Where do atheists get their morals from?

[Viking]

I don't see how there could be a trial, let alone a verdict, on the issue of "the existence of god on the balance of probabilities."

The trial would have to balance the probability of X and the probability of Y, where neither can be quantified or even defined.

Whether there is a "mind" behind natural forces is one of those unknowable questions, for which Occam's Razor seems the only tool to guide us:  do we need to assume an entity behind natural forces in order to explain them?  No.  OR tells us, then, not to assume them.

OR isn't a legal concept, I don't believe, but then, this isn't a legal question.

I'm not making the claim that this trial will make any sense, BB is. On one side you are operating with a claim which has an unknown prior probability (the existence of god) and on the other side you have an attempt to put a probability of proving a negative (=0 by definition).

I suspect his two tests are if his assertions actually support the hypothesis that god exists and the probability that his assertions are true or reasonable.

I don't think BB is actually going to make his case or attempt to do so, he will either abandon this thread or call me a bigot for asking him to do what he said he could do.

[The Brain]

mountie bigit

[dps]

I don't see how there could be a trial, let alone a verdict, on the issue of "the existence of god on the balance of probabilities."

The trial would have to balance the probability of X and the probability of Y, where neither can be quantified or even defined.

Whether there is a "mind" behind natural forces is one of those unknowable questions, for which Occam's Razor seems the only tool to guide us:  do we need to assume an entity behind natural forces in order to explain them?  No.  OR tells us, then, not to assume them.

OR isn't a legal concept, I don't believe, but then, this isn't a legal question.

I'm not making the claim that this trial will make any sense, BB is. On one side you are operating with a claim which has an unknown prior probability (the existence of god) and on the other side you have an attempt to put a probability of proving a negative (=0 by definition).

I suspect his two tests are if his assertions actually support the hypothesis that god exists and the probability that his assertions are true or reasonable.

I don't think BB is actually going to make his case or attempt to do so, he will either abandon this thread or call me a bigot for asking him to do what he said he could do.

I'm not sure that he could answer, because if I understand his post (and I admit that I may be misunderstanding it), he's not claiming to balance the evidence in quite the same way he'd balance evidence in a trial--he's making an analogy (arguably a poor one) rather than a direct comparison.  It's seems impossible to reach a conclusion about what one believes as to the existance or non-existance of God through strict logic.  It would be like deciding what to have for dinner this evening through the use of strict logic.  If you choose to have roast beef instead of steak, how can anyone use logic to show that you were wrong?

[The Brain]

Fairly easy to determine what you actually ended up having for dinner.

[garbon]

It would be like deciding what to have for dinner this evening through the use of strict logic.  If you choose to have roast beef instead of steak, how can anyone use logic to show that you were wrong?

Actually I think one could from a nutrition angle look at what was good or bad depending on your circumstances and preparation of the dish.

[crazy canuck]

Fairly easy to determine what you actually ended up having for dinner.

I dont know, some of that organic labelling has to be taken on faith it seems...

[grumbler]

I'm not sure that he could answer, because if I understand his post (and I admit that I may be misunderstanding it), he's not claiming to balance the evidence in quite the same way he'd balance evidence in a trial--he's making an analogy (arguably a poor one) rather than a direct comparison.  It's seems impossible to reach a conclusion about what one believes as to the existance or non-existance of God through strict logic.  It would be like deciding what to have for dinner this evening through the use of strict logic.  If you choose to have roast beef instead of steak, how can anyone use logic to show that you were wrong?

I'm gonna disagree.  BB seemed to me to be making the direct comparison of the chances of proving the existence of his god based on "the balance of probabilities" to the chances of doing so in any case being decided on balance of probabilities.

[BB]But balance of probabilities?  Well like I said you have lots of witnesses who say they've seen Him and talked to Him.  You have the historical records showing His words (the Bible).  And you'll find plenty of Experts who say looking at the world and its beauty means there is a God.

So yes - I think His existence could be proven on a balance of probabilities.

I think he is wrong, of course, because he is ignoring all of the probabilities that work against his case, but I think he was making the bolded claim.

[Viking]

Because religions don't necassarily present themselves in the way you seem to think.
As an example, in Christianity, Jesus' typical mode of communication is through parable or similar metaphorical presentation.  That should be a big clue that a strictly literal approach is neither intended or appropriate.

I don't think this is a problem for the literalist. There are sufficiently large proportions of the bible that are not parables especially the epistles, revalation and the prophecies and explicit statements of jesus. Furthermore I don't think the literalist has any problem with parables simply on the grounds that the literalist considers the parables to literally be parables. Reality clashes least with the parables simply because they are stories that even the literalist doesn't claim to be literally true.

It's just that the parables comprised a list of 30 or 40 one paragraph stories in a much longer book. The sermon on the mount, the eye of the needle and the bit about forsaking your family selling all you own and following his as well as the "there is one among you here who will see the end of days" bit.

You are again presuming there is a "natural morality" that is universal and innate, which is a very dubious proposition.  To the extent you are relying on some evolutionary mechanism to explain morality, the claim borders on the non-falsiable: there is no "fossil record" of mental constructs.  It also contradicts what I would posit as a common sense view of how ethical behavior manifests - namely, most people adopt various simple heuristics and maxims as they are exposed to them.  That is, most people "pick and choose" from an array of potential ethical rules and heuristics, typically influenced by parents, peer groups, teachers or mentors.  In this respect, ethical concept and moral rule formation pretty much involves the same process regardless of religious sect, and regardless of whether one is theist or atheist.  The only difference is that the theist is more likely to have their "picks" influnced by clergy, whereas the atheist is more likely to adopt maxims or principles that, while identical in substance to certain religious maxims and principles, have the word "God" taken out.

Well yes, I agree. There is no fossil record of ideas except as writing. Given that 95% of homo sapien history happened before the invention of writing we don't have the bones of the development from morals as we see in chimps and other great apes to stone age morality and (within human history) the development from paleolithic through mesolithic to neolithic ideas. We do however have data indicating mental development both in development of tools, art and burial rituals.

We do know that mental constructs exist and we can find differing and rudimentary moral codes in animals. Just like we can find rudimentary forms of eyes in the animal kingdom showing each supposed step in the development of the eye without actually having eye fossils to work with. Lions don't do cannibalism, monkeys, prairie dogs and meerkats risk their own lives to warn pack members of predator attacks (they even have rudimentary language to do this), vampire bats share food and remember who shared and who didn't, chimpanzees will start fights if they feel unfairly treated (give one chimpanzee one apple and another chimpanzee two apples and you have started a fight), gorillas will spare submitting males from beatings and death and again to chimpanzees they will show compassion and comfort injured, shamed or insulted members of their group. These behaviors are universal within these species, you find them in all groups of that species.

So, we don't have moral fossils but we have all the rudimentary forms of morality one would expect among species which don't require the full set we have. The more complex an animals social structure is the more developed it's morals. If you don't think ants have morals; ants willfully give their own lives for other ants (so do bees). The insect answer suggests that morals do not take up much brainpower; even that they might be simplistic heuristics at their core which our brains elaborate on.

You agree with 2/3 of my thesis her. You agree that morals include learned heuristics and maxims and you agree that our common sense is vital in picking which of these heuristics and maxims we follow. I'm saying that our morals comprise of both learned morals and instinctive morals. Investigations into the development of childrens brains has demonstrated that certain morals don't need to be taught, they are instinctive. Parents will note how toddlers will measure milk glasses to the millimeter to make sure that the milk is fairly divided. We don't need to teach children that lying, stealing and murder are wrong. Lie detectors work on identifying the mental stress response we have when lying. This is not a perfect guarantee of behavior, parents and society do need to identify and correct when deviation happens. The person breaching these fundamental morals knows he is breaching without ever really having been taught.

If you can find some other mechanism for the appearance of a near universal set of moral beliefs among all human societies I am willing to listen to it. We have instincts for moral behavior, these instincts are often re-enforced by culture and religion, I do not doubt that; but we have these instincts. Cannibalism, incest, murder, mendacity, theft etc. are near universally immoral and when they are practiced they are practiced as part of religious ritual (a victory of nurture over nature).

Our brain produces our instincts and our brain is a result of evolution. I think it is reasonable for it to follow from that that our instincts are a result of evolution, however vicariously. If you accept this and you accept the role of instinct in morality then I can't see how you can not accept genetically evolved morality as a constiuent material plausible explanation for the appearance of universal morality. 

The rest of this post is attaking strawmen.  Who are these unknown adversaries that insist that others adopt a strict literalist interpretation of a text and yet don't do so themselves? 

I claim that they insist the book is true while they don't live the consequences of that claim. I accept that it is completely possible for a person to genuinely believe the book is true and genuinely believe that he doesn't need to follow all the bits and genuinely argue that the book is true. Humans are creatures of contradictions. They don't think that they themselves need to follow all the bits of the book themselves since they are wise enough to understand which bits to follow and which bits not to follow, they just don't assume that other people are smart enough to do the same.

Almost all christians decline to give no thought for the morrow, to abandon their families and to sell all their worldly goods and give them to the poor. They manage to get the idea that the bible teaches the opposite; that is to be a good family member. Any man who got an education and then a job, got married had kids got a mortgage and goes to church on sundays is ignoring Jesus instruction on how to be one of his followers. That is what I mean.

It's not descriptive -- a descriptive account would involve a taxonomy of ethical phenomena and an analysis of principles that might underlie them - you are advancing something different, which is theory of origins.  And it is a very dubious theory because the axiomatic claims are contestable (e.g. the claim of instinctive sympathy towards children and small animals as a foundational basis of ethics immediately encounters the uncomfortable reality of highly variant attitudes towards father-child relationships and treatment of small animals across scoeities) and the difficulties of extrapolating the richness and depth of systems of moral reasoning from such simple biological axioms in a manner that doesn't reduce to question begging.

I'm not suggesting that we can get any "ought" from any "is" here. I'm observing that human societies have agreed on a certain set of moral basics and because we all share these basics we acquired them from a common source and that the only common source we share with australian aboriginies is the mesolithic genetic pool.

I'm not arguing that because all societies have up to now agreed that murder is bad that it follows that we much hold this view in the future. I am not arguing for a foundation at all. I am observing that we have a common agreement of what moral behavior is and the reason we agree is that these morals evolved in the same or similar manner. Nothing that Paleolithic man though was moral should be or is binding on us. Just as in genetic evolution there are no good genes and bad genes, there are successful genes and only nature decides which are good, humanity does not. That is how we got the idiotic idea of eugenics; som idiots who happened to be related to Darwin got it into their heads that the central idea of evolution (natural selection) was amoral and should be fought against. I'm not arguing for (lets see if we can make this a neologism) eumemics.

The problem is that the hypothesis is not testable at all becuase any empirical social phenomemon can be "explained" by being hammered into an evolutionary explanation.  Thus evolution can be used to explain selfishness but also altruism.   ANY social constuct or behavior can be argued to have an evolutionary advantage in some context, because "fitness" or selectivity for evolutionary purposes is not invariant, but highly context-based.  Which is a particular problem where the relevant context - human social interaction - is subject to extreme variability and change, and variability that is endogenous in terms of interaction of the human faculty of reason and speculation with that contextual change.

This is why Hume's point about divorcing the empirical from normative ethical reasoning is well taken.

I agree here. To quote Orgel's rule "evolution is smarter than you". I suspect that as time passes we might actually evolve different universal morals for farming villages and cities in addition to the hunter gatherer morals we have now. The time we have spend as farmers and burghers is so minutely short on the evolutionary scale the no real effect has been seen and the rate of cultural evolution is so many orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution that it is quite possible that our moral memes will render genetic change on this issue insignificant.



The important points I am making are

1 - genetic instinctive morality is only one factor
2 - normative morals do not follow from moral evolution through group selection just as eugenics does not follow from genetic evolution through natural selection.

Edit: fixed quote threading and formatting

Edit2: Brain, DG would you mind deleting those posts

[The Brain]

Because religions don't necassarily present themselves in the way you seem to think.
As an example, in Christianity, Jesus' typical mode of communication is through parable or similar metaphorical presentation.  That should be a big clue that a strictly literal approach is neither intended or appropriate.

I don't think this is a problem for the literalist. There are sufficiently large proportions of the bible that are not parables especially the epistles, revalation and the prophecies and explicit statements of jesus. Furthermore I don't think the literalist has any problem with parables simply on the grounds that the literalist considers the parables to literally be parables. Reality clashes least with the parables simply because they are stories that even the literalist doesn't claim to be literally true.

It's just that the parables comprised a list of 30 or 40 one paragraph stories in a much longer book. The sermon on the mount, the eye of the needle and the bit about forsaking your family selling all you own and following his as well as the "there is one among you here who will see the end of days" bit.

You are again presuming there is a "natural morality" that is universal and innate, which is a very dubious proposition.  To the extent you are relying on some evolutionary mechanism to explain morality, the claim borders on the non-falsiable: there is no "fossil record" of mental constructs.  It also contradicts what I would posit as a common sense view of how ethical behavior manifests - namely, most people adopt various simple heuristics and maxims as they are exposed to them.  That is, most people "pick and choose" from an array of potential ethical rules and heuristics, typically influenced by parents, peer groups, teachers or mentors.  In this respect, ethical concept and moral rule formation pretty much involves the same process regardless of religious sect, and regardless of whether one is theist or atheist.  The only difference is that the theist is more likely to have their "picks" influnced by clergy, whereas the atheist is more likely to adopt maxims or principles that, while identical in substance to certain religious maxims and principles, have the word "God" taken out.

Well yes, I agree. There is no fossil record of ideas except as writing. Given that 95% of homo sapien history happened before the invention of writing we don't have the bones of the development from morals as we see in chimps and other great apes to stone age morality and (within human history) the development from paleolithic through mesolithic to neolithic ideas. We do however have data indicating mental development both in development of tools, art and burial rituals.

We do know that mental constructs exist and we can find differing and rudimentary moral codes in animals. Just like we can find rudimentary forms of eyes in the animal kingdom showing each supposed step in the development of the eye without actually having eye fossils to work with. Lions don't do cannibalism, monkeys, prairie dogs and meerkats risk their own lives to warn pack members of predator attacks (they even have rudimentary language to do this), vampire bats share food and remember who shared and who didn't, chimpanzees will start fights if they feel unfairly treated (give one chimpanzee one apple and another chimpanzee two apples and you have started a fight), gorillas will spare submitting males from beatings and death and again to chimpanzees they will show compassion and comfort injured, shamed or insulted members of their group. These behaviors are universal within these species, you find them in all groups of that species.

So, we don't have moral fossils but we have all the rudimentary forms of morality one would expect among species which don't require the full set we have. The more complex an animals social structure is the more developed it's morals. If you don't think ants have morals; ants willfully give their own lives for other ants (so do bees). The insect answer suggests that morals do not take up much brainpower; even that they might be simplistic heuristics at their core which our brains elaborate on.

You agree with 2/3 of my thesis her. You agree that morals include learned heuristics and maxims and you agree that our common sense is vital in picking which of these heuristics and maxims we follow. I'm saying that our morals comprise of both learned morals and instinctive morals. Investigations into the development of childrens brains has demonstrated that certain morals don't need to be taught, they are instinctive. Parents will note how toddlers will measure milk glasses to the millimeter to make sure that the milk is fairly divided. We don't need to teach children that lying, stealing and murder are wrong. Lie detectors work on identifying the mental stress response we have when lying. This is not a perfect guarantee of behavior, parents and society do need to identify and correct when deviation happens. The person breaching these fundamental morals knows he is breaching without ever really having been taught.

If you can find some other mechanism for the appearance of a near universal set of moral beliefs among all human societies I am willing to listen to it. We have instincts for moral behavior, these instincts are often re-enforced by culture and religion, I do not doubt that; but we have these instincts. Cannibalism, incest, murder, mendacity, theft etc. are near universally immoral and when they are practiced they are practiced as part of religious ritual (a victory of nurture over nature).

Our brain produces our instincts and our brain is a result of evolution. I think it is reasonable for it to follow from that that our instincts are a result of evolution, however vicariously. If you accept this and you accept the role of instinct in morality then I can't see how you can not accept genetically evolved morality as a constiuent material plausible explanation for the appearance of universal morality. 

The rest of this post is attaking strawmen.  Who are these unknown adversaries that insist that others adopt a strict literalist interpretation of a text and yet don't do so themselves? 

I claim that they insist the book is true while they don't live the consequences of that claim. I accept that it is completely possible for a person to genuinely believe the book is true and genuinely believe that he doesn't need to follow all the bits and genuinely argue that the book is true. Humans are creatures of contradictions. They don't think that they themselves need to follow all the bits of the book themselves since they are wise enough to understand which bits to follow and which bits not to follow, they just don't assume that other people are smart enough to do the same.

Almost all christians decline to give no thought for the morrow, to abandon their families and to sell all their worldly goods and give them to the poor. They manage to get the idea that the bible teaches the opposite; that is to be a good family member. Any man who got an education and then a job, got married had kids got a mortgage and goes to church on sundays is ignoring Jesus instruction on how to be one of his followers. That is what I mean.

It's not descriptive -- a descriptive account would involve a taxonomy of ethical phenomena and an analysis of principles that might underlie them - you are advancing something different, which is theory of origins.  And it is a very dubious theory because the axiomatic claims are contestable (e.g. the claim of instinctive sympathy towards children and small animals as a foundational basis of ethics immediately encounters the uncomfortable reality of highly variant attitudes towards father-child relationships and treatment of small animals across scoeities) and the difficulties of extrapolating the richness and depth of systems of moral reasoning from such simple biological axioms in a manner that doesn't reduce to question begging.

I'm not suggesting that we can get any "ought" from any "is" here. I'm observing that human societies have agreed on a certain set of moral basics and because we all share these basics we acquired them from a common source and that the only common source we share with australian aboriginies is the mesolithic genetic pool.

I'm not arguing that because all societies have up to now agreed that murder is bad that it follows that we much hold this view in the future. I am not arguing for a foundation at all. I am observing that we have a common agreement of what moral behavior is and the reason we agree is that these morals evolved in the same or similar manner. Nothing that Paleolithic man though was moral should be or is binding on us. Just as in genetic evolution there are no good genes and bad genes, there are successful genes and only nature decides which are good, humanity does not. That is how we got the idiotic idea of eugenics; som idiots who happened to be related to Darwin got it into their heads that the central idea of evolution (natural selection) was amoral and should be fought against. I'm not arguing for (lets see if we can make this a neologism) eumemics.

The problem is that the hypothesis is not testable at all becuase any empirical social phenomemon can be "explained" by being hammered into an evolutionary explanation.  Thus evolution can be used to explain selfishness but also altruism.   ANY social constuct or behavior can be argued to have an evolutionary advantage in some context, because "fitness" or selectivity for evolutionary purposes is not invariant, but highly context-based.  Which is a particular problem where the relevant context - human social interaction - is subject to extreme variability and change, and variability that is endogenous in terms of interaction of the human faculty of reason and speculation with that contextual change.

This is why Hume's point about divorcing the empirical from normative ethical reasoning is well taken.

I agree here. To quote Orgel's rule "evolution is smarter than you". I suspect that as time passes we might actually evolve different universal morals for farming villages and cities in addition to the hunter gatherer morals we have now. The time we have spend as farmers and burghers is so minutely short on the evolutionary scale the no real effect has been seen and the rate of cultural evolution is so many orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution that it is quite possible that our moral memes will render genetic change on this issue insignificant.



The important points I am making are

1 - genetic instinctive morality is only one factor
2 - normative morals do not follow from moral evolution through group selection just as eugenics does not follow from genetic evolution through natural selection.

[DGuller]

Because religions don't necassarily present themselves in the way you seem to think.
As an example, in Christianity, Jesus' typical mode of communication is through parable or similar metaphorical presentation.  That should be a big clue that a strictly literal approach is neither intended or appropriate.

I don't think this is a problem for the literalist. There are sufficiently large proportions of the bible that are not parables especially the epistles, revalation and the prophecies and explicit statements of jesus. Furthermore I don't think the literalist has any problem with parables simply on the grounds that the literalist considers the parables to literally be parables. Reality clashes least with the parables simply because they are stories that even the literalist doesn't claim to be literally true.

It's just that the parables comprised a list of 30 or 40 one paragraph stories in a much longer book. The sermon on the mount, the eye of the needle and the bit about forsaking your family selling all you own and following his as well as the "there is one among you here who will see the end of days" bit.

You are again presuming there is a "natural morality" that is universal and innate, which is a very dubious proposition.  To the extent you are relying on some evolutionary mechanism to explain morality, the claim borders on the non-falsiable: there is no "fossil record" of mental constructs.  It also contradicts what I would posit as a common sense view of how ethical behavior manifests - namely, most people adopt various simple heuristics and maxims as they are exposed to them.  That is, most people "pick and choose" from an array of potential ethical rules and heuristics, typically influenced by parents, peer groups, teachers or mentors.  In this respect, ethical concept and moral rule formation pretty much involves the same process regardless of religious sect, and regardless of whether one is theist or atheist.  The only difference is that the theist is more likely to have their "picks" influnced by clergy, whereas the atheist is more likely to adopt maxims or principles that, while identical in substance to certain religious maxims and principles, have the word "God" taken out.

Well yes, I agree. There is no fossil record of ideas except as writing. Given that 95% of homo sapien history happened before the invention of writing we don't have the bones of the development from morals as we see in chimps and other great apes to stone age morality and (within human history) the development from paleolithic through mesolithic to neolithic ideas. We do however have data indicating mental development both in development of tools, art and burial rituals.

We do know that mental constructs exist and we can find differing and rudimentary moral codes in animals. Just like we can find rudimentary forms of eyes in the animal kingdom showing each supposed step in the development of the eye without actually having eye fossils to work with. Lions don't do cannibalism, monkeys, prairie dogs and meerkats risk their own lives to warn pack members of predator attacks (they even have rudimentary language to do this), vampire bats share food and remember who shared and who didn't, chimpanzees will start fights if they feel unfairly treated (give one chimpanzee one apple and another chimpanzee two apples and you have started a fight), gorillas will spare submitting males from beatings and death and again to chimpanzees they will show compassion and comfort injured, shamed or insulted members of their group. These behaviors are universal within these species, you find them in all groups of that species.

So, we don't have moral fossils but we have all the rudimentary forms of morality one would expect among species which don't require the full set we have. The more complex an animals social structure is the more developed it's morals. If you don't think ants have morals; ants willfully give their own lives for other ants (so do bees). The insect answer suggests that morals do not take up much brainpower; even that they might be simplistic heuristics at their core which our brains elaborate on.

You agree with 2/3 of my thesis her. You agree that morals include learned heuristics and maxims and you agree that our common sense is vital in picking which of these heuristics and maxims we follow. I'm saying that our morals comprise of both learned morals and instinctive morals. Investigations into the development of childrens brains has demonstrated that certain morals don't need to be taught, they are instinctive. Parents will note how toddlers will measure milk glasses to the millimeter to make sure that the milk is fairly divided. We don't need to teach children that lying, stealing and murder are wrong. Lie detectors work on identifying the mental stress response we have when lying. This is not a perfect guarantee of behavior, parents and society do need to identify and correct when deviation happens. The person breaching these fundamental morals knows he is breaching without ever really having been taught.

If you can find some other mechanism for the appearance of a near universal set of moral beliefs among all human societies I am willing to listen to it. We have instincts for moral behavior, these instincts are often re-enforced by culture and religion, I do not doubt that; but we have these instincts. Cannibalism, incest, murder, mendacity, theft etc. are near universally immoral and when they are practiced they are practiced as part of religious ritual (a victory of nurture over nature).

Our brain produces our instincts and our brain is a result of evolution. I think it is reasonable for it to follow from that that our instincts are a result of evolution, however vicariously. If you accept this and you accept the role of instinct in morality then I can't see how you can not accept genetically evolved morality as a constiuent material plausible explanation for the appearance of universal morality. 

The rest of this post is attaking strawmen.  Who are these unknown adversaries that insist that others adopt a strict literalist interpretation of a text and yet don't do so themselves? 

I claim that they insist the book is true while they don't live the consequences of that claim. I accept that it is completely possible for a person to genuinely believe the book is true and genuinely believe that he doesn't need to follow all the bits and genuinely argue that the book is true. Humans are creatures of contradictions. They don't think that they themselves need to follow all the bits of the book themselves since they are wise enough to understand which bits to follow and which bits not to follow, they just don't assume that other people are smart enough to do the same.

Almost all christians decline to give no thought for the morrow, to abandon their families and to sell all their worldly goods and give them to the poor. They manage to get the idea that the bible teaches the opposite; that is to be a good family member. Any man who got an education and then a job, got married had kids got a mortgage and goes to church on sundays is ignoring Jesus instruction on how to be one of his followers. That is what I mean.

It's not descriptive -- a descriptive account would involve a taxonomy of ethical phenomena and an analysis of principles that might underlie them - you are advancing something different, which is theory of origins.  And it is a very dubious theory because the axiomatic claims are contestable (e.g. the claim of instinctive sympathy towards children and small animals as a foundational basis of ethics immediately encounters the uncomfortable reality of highly variant attitudes towards father-child relationships and treatment of small animals across scoeities) and the difficulties of extrapolating the richness and depth of systems of moral reasoning from such simple biological axioms in a manner that doesn't reduce to question begging.

I'm not suggesting that we can get any "ought" from any "is" here. I'm observing that human societies have agreed on a certain set of moral basics and because we all share these basics we acquired them from a common source and that the only common source we share with australian aboriginies is the mesolithic genetic pool.

I'm not arguing that because all societies have up to now agreed that murder is bad that it follows that we much hold this view in the future. I am not arguing for a foundation at all. I am observing that we have a common agreement of what moral behavior is and the reason we agree is that these morals evolved in the same or similar manner. Nothing that Paleolithic man though was moral should be or is binding on us. Just as in genetic evolution there are no good genes and bad genes, there are successful genes and only nature decides which are good, humanity does not. That is how we got the idiotic idea of eugenics; som idiots who happened to be related to Darwin got it into their heads that the central idea of evolution (natural selection) was amoral and should be fought against. I'm not arguing for (lets see if we can make this a neologism) eumemics.

The problem is that the hypothesis is not testable at all becuase any empirical social phenomemon can be "explained" by being hammered into an evolutionary explanation.  Thus evolution can be used to explain selfishness but also altruism.   ANY social constuct or behavior can be argued to have an evolutionary advantage in some context, because "fitness" or selectivity for evolutionary purposes is not invariant, but highly context-based.  Which is a particular problem where the relevant context - human social interaction - is subject to extreme variability and change, and variability that is endogenous in terms of interaction of the human faculty of reason and speculation with that contextual change.

This is why Hume's point about divorcing the empirical from normative ethical reasoning is well taken.

I agree here. To quote Orgel's rule "evolution is smarter than you". I suspect that as time passes we might actually evolve different universal morals for farming villages and cities in addition to the hunter gatherer morals we have now. The time we have spend as farmers and burghers is so minutely short on the evolutionary scale the no real effect has been seen and the rate of cultural evolution is so many orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution that it is quite possible that our moral memes will render genetic change on this issue insignificant.



The important points I am making are

1 - genetic instinctive morality is only one factor
2 - normative morals do not follow from moral evolution through group selection just as eugenics does not follow from genetic evolution through natural selection.

[garbon]

[The Minsky Moment]

I'm not suggesting that we can get any "ought" from any "is" here . . .. I am not arguing for a foundation at all. I am observing that we have a common agreement of what moral behavior is and the reason we agree is that these morals evolved in the same or similar manner. Nothing that Paleolithic man though was moral should be or is binding on us. Just as in genetic evolution there are no good genes and bad genes, there are successful genes and only nature decides which are good, humanity does not. . . .

The important points I am making are
. . .
2 - normative morals do not follow from moral evolution through group selection just as eugenics does not follow from genetic evolution through natural selection.

If your argument held, then your would have just proven the case of the theists

As I understand it, you are advancing a empirical theory of morality without any normative content at all, thus avoiding Hume's fallacy.  But avoiding the fallacy doesn't make the question go away.  You've simply sidestepped the question at the heart of all moral reasoning - what is the good.  I.e. assuming that evolutionary forces operate over time to produce a particular set of mental structures, there is no way for us to know whether those mental structures are actually right or good in any sense other than that they are the ones we happene to have.

Under such an account, the faculty of human reasoning cannot contribute to elucidating moral problems other than to the extent of postulating constructs that are sorted and selected according to the evolutionary process.  That is, normative moral judgments cannot come from the human minds, nor do they arise from nature.  Thus, it follows that they can only come from some supernatural source. 

You've proven the case you set out to respond to.
Or at least you would have if the  underlying argument held.

Our brain produces our instincts and our brain is a result of evolution. I think it is reasonable for it to follow from that that our instincts are a result of evolution, however vicariously. If you accept this and you accept the role of instinct in morality then  . . .

No, I don't think this does follow.
First, while it is true that our physical brain arose out of the biological, evolutionary process, it does not follows that every activity of the brain is governed by that process.  The brain may indeed have evolved the way it did beacuse it certain ancient environments it conferred survivability advantages that outweighed its disadvantages, but the organ that resulted was capable of functions beyond those particular contingent evolutionary advantages.  (just as by way of analogy certain techologies may have uses or functions well beyond the specific problems they were originally used to solve).  There may have been an evolutionary advantage to having brains capable of relatively sophisticated social interaction and behavioral dispositions favoring certain kinds of cooperation.  But the ability or inclination to engage in moral philsophy side effect of that biological process, and the moral reasoning that the mind engages in as part of that activity is just that -- reasoning -- and not just random mental projections that are then sorted out by blind processes of evolutionary selection.

Second, and indepedently, I reject the role of instinct in morality.  Instinct, if defined as innate and non-volitional behavior, has no moral content or significance at all.

[Malthus]

Heh, to an extent there is a tension between what one would imagine are the evolutionarily-derived instincts and what most people would consider moral - hence, the "selfish gene". 

[Barrister]

I'm not sure that he could answer, because if I understand his post (and I admit that I may be misunderstanding it), he's not claiming to balance the evidence in quite the same way he'd balance evidence in a trial--he's making an analogy (arguably a poor one) rather than a direct comparison.  It's seems impossible to reach a conclusion about what one believes as to the existance or non-existance of God through strict logic.  It would be like deciding what to have for dinner this evening through the use of strict logic.  If you choose to have roast beef instead of steak, how can anyone use logic to show that you were wrong?

I'm gonna disagree.  BB seemed to me to be making the direct comparison of the chances of proving the existence of his god based on "the balance of probabilities" to the chances of doing so in any case being decided on balance of probabilities.

[BB]But balance of probabilities?  Well like I said you have lots of witnesses who say they've seen Him and talked to Him.  You have the historical records showing His words (the Bible).  And you'll find plenty of Experts who say looking at the world and its beauty means there is a God.

So yes - I think His existence could be proven on a balance of probabilities.

I think he is wrong, of course, because he is ignoring all of the probabilities that work against his case, but I think he was making the bolded claim.

Early on Viking made some comparison I didn't understand about me using the standards I work with in my job to my faith.  So I posted the "are you asking me if I can prove God exists in a courtroom?" and then went on with my very brief analysis.

The post was probably more about how a courtroom operates than about religious faith though.  A courtroom does not operate on strict logic or on absolute proofs, which is what Viking wants with respect to religion.  It is the very rare case when I have a crime captured entirely on video.  Instead we deal with hearing witness recall what they saw and experienced, and we deal with documentary evidence and expert analysis.

A courtroom works on a very different basis than science does.  We embrace a degree of uncertainty.

I agree that arguign the existence of God isn't really the right forum for a courtroom - mostly given the enormity of the question.  But in my own life I've looked at the question, and I believe it is likely that God exists (but that I do have a doubt about it).

[The Minsky Moment]

Heh, to an extent there is a tension between what one would imagine are the evolutionarily-derived instincts and what most people would consider moral - hence, the "selfish gene".

Yeah - that's why trying to apply a theory about physical phenomena to social phenomena probably renders it non-falsiable.  You can always come up with a variant evolutionary story that explains any apparent outlier social data.