reaction reading: An Evolutionary Vindication of Moral Facts by Ben Serber
Evolution frees us from evolution.
So the introduction mentions Richard Joyce's book The Evolution of Morality (2006), and Ben Serber’s paper An Evolutionary Vindication of Moral Facts via academia.org [PDF] is basically a reaction to that book. A nod and then a but. And some musing on agnosticism.
Looking at my linkpost page of reactions to evolution~morality articles (substack version) I can confirm I have not read Joyce’s book, but do have it on my to-do list.
There is however, a Reaction reading of mine to Richard Joyce's contribution “Evolution and Moral Naturalism” to The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism (Forthcoming). Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Via academia.edu of Chapter 26 pages 369-385. [Reaction reading crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.]
So I go check what I wrote back then, before moving onto to the second part of Serber’s introduction.
Then in the Serber’s 1.2 Roadmap section we get:
The second section follows Richard Joyce in explaining the shift from moral behavior to moral language and moral sentiment; this shows that there is at least one way in which that transition might be made.
My brain is now on alert, despite last bits of jetlag here in Victoria, BC, that while supportive of evolutionary discussions and originary implications of morality as an outcome, I regard moral sentiment more as the beginning not the end of this ‘transition’, (where an emotional taphonomy might be a better way to study it.)
And the idea of ‘moral language’ as a side-deal here is annoying. As if morality has it’s own origin story and then has to fit in along with tool use and other recursive powers like language, on some parallel track. Waves recursive hands in order to handwave.
So then, if I say sentiment is a starting point and not an outcome, I am framing the worlding urge as a package deal of what should be done: shelter, sustenance, the home range, the family, the extra-family of the world of the (tribe/band/group). Sentiment cements it together as much as it should proper behaviour, proper food rituals, proper propriety about all elements of a group’s world. That which the body worries about.
I regard moral naturalism of this sort, which Serber and Joyce argue for, as having the order of this evolutionary transition backwards. (If forced to use such non-recursive vectors.)
Looking further down Serber’s roadmap of the article ahead, I see Ben does not revisit this order I criticise.
Instead we get:
For Joyce, any attempt to derive a moral ‘ought’ from the evolutionary ‘is’ will fail because such accounts cannot find a fact in the world to latch onto that provides imperatives that are both inescapable and carry authority.3 In the fourth section, I respond to this concern by proposing a fact in the world that can generate imperatives that are both inescapable and authoritative: evolutionary adaptiveness. Some adaptive imperatives, such as survival, are so basic as to be universal, and hence present regardless of what an agent takes their ends to be. At the same time, these imperatives are legitimate elements of practical reasoning, and an agent would thus be irrational in failing to heed them. The existence of such a fact undermines Joyce’s claim that it is impossible to generate a concrete morality in the face of the evolution of morality. I conclude with some notes on how a morality grounded in evolutionary adaptiveness can expand to generate a robust system of first-order ethics, though the bulk of this project must take place in future work.
I have some sympathy with the ‘evolutionary adaptiveness’ but I do not think there is any need to use this as a lock and key to parallel some kind of logical lock-step between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. It is not needed.
Or that the logic we see in evolution (as a hindsight) has any power here.
Morality as an outcome of evolution will requires its own taphonomical evidence, which is likely to be found in the world we live in. The world is a living fossil, not in the sense of a lonesome survivor of a wondrous previous diversity, but as the success story itself, fossilising itself in survival. The remains are the life. This is where evolution gives a bad example to us, where we think of it as a bunch of fossils, and not the web of complexity currently around us. Evolution is not the history of evolution.
This is a very different error to those found in anthropology or sociology on the question of morality. Their error lies in currency.
As an equivalent of fossils in this regard, instead of bones and footprints, clickbait and sports clubs will be a better bet.
My sympathy with evolutionary adaptiveness is that it frees us from the lock step of hindsight logic, because in caring about survival, however logical, evolution has absolutely no care at all for us at all, worlding, moralising or praying or even evolutionary adaptiveness, like whatever. Evolution allows us to be free of evolution. This is true gastrulation. Just as surfaces and eddies lifted their surfaces into the eddy as a membrane, and the eddies fetalised their energy into under the surface, and that composition, we call it the cell, floated free from the substrate, composing its body from the substance and the flow of energy. Here the pathway to worrying about how it should be, some gastrulations later, began. No transition required.
I may or may not read the rest of the paper, but it has some discussion of agnosticism so I probably will.
See The reader as a trade for more on how people read, including how they read papers…
Also more reactions or quick take to articles or chapters on the morality~evolution nexus can be found at this self-hosted linkpost.
References:
Richard Joyce———
The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 9781118657607 REACTION & substackCrosspost: “Evolution and Moral Naturalism.” The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism (Forthcoming). Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. via academia.edu. Web. ISBN9781118657607 [Chapter 26 pages 369-385]Ben Serber UW – Milwaukee. bserber@uwm.edu———
An Evolutionary Vindication of Moral Facts via academia.org [PDF].