Hi there!
So I am hoping there are posters out there who are chomping at the bit to get into a good old-fashioned RF scrap!
I have just started reading a book called "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them" authored by Joshua Greene.
It is a fascinating book with which I agree on much but also disagree with a bit too, especially with the idea of evolutionary morality since it is an idea that cannot really be examined, thus is unfalsifiable, and therefore the author is just throwing conjecture regarding how we evolved our morality.
But that is besides the point of this thread.
What I would really like to get everyone's thoughts on is his definition of morality below:
"Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation."
Do you agree or disagree with this definition? If not, then please explain your reasoning and what you think the actual definition is or should be?
Interesting. That's a reductionist perspective, by which I don't mean anything disparaging; a reductionist explanation is often the proper goal of inquiry. For example, take the question, “what is 'heat'?” Well, it turns out that we now have a seemingly unassailable explanation for all phenomena we associate with “heat”: namely, “average molecular motion.”
Now take the question, “what is 'life'?” Well, from the perspective of biologists, at least, there are living things and nonliving things, and the former are those which can perform certain tasks: reproduction, metabolism, you know the drill. And if they are asked, “that's all fine, but I wasn't asking what differentiated living things from non-living things, I was asking what is life, itself,” most biologists (and probably most laypeople, now) will regard this as basically a mistaken question. They don't believe there
is any essence of “life, itself,” beyond “that which characterizes living things.”
This reduction becomes more of an area of controversy than the reduction of “heat” to “average molecular motion,” because there are people who are firmly convinced that there is such an essence, and that it transcends the material realm. And this is doubly true of attempted reductions of phenomena like “consciousness” or “morality.”
So, your author is practicing methodological naturalism, under which it is assumed that all natural phenomena can be reduced to other natural phenomena; that morality is a natural phenomenon; therefore, morality can be so reduced. I'm not a religious believer myself, but somehow this reductive definition doesn't strike me as being quite as successful or satisfactory as the others.
I have no problem at all with the conclusion, "A certain set of psychological adaptations (those that promote behavior we generally call 'moral') allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation." But that's not the same thing as saying “morality simply
IS that set of adaptations.” For one thing, it seems to imply that utilitarianism is simply, objectively true; that if anybody claims that some actions are moral though they fail to provide these benefits, or immoral although they do, that they are ipso facto wrong. I don't see that.
For another thing, suppose you convince me that "Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation." OK, then why would I want to follow these adaptations, adopt that behavior? If the answer is, “so that you can reap those benefits,” then I find that highly unconvincing. Lots of people do of course resist “cooperative” behavior, and seem to get along quite well in society. There are plenty of successful sociopaths. But lots of people still do want to be (what we generally call) moral, even if it turns out
not to help them socially. (In fact, many people consider morality to specifically require doing the right thing even if you
don't benefit from it.) How does the author's definition account for such a fact?