REACTION: The Prospects for Evolutionary Ethics Today (2010) by Neil Levy

Dark elves are always with us

Neil Levy "The Prospects for Evolutionary Ethics Today" Euramerica 40, no. 3 (September 2010): 529-71. Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica http://euramerica.org  [via academia.edu]

So, an Australlian? Neuroscientist? via Oxford?

Abstract: One reason for the widespread resistance to evolutionary accounts of the origins of humanity is the fear that they undermine morality: if morality is based on nothing more than evolved dispositions, it would be shown to be illusory, many people suspect. This view is shared by some philosophers who take their work on the evolutionary origins of morality to undermine moral realism. If they are right, we are faced with an unpalatable choice: to reject morality on scientific grounds, or to reject our bestconfirmed scientific explanation of our origins in order to save morality. Fortunately, as I show, we have no reason to accept the deflationary claims of some evolutionary ethicists: morality, as we ordinarily understand it, is fully compatible with evolution. Key Words: evolution, ethics, meta-ethics, Spencer, Huxley

Following on from the last reaction (substack), this also deals with those who argue or see that tradcore Darwinianism undermines hard morality. Either by those debunking morality/religion/etc, or, inreaction to that by reserving those powers of worlding to a select chosen, and to silo off the two ways of worlding from each other.

I'd also argue that it is all fully compatible with evolution, so we will now see where Neil Levy goes, he uses the deflationary word to almost slash debunk and silo-ing-off together which is interesting, not defined so must be common in his language usage groups. I feel there is a bit of elision there, but may just be me making an error.

So, we read that evolution is currently 'naturalizing' across meta-ethics. Like an invasive weed, the language feels Antipodean. The paper will review recent work in evolutionary meta-ethics with some historical nods first up:

Aristotle, Hume, Darwin on altruism, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Henry Huxley, the over-shadowing twins.

Then we get the fulcrum and lever of the paper:

1. Can evolution provide us with knowledge of the ethical principles which ought to guide our behavior? This is the normative evolutionary question.
2. Might understanding the (putative) evolutionary origins of morality help us comprehend the structure of ethics, and to settle debates over the meaning and reference of ethical terms? This is the meta-ethical evolutionary question.

My answer to 1 is: No, we just get an urge to world all that among others, the same way hunger does not give you a recipe on how to bake a cake, but is quite prosocial because we often shares meal to discuss all of the above, and all of the below.

And my answer to 2 is: Also no, the worlding urge pushes us to debate all settlements, as we are social in both our prosocial and anti-social preferences and will often gather in noyaux. (Even the want to withdraw from the world is social BTW. Asocial points-of-view do not even notice the world so there is nothing to withdraw from.

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I guess Neil Levy is going to say a qualified yes to number 2. And 1 is damned by the normative hells of other people, i.e. the dark enlightenment of neoreaction or revolution that descend from Spencer’s view of evolution = progress.

On more purely intellectual grounds, Moore’s “open question argument”specifically formulated with Spencer in mind—seemed to defeat all attempts to identify goodness with being highly evolved (Moore, 1903). It would, Moore argued, always be an open question whether any identification of moral terms with natural properties was correct. The direct route, from meta-ethics to normative principles, was apparently blocked. [Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia ethica. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.]

This would also apply to alignment discussions in AI more generally, different framework.

Huxley was more pro-silo, or as Stephen Jay Gould puts it when I was young, accept there are non-overlapping magisteria. Perhaps with more of a semi-permeable membrane…

The debate between Spencer and Huxley is not over: if morality can be directly tied to evolution (as Spencer claimed), it is a very different kind of phenomenon then the ethics which might emerge from the processes of cultural and intellectual elaboration on a biological base, the kind of morality that Huxley defended. In particular, as we shall see, a neo-Spencerian morality seems far more likely to be subjectivist, non-realist and restricted then a Huxleyean morality. It is therefore an urgent task to assess the plausibility of neo-Spencerian views.

We step through some altrusim frameworks via kin selection etc.

This is the problem of altruism: given that we are the products of evolution, how did we come to be altruistic, to whatever extent? E. O. Wilson called this “the central theoretical problem of sociobiology” (Wilson, 1975: 3). [Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]

Including group selection. Possibly possible IMHO but not a very parsimonious explanantion. A weak form of this is more likely and is called inter-group competition, this process seems to favour more adaptive coalition seeking behaviours and negotiations (perhaps via Garvey’s outsourcing and thus rollback of potential hardwiring of norms by self-domestication – bad luck Spencer’s dark elves). I.E. we get markets and masses in the noyaux, not castes of worker bees, as much as the dark elves want them.

I.E. groups do not get selected, behaviours that compromise do (i.e. world we self among others worlding), at the individual level.

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The meta-ethics bit

There are at least five relevant possibilities: (1) Morality might commit us to the existence of Platonic moral facts, which are ontologically independent of human beings or other rational beings. (2) Morality might commit us to the existence of moral facts which, while not ontologically independent of the existence of any rational beings, are binding on all such beings, and which therefore cannot vary across space or time. (3) Morality might commit us to the existence of objective properties, the truth conditions of which do not essentially contain references to the subjective states of the beings upon whom they are binding. (4) Morality might commit us to the existence of moral facts which are such that their existence ensures that it is rational for us to behave morally, in general or (more strongly) on each particular occasion. (5) Morality might require us to give some weight to the interests of all parties affected by our acts, regardless of their relationship to us. Some of these claims are, prima facie at least, much more plausible than others. Thus, how threatening to moral realism an evolutionary explanation of morality will be depends upon which—if any—of these claims it is taken to undermine.

All of these positions are the result of the worlding urge, they each seek to act normatively on the world, claiming more or less power or justification from the worlding preferences for coherency and justification or openness to work with others, in compromise or in re-activating baboon-like sub-dom games. As morality is an outcome of the worlding urge all of these positions are true because none of them are.

Evolution acts on individuals ability to get organised with each other. Among both ‘making special’ kin (where evolved sentiments are conventionalised), and annoying kith you have to have meetings with about all of the above. It’s the meeting which make us human, types of meetings include: meals, masses, conferences, demonstrations, processions, marches, ceremonies etc (ratio at these meetings of food to ritual varies quite a lot). We are norm seeking but have no norms to seek norms by, it’s always up in the air above the social arena. This follows from evolutionary expressivism (page 548ff) into our noyaux where feelings a regulated by the “real world” (Freud’s reality principle, it is cute that Sigmund called the world reality).

What really deflates moral realism? Politics, not evolution, progressive or not.

“Proto-morality” page 549, this is a lead but the error lies in not blurring that into something that allows one to see the worlding it does, it remains focusses on the individual’s point-of-view and not the ground they move this POV on. Both psychology-land and conscience-based discourses do this. They get pot-holed in sub-optimal solutions. They stare at their feet getting wetter and wetter.

Levy then lists minecrafty mappings on implications that a trapped in this pot-hole. Paranoia & truth claims.

The first thing we need to note is that it is very plausible to think that our evolved dispositions do track real properties (Rottschaefer & Martinsen, 1990). [Rottschaefer, W. A., & Martinsen, D. (1990). Really taking Darwin seriously: An alternative to Michael Ruse’s Darwinian metaethics. Biology and Philosophy, 5, 2: 149173.]

Levy damns it with: “However, since the argument is entirely conceptual, and not evolutionary, I relegate discussion of it to a footnote.⁶”

We then have to step through more mud in the pothole to deal with the naturalistic fallacy. The more you drive through a pothole the bigger it gets.

At least we get a fish analogy here, limited to categories, not in water.

Finally on page 554 we get out of the pothole:

To put the same point in another way, it is a mistake to identify proto-morality—the animal base, as it were of morality full-blown—with morality itself. On this point at least, we ought to side with Huxley against Spencer. We shall return to this point. For the moment, we need to pick up the main thread of our journey.

Why have we made such a glaring error?

Both the subjective reality of morality, and the illusion of objectivity, are the product of natural selection (Ruse, 1998). In fact, morality is nothing more than a set of evolved dispositions, a “collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes” (1998: 253). [Ruse, M. (1998). Taking Darwin seriously: A naturalistic approach to philosophy (2nd ed.). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.]

Blaming the genes is too much, the gap too far a jump to make. The ‘collective illusion’ is foisted on us, not by genes (too Spencerian, but in a bad way, not a progressive way) but by our attempts to make do with what is at hand, or mouth, in the urge to should the world around us, because we do it with others who are not kin.

We are trying to correct errors wth errors, this is why it looks like an illusion when we try to map it into coherency (perhaps yet another error but that is often all we have to hand). This is why the outcomes are so varied.

Or put another way:

Mackie’s error theory, for instance, analyses moral claims as committing those who make them to the existence of objective prescriptive facts: facts the recognition of which is necessarily motivating. Mackie argued that such “queer” facts are metaphysical extravagances (Mackie, 1977). The evolutionary error theory analyzes morality as demanding more of us than we can give: it claims that our concept of morality is of a set of obligations which transcend the bounds of kin and reciprocity, but our moral dispositions are confined within these bounds. Our concept of morality commits us to (5), but (5) is false. [Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.]

Or at least often wrong. The attempts yield goodness, if not goodness’ sake.

Then we consider the alien, or at least ants, the Portugese Man ‘o War, & Star Trek’s Borg

We redux the deflationary evolutionary ethicists interconnections.

We might call the conjunction of these three claims the neo-Spencerian position. Neo-Spencerians follow Spencer in identifying morality proper with the set of evolved dispositions, in opposition to Huxley and neo-Huxleyeans⁸ who believe that morality is importantly different from proto-morality. We cannot, as might have thought, put the Huxley/Spencer debate behind us. It continues to play itself out among evolutionary ethicists today.

Looks like my postion is definitely not Spencerian, and more neo-Huxleyan but without the “proto-morality” pothole because worlding.

t very least, the burden of proof ought to be on those who reject the neo-Spencerian view, to show that additional mechanisms are necessary. Merely insisting that preferences cannot be moral reasons (Woolcock, 1993, 1999, 2000) just begs the question. [Woolcock, P. G. (1993). Ruse’s Darwinian meta-ethics: A critique. Biology and Philosophy, 8, 4: 423-439.]

No the question is why one cannot see the pothole one is in? Fish in water? The Spencerian position doubles-down on this pothole, dives deep into the mud & grit.

Conclusion

We go wrong, then, if we allow our theories to be driven by evolutionary hypotheses. They ought not to constitute a separate realm of theorizing about humanity and its nature, moral or otherwise. Instead, they constitute just one small part of the jigsaw, one more piece of evidence which, together with evidence from psychology and neurobiology, history and even literature, build up the picture of human nature.

I agree and add that the “one more piece of evidence” well… — I say this is the world we swim in and take for granted even as we build all the live long day.