ajarntham
Member
He accounts for morality that doesn't help us socially by dismissing them as an accidental side effects of evolution. This is a copout. He only deals with that which suits his agenda and doesn't deal with that which doesn't suit his agenda, by saying that it is accidental, which to me seems similar to the No True Scotsman fallacy. If a set of morality doesn't neatly fit into his box then he doesn't examine other possibilities for their development.
This is why I am having a problem with his explanations of WHY our morality developed. I understand that our emotions are linked to our biology and our biology evolved. But WHY it evolved in a certain direction is just conjecture on his part. He isn't providing evidence for the actual mechanisms that caused these morals to develop the way they did.
I don't think that biology is at a point where it can talk about mechanisms, in the sense of particular mutations to particular genes, in trying to explain the development of mental abilities and tendencies. Maybe it never will be.
I'm not sure whether this is entirely on-topic here, but I've found it important in these kinds of discussions to distinguish between "evolution caused us to have these sets of standards, in which some acts are called 'right' and others are called 'wrong'," and " 'right' and 'wrong' are simply to be defined as what evolution has drawn us towards, or away from." Analogously, compare these two statements:
1) evolution has wired our brains in a way that makes us perceive some objects as close and others as farther away.
2) "close" and "far away" are simply to be defined as what evolution has led us to say about our perceptions.
Pretty much everybody except some creationists would agree with (1). So far as I know, nobody in human history has agreed with 2). Clearly (in this case, anyway) it could be correct to say "evolution gives us the ability to perceive things in this way," but entirely wrong to say "these things we apparently perceive (like 'close' and 'far') have no independent reality, outside of the evolutionary adaptation." The same might be true of right and wrong; evolutionary adaptations give our brain the ability to perceive them, but that doesn't mean they have no independent reality outside of those adaptations.