Materialist morality

Basically I personally adhere to a moral foundationalism.


This basically takes similiar form to the foundationalism most are aware of, epistemic foundationalism which involves truths or reasoning beggining with certain self-evident axioms- like sight sensation, sound sensation, the law of noncontradiction, and objectivism.


Only that instead of sensation of sight it proposes a sensation of good/bad and right/wrong.

Many moral systems are moral foundationalist in this sense.

Consider utilitarianism, it proposes that pleasure=right. But how do they argue for this? How do they know an organisms goal is to promote pain, and avoid pleasure?

The answer would be something like "it's obvious". But why is it obvious? I would say because the sensation itself along with its evaluation is self-evident.



Hence right or wrong in the general and moral sense become what I consider ethical data. This data takes the form of emotions, and other pleasure/pain sensations.


Hence liking or disliking something is simply a certain type or quality of pain and pleasure. Though I hesitate to call it pain or pleasure because of the hedonistic assumptions underlying such words.


Thus I believe moral norms are justifed at a self-evident level. Not a cognitive level, but an emotive level.


This means there can be variation of course. What is self-evident to one person may not be to another when it comes to the emotive. But what can be objectively said is that what is self-evident to me, is self-evident to me, even if not to you.


Now what established these moral axioms? I believe evolutionary mechanisms, that are of course expressed through environment. In this sense I am of course making a distinction between proximate causes for adhering to morals (emotions from the brain's point of view) as opposed to ultimate causes (why it evolved, from the genes point of view.)
I distinguishing between ethical explanations and justifications.

To quote Richard Dawkins (leading evolutionary theorist) on a similiar issue:

DR. DAWKINS: Some people are puzzled by the sense in which it's possible to take a deliberate decision to emancipate ourselves from the Darwinian world. Well, we know we do it, because every time we look unreceptive we are doing something anti-Darwinian. What happens is that Darwinian natural selection has built into us sexual desire for obvious good Darwinian reasons. In nature, where there are no contraceptives, sexual desire leads you to copulate. Copulation leads to children. That's all the genes need. In the modern world contraceptives have been invented, so it's possible to enjoy copulation without the follow-up, without having children. And we do. And many of us do it all the time. And it is something which is manifestly and factually counter-Darwinian -- anti-Darwinian, anti the dictates of the selfish genes. We have been given brains which were shaped to enjoy sex. We have also been given brains that have been shaped to enjoy various other kinds of hedonistic pleasures. We have noticed consciously that hedonistic pleasure or other more worthwhile pastimes are sometimes incompatible with having lots of children all the time that you have to look after. And so we get the best of both worlds by consciously deciding to enjoy both the sex and the other things that would have been competed with -- by the need to look after children. We have achieved the best of both worlds from our own brain point of view, but not of course from the gene point of view.

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http://www.meta-library.net/transcript/dawk-body.html


I think morals evolved as a consequence of living in a group, and how group members tend to establish certain norms.

Now I am not saying it is genetically determined. I am saying there is a genetic predisposition.

I am also not saying that we merely practice morality because it benefits our Darwinian fitness. I am saying we practice morality because we want to and we want to practice morality because Darwinian mechanisms in the past have wired us that way. Just like sex, genetic mechanisms of the past are what make us like sex today, but that doesn't mean we just have sex to aid our genes.


It is like growth. We are all genetically predisposed to grow. But does that mean without food and water we will still reach our full height? Does that mean that nutrition does not effect growth?

Of course not. Genetic predispositions are of course nurtured through and expressed through the environment.


To quote geneticist Matt Ridley:

The conventional wisdom in the social sciences is that human nature is simply the imprint of an individual's background and experience. But our cultures are not random collections of arbitrary habits. They are canalized expressions of our instincts. That is why the same themes crop up in all cultures - themes such as family, ritual, bargain, love, hierarchy, friendships, jealousy, group loaylty, and superstition. That is why, for all their superficial differences of language and custom, foreign cultures are still immediately comprehensible at the deeper level of motives, emotions and social habits. Instincts, in a species like the human one, are not immutable genetic programs; they are pre-dispositions to learn. And to believe that human beings have instincts is no more determinist than to believe they are the products of their upbringing.

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And again:

For St Augustine the source of social order lay in the teachings of Christ. For Hobbes it lay in the sovereign. For Rousseau it lay in solitude. For Lenin it lay in the party. They were all wrong. The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present.

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http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Life/Science/Matt_Ridley.html




Dawkins again, on how selfish genes can lead to selfless organisms:

The phrase "the selfish gene" only means that genes are selfish. It doesn't mean that individual organisms are. On the contrary, one of the main messages of the selfish gene is that selfish genes can program altruistic behavior in organisms. Organisms can behave altruistically towards other organisms -- the better to forward the propagation of their own selfish genes. What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education. It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by." It's very important to do moral philosophy, to try work out the principles we want to live. But when you say religious principles, there I think I would part company. I see no reason why they should be religious. But I certainly think that they should be developed by society and not necessarily following biological dictates.

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Now Steven Pinker, professor of Neuroscience at MIT:

Many of our mental faculties evolved to mesh with real things in the world. Our perception of
depth is the product of complicated circuitry in the brain, circuitry that appears to be absent in other species and even in certain impaired people. But that does not mean that there aren't real trees and cliffs out there or that the world is as flat as a cartoon?
And this argument can be carried over to more abstract properties of the world. Humans (and many other animals) appear to have an innate sense of number, which can be explained by the utility of reasoning about numerosity in our evolutionary history. That is perfectly compatible with the Platonist theory of number believed by many mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics, according to which abstract mathematical entities such as numbers have an existence independent of minds.
According to this view, the number sense evolved to mesh with real truths in the
world that in some sense exist independent of human knowers. A similar argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong have an existence and an inherent logic that licenses some chains of argument and not others. If so, our moral sense evolved to mesh with the logic of morality. The crucial point is that something can be both a product of the mind and a genuinely existing entity.

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And Pinker again on why free will (in the dualist sense) is not conductive to morality:

The last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn't hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment. We could not hope to reduce evil acts by enacting moral and legal codes, because a free agen, floating in a different plane, would be unaffected. We could punish a wrongdoer, but it would be sheer spite, because it could have no predictable effect on the future behaviour of the wrongdoer or other people aware of the punishment.
On the other hand, if the soul is predictably effected the prospect of esteem and shame or reward and punishment, it is no longer truly free, because it is compelled (at least probabilistically) to repsect those contingencies.

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http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Life/Science/Blank_Slate.html#Determinism

Steven Pinker again, on why determinism does not negate responsibility:

The third fear is a fear of determinism: that we will no longer be able to hold people responsible for their behavior because they can they can always blame it on their brain or their genes or their evolutionary history?the evolutionary-urge or killer-gene defense. The fear is misplaced for two reasons. One is that the silliest excuses for bad behavior have in fact invoked the environment, rather than biology, anyway?such as the abuse excuse that got the Menendez brothers off the hook in their first trial, the "black rage" defense that was used to try to exonerate the Long Island Railroad gunman, the "pornography made me to it" defense that some rapists have tried. If there's a threat to responsibility it doesn't come from biological determinism but from any determinism, including childhood upbringing, mass media, social conditioning, and so on.

But none of these should be taken seriously in the first place. Even if there are parts of the brain that compel people to do things for various reasons, there are other parts of the brain that respond to the legal and social contingencies that we call "holding someone responsible for their behavior." For example, if I rob a liquor store, I'll get thrown in jail, or if I cheat on my spouse my friends and relatives and neighbors will think that I'm a boorish cad and will refuse to have anything to do with me. By holding people responsible for their actions we are implementing contingencies that can affect parts of the brain and can lead people to inhibit what they would otherwise do. There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior--namely, the inhibition systems of the brain--just because we're coming to understand more about the temptation systems.

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Pinker again on why evolutionary theory does not lead to moral nihilism:

The final fear is the fear of nihilism. If it can be shown that all of our motives and values are products of the physiology of the brain, which in turn was shaped by the forces of evolution, then they would in some sense be shams, without objective reality. I wouldn't really be loving my child; all I would be doing is selfishly propagating my genes. Flowers and butterflies and works of art are not truly beautiful; my brain just evolved to give me a pleasant sensation when a certain pattern of light hits my retina. The fear is that biology will debunk all that we hold sacred.

This fear is based on a confusion between two very different ways to explain behavior. What biologists call a "proximate" explanation refers to what is meaningful to me given the brain that I have. An "ultimate" explanation refers to the evolutionary processes that gave me a brain with the ability to have those thoughts and feelings. Yes, evolution (the ultimate explanation for our minds) is a short-sighted selfish process in which genes are selected for their ability to maximize the number of copies of themselves. But that doesn't mean that we are selfish and short sighted, at least not all the time. There's nothing that prevents the selfish, amoral process of natural selection evolution from evolving a big-brained social organism with a complex moral sense. There's an old saying that people who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. That's a bit like human values--knowing how they were made can be misleading if you don't think carefully about the process. Selfish genes don't necessarily build a selfish organization.

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http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_blank/pinker_blank_p3.html