Reaction: Brian Garvey's “The Evolution of Morality and Its Rollback”
I find this very interesting.
Garvey, Brian. “The Evolution of Morality and Its Rollback.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40.2 (2018): via academia.edu. Web. 31 Aug. 2024.
From the introduction:
it is possible that humans do not possess as much internal machinery for guiding actions or for morally responding to situations as the Evolutionary Psychology story alluded to above suggests. Instead, it may be that we often rely on external scaffolding to guide us both in how to act and how to react. I will suggest that this may be the case even in types of situation which our Pleistocene ancestors were provided by natural selection with mechanisms for dealing with. Moreover, it is possible that, because this capacity for outsourcing exists in the modern world, cognitive modules that evolved for dealing with those situations in the Stone Age may no longer exist, or at least may be significantly reduced.
It’s basically a highlighting of pathways that provide a way around, as well as a way to criticise, evolutionary just-so stories. What is new to me is that the ‘outsourcing’ of much of our reasoning (if not all reasoning, including the ability to generate multi-layered stories) to the crowdsource pool that is society, or more generally the world, is one way which would allow us to factor in and thus develop measures, and thus more testable explanations of morality/worlding examples. There is a method now available here which might test whether the ‘world’ as a outsourcing medium (Petter’s noyaux) exists.
Garvey also puts forward the idea that if there were evolutionary psychological modules, this outsourcing could undo them. I.E. be an example of reverse Baldwinian evolution.
In the Baldwin effect, learned abilities (with or without the outsourcing of a culture) become hardwired over time, as there is an evolutionary advantage in an instinct over the effort required to learn a behaviour anew in each individual, with the attendant trade-off that the instinct becomes suddenly non-adaptive.
Garvey calls the reverse of this process, where hardwired module become learned abilities, rollback. And presents society/world/culture as an outsourcing medium (shared and inherited/transmitted solution space of possibilities) where this can be mediated.
If this rollback is possible, I would argue that in the solution space of the ‘worlding domain’ that a deontological emphasis (or dimension) of some moral philsophers becomes a smaller part of the worlding solution-space’s geography over the generations where such outsourcing allows. It also makes ridiculous that Humans are human because they are moral animals, and animals are not.
I find this very interesting.
How does it relate to my position in why we should. Well it overlaps nicely, so much so it would be difficult to tease out the differences in real life.
My argument would accept Garvey’s position and add a strong version, that, perhaps, the outsourcing prevents detailed Baldwinian evolution of any module in the first place (Pleistocene first place anyways. Eocene not-so-much), as that outsourcing would only put forward its influence only after a moral/worlding urge 'to should' (to world within the group of one’s place). The 'outsourcing' is reliant on worlding happening before anything can be outsourced to it, preventing hard-wiring in the first place. (It becomes a originary discussion about the first place).
I’ll read the rest of the paper later.
Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com .
A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality.
Linkback from https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/evolutionary-rollback-and-trait-simplification