PyramidHead
Contributor
Morality can and should be considered a separate concern from societal function and human survival, even if the moral sense we have now largely evolved under conditions that favored those things. The fact is, almost everything about us can be traced back to a mutation or combination thereof that helped our ancestors thrive in groups. That doesn't mean we have to adhere to that original goal in all applications of our evolved tendencies.
To make this more obvious, consider that we must have evolved an ear for music for some social or reproductive fitness benefit. By definition. And so, we can imagine the earliest examples of music being used as ways of memorizing important information in the form of songs, announcing superiority to rival groups by coordinated displays, or arousing potential mates. Yet, none of these are valid ways of evaluating music today. Music is something over and beyond its humble beginnings. Good music stirs us on a level that has nothing to do with remembering hunting paths or impressing sexual partners (well, maybe there's still a considerable amount of that). Someone who insisted that the only acceptable way to scrutinize music is to appeal to its original evolutionary function would be someone who quite simply did not understand music. At all.
I think the same can be said about morality. It's perfectly coherent and understandable to imagine an act that would be beneficial to society or humanity at large, while still involving a great deal of unfairness, cruelty, and manipulation. To argue that such an act would be moral by virtue of its desirable social and survival consequences is, to me, a concession that you have no idea at all what morality is. It may be true that there are reasons to do something unfair, cruel, and manipulative, and those might be social reasons, genetic fitness reasons, or whatever, but they cannot be moral reasons. That's not what morality actually is, any more than the music of Bela Bartok is actually just an efficient way to intimidate rival tribes.
We need to de-couple the genetic origins of morality from its application. We need to resist the temptation to discard any moral concept that is not socially and genetically supportive, either on an individual or collective level, solely on those grounds. Everybody knows, deep down, what it means to be moral. It means, at minimum, don't favor your own interests over somebody else's just because they are your own. Every time I hear someone try to engineer that basic concept back to self-interest, to demonstrate that, after all, behaving morally is in my self-interest compared to behaving immorally and that's why I should do it, it gets distorted beyond recognition. It's as if, without some endgame that benefits me above all in the end, there can be no compelling justification for doing anything. But, the entire point of morality is that I sometimes do what is best for someone else, not because I calculated that it will be a winning strategy for my projects in the long run in some game-theoretical sense, but solely out of compassion, and indeed often IN SPITE of it being bad for me (or for society, or for humans, etc.) in the long run.
To make this more obvious, consider that we must have evolved an ear for music for some social or reproductive fitness benefit. By definition. And so, we can imagine the earliest examples of music being used as ways of memorizing important information in the form of songs, announcing superiority to rival groups by coordinated displays, or arousing potential mates. Yet, none of these are valid ways of evaluating music today. Music is something over and beyond its humble beginnings. Good music stirs us on a level that has nothing to do with remembering hunting paths or impressing sexual partners (well, maybe there's still a considerable amount of that). Someone who insisted that the only acceptable way to scrutinize music is to appeal to its original evolutionary function would be someone who quite simply did not understand music. At all.
I think the same can be said about morality. It's perfectly coherent and understandable to imagine an act that would be beneficial to society or humanity at large, while still involving a great deal of unfairness, cruelty, and manipulation. To argue that such an act would be moral by virtue of its desirable social and survival consequences is, to me, a concession that you have no idea at all what morality is. It may be true that there are reasons to do something unfair, cruel, and manipulative, and those might be social reasons, genetic fitness reasons, or whatever, but they cannot be moral reasons. That's not what morality actually is, any more than the music of Bela Bartok is actually just an efficient way to intimidate rival tribes.
We need to de-couple the genetic origins of morality from its application. We need to resist the temptation to discard any moral concept that is not socially and genetically supportive, either on an individual or collective level, solely on those grounds. Everybody knows, deep down, what it means to be moral. It means, at minimum, don't favor your own interests over somebody else's just because they are your own. Every time I hear someone try to engineer that basic concept back to self-interest, to demonstrate that, after all, behaving morally is in my self-interest compared to behaving immorally and that's why I should do it, it gets distorted beyond recognition. It's as if, without some endgame that benefits me above all in the end, there can be no compelling justification for doing anything. But, the entire point of morality is that I sometimes do what is best for someone else, not because I calculated that it will be a winning strategy for my projects in the long run in some game-theoretical sense, but solely out of compassion, and indeed often IN SPITE of it being bad for me (or for society, or for humans, etc.) in the long run.
