relativist, I agree with that. You could sum it up by saying that morality is contextual. I think you used the term 'contextualist' earlier. I have no problem in accepting that label myself.
Now I have read the article, it is rich in hypotheticals and possibilities but there is not one calculation or simulation that describes the increase in fitness for humans by adopting a forced-sex mating strategy so what conclusions are one to draw from it? Do you know if anyone have put down their concrete assumptions and made any calculations?
Should survive? Should is a verb in the subjunctive mood. In the context of this thread, its use would -- you guessed it -- refer to an absolute moral demand as in "never, ever, made a mistake".
Good grief! So, now you claim to be a self-professed Christian who unapologetically admits to deceiving others about his identity. How can we trust anything you post? So long.
The article is more of a summary of the issues, you'd have to dig into the citations to get more of the research data.
Not necessarily, strategies need not be heritable to improve fitness. Nor does it need to result in more offspring. All that is needed is that it increases the statistical likelihood of genes surviving, which is explained by the manner in which rapists are able to copulate with more females by bypassing parental mate selection.
It is a successful reproductive strategy that improves fitness. How successful isn't all that relevant, the only issue is whether we can draw a straight line from fitness to morality.
Considering that there is very little demonstrated regarding heritability of psychology in general, evolutionary psychologists wouldn't have much to talk about if they didn't engage in conjectural discussions and debate.
I agree with the text in that it basically says what I have said before. But is much better articulated. What stood out to me was his comment that relativity requires an absolutes.
Morality without an absolute standard is like trying to find North in the middle of space. Although the concept of North may exist as an abstract idea, it truly does not exist. North is merely relative to one's individual position. If I am floating this way and you were floating that way, and I said North is here and you said North was there, who is right and who is wrong? The answer is neither. Likewise, without an absolute to measure, morality can only exist as an abstract thought. Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Therefore it would be nonsensical and worthless debating morality whatsoever.
I was able to find the article and read part of it. The whole thing is built on the notion of parental control of women's mate choices. This is certainly part of the agricultural era, but forced mating did not evolve during the last 10-20,000. The evidence for parental mating control in hunter-gatherer societieis seems incredibly weak. On example cited referred to a small Canadian tribe, who gathered *food*, but did practice tobacco agriculture (for a luxury item). It seems a rather weak foundation for this claim.
It doesn't seem *that* successful, just enough to persist.
It is a rather sketchy field. The journal that published the article, "Aggression and Violent Behavior", seems rather multi-disciplinary and certainly not a evo. psych journal. (I didn't see any such articles in the recent issues.)
All of this is rather beside the point, which is simply that marking out fitness as identical with morality is not really a viable option given that the only thing that matters for fitness is reproductive success. The whole bringing evolution into the picture seems to miss the crux of the conversation about morality since it seems to be looking for causal explanations for behaviors rather than dealing with the philosophical issues like grounding and moral validity.
You actually just explained exactly what relativistic morality entails. Which is that morals only exist within a societal framework, just as "north" only exists within an cartographical one. North is not absolute, but the northernmost point on a map gives a reference for that frame. So objectivity is required, but not an absolute. But relativism places that objectivity in the societal framework, making it impossible to compare across societies.
As a theists, i personally believe that morality is objective and absolute because the standard I have accepted comes from my religion. However, unless I can prove my religion to be true, I cannot prove my standard to be absolute. Therefore, the position that I am arguing here on this thread is that it is either absolute, or it is not. If not, morality cannot actually exist and that it only exists as an abstract idea similar to the abstract idea of the concept of a thing called "North" in the vacuum of deep intergalactic space. The ultimate result would be me asking, "What give you the right to tell me I am wrong?" The honest answer is nothing.
Because selection takes place at the level of populations and not at the level of individuals there is no need for direct transmission, all that would be needed is that the presence of the strategy improves the populations survivability as a whole. But again, the specifics of evolution is a red herring to the point about fitness and morality and the naturalistic fallacy.
Do you know if anyone actually present their measure of fitness? Otherwise I'll look through the references tomorrow.
The most common measure of fitness is differential reproductive success. So how do we measure the "statistical likelihood of genes surviving" if not by an increase in the relative or absolute frequencies of that gene (there is no identified rape gene?) in the next generation. Do rapist produce more offspring than non-rapists? If not why should we believe that forced-sex mating is highly successful strategy?
Does it? Who showed that, and by which measure? In humans? Perhaps it does in mallards?
