Guybrush

So far into the discussion, there's been a few good answers and a lot of spam posts. It seems most so far lean towards context-ism while me and possibly dac are more rule-followy. Still, I get the impression most people here haven't really thought about morale much. At the university in Oslo, a course in morale theory is required for all higher educations you might study. It's kinda old fashioned, but I think the subject is quite interesting.

It always rubs me the wrong way when people who don't understand biology but do understand morale think they understand morale as it should be if based on humanity's evolutionary history. They almost always get it wrong at some point

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sleepy jack

I've never really understood the idea (I've mostly heard Dawkins briefly talk about it in interviews and books) that our morals are determined by our genes. I don't think, as beings with independent minds, that we are simply our genes. I think our thoughts allow us to progress beyond that because of our ability to think abstractly. The idea that everything is some misdirected Darwinian impulse just seems too simplistic for me.

ixtlan22

Yeah I'm into a healthy mixture of free will and something predetermined, you can call that (the predetermined part) genes and it suffices to my mind just as much as just about anything else, i.e. predestination, synchronicity, etc. I think the world is in a pretty strange place so we've lost our instinctual ethics to a large degree. The environment we were built to be ethical in has changed so rapidly that its a very difficult question. In fact, I don't think ethics would even be an issue in a more 'natural' (I know the risk in bringing up this word) environment. I think that to figure out what our collective ethics should be as humans we need to figure out what our common goals are as a species. The pursuit of wealth, politics, and the loss of the true definition of wealth have twisted our ethics into a confusing mess of greed.

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Guybrush

One point regarding free will versus genes is that a very primal part of our brain is the limbic system - the center of emotions and this is ancient. Inputs are processed and applied various emotional tags by it. It's not part of your free thinking. Let's say genes make you angry .. That's your genes talking. However, you have free will and you can suppress that anger. In that respect, you're not a slave to your genes.

However, generally speaking, we do follow them. Most of us by far tend to avoid unpleasant situations if we can and other things we don't like. Then we pursue good stuff - good food, sex, etc.

To understand the "biology morale theory" fully, you really need to understand evolution and even though people think they do, they usually don't because it's actually a rather expansive subject that incorporates a lot of theory most people don't even know about. Richard Dawkins is the nr.1 biologist to have popularized the idea of selfishness because he was able to convey to the man in the street the thoughts and learnings of his fellow evolutionary biologists. This morale theory has it's roots in a lot of this, but most philosophers don't understand it fully, I think, because of their lack of evolutionary understanding.

edit :

I can add some info for the curious. At the core of this idea is that every being is selfish and looking after itself. Itself means it's own genes - and we share our genes with our closest relatives, so you're gonna look out for them as well. So, we are all adapted through millions of years to effectively take care of our genes (survive and reproduce) and that has a lot of implications. It means that a lot of the things we do behaviourally are tailored to raise our fitness. Humans are social beings and by cooperating with others, your genes are more likely to survive and so selfishness becomes similar to altruism in some cases.

A lot of emotions are expected to be adaptations that have evolved because they raise our fitnesses. For example, most get jealous when their partner flirts with someone else. That makes perfect sense from a biological standpoint and most think flirting with someone else when you have a steady partner is morally wrong. The morale may not be hardcoded into us, but the emotions are and that's a likely morale view to arise from those.

People sometimes say "why do we feel sorry for kids in Africa then? Giving them money doesn't raise our fitness!" The answer is simple - we're social beings adapted to taking care of eachother and children has a special appeal to our warmer feelings. That is easily explained by evolutionary theory. If you then remember that evolution of our biology is relatively slow compared to the evolution of our culture, you'll realize that humans didn't evolve to live in big societies with TVs. Not long ago, in evolutionary time we lived in small communities where we all depended on eachother, more or less. If you see a starving kid on TV, your "genes" may not know that this kid is far, far away and has no impact on your fitness. You may react as if the kid was a part of your community and that helping it will benefit you.

Remember also that selfishness and preserving your genes is not a conscious agenda. It's hardcoded into all of us. You want sex, but you don't think "I wanna spread my genes!" In a similar way, I'm pretty sure starfish don't "know" why they do the things they do.

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sleepy jack

I understand that but I'm more curious of moral issues that have nothing to do with the survival of your genes. This is the problem I've always had with Ayn Rand, it's the idea of an "objective morality" that comes down to shag, eat, and most importantly ensure your race to survive. To me, that isn't morality so much as common sense...I tend to think of morality as being something a bit more widespread then that. For instance, the issue of gay marriage, now I would personally consider it immoral to deny rights and pleasures to others, but some people, based on a religious text, considering the very act of homosexuality immoral. How does that fit into your argument? From the stand point I've heard, and this may sound prickish, there seems to be an inherent contradiction there. On one hand you don't want to see someone of your species suffer an injustice because of some sense of empathy on the other hand wouldn't you want to discourage sexual behavior that doesn't lead to reproduction? This is kind of a bad example because it's not an issue totally separate from it but I'm tired. I guess we could get into taxation but I'm growing tired of debating the "morality" of that.

Guybrush

This biology morale is not so good for producing a set of rules to live by. In my opinion, what it does is explain is why we have morals to begin with - where they come from - and it does explain some of the things we do, as my brief example on why we get jealous. It deals with a sort of caveman intuitivity, but now the caveman might live in a flat in NY and we need something a bit more elaborate. For me, it's more a way to help explaining where morals come from rather than something to live by. As a biologist, I expect a lot of deviants from a normal moralistic behaviour to be the result of mutations. Just like mental illnesses may have a genetic component, so may murdering others. However, as I wrote in my first post, what I follow are variations of the golden rule - not biology morale. However, if someone says something that is a complete contradiction of biology morale, I tend to say "wait a minute ..." and argue against that.

Homosexual behaviour is perfectly normal in nature and I wrote a lengthy post about that in the *** sex and religion thread, page 2. Homophilia - individuals that are exclusively going for same sex partners - is more rare because they produce less offspring and the more same-sexy they are, the more they are selected against in evolution. There shouldn't be a gene that if turned on or off determines *** or not, it would have disappeared a long time ago. Rather, I believe we are all somewhere between homo and heterosexual and the norm is to be oriented somewhere towards hetero, say 80% hetero and 20% homosexual. Many other mammals know how to live out the *** side, but we don't anymore because we have a need to define ourselves as one or the other, something a giraffe wouldn't concern itself with. Just like you get statistical outsiders that are very short or very tall, you also get people who are 70% *** and 30% hetero. Maybe they define themselves as *** people. That's roughly my own hypothesis, but it seems to make the most sense from what I've seen. There are identical twins where one is *** and the other not, so it can't be up to genes alone. I don't know if exclusively *** animals may cause problems for other animals, say a *** wolf in a wolf pack, but so far I don't think they do and I don't think we should discriminate.


I've never read Ayn Rand, but in reality, we don't care for our species. At least not in a care-that's-hardcoded-into-us way like we might care for our children. We only care for those of our species that we can benefit from. Altruism, if it exists at all, should be little more than a genetic anomaly and would be selected against in nature. The reason is because at the basis, we're selfish and altruism is exploitable by selfish individuals.

A popular example in evolutionary biology that can be used to explain my previous statement is this : Let's say you have a species of birds that consists of only two types of individuals - doves and hawks. When a hawk meets other hawks and doves, they fight the other bird for resources. If a hawk fights a dove, the dove shyes away before it is hurt. If a hawk fights a hawk, they fight until seriously injured, perhaps fatally, or until dead. If a dove meets a dove, nobody gets hurt, but they spend some time threatening eachother. The birds don't know prior to a fight what kind the other bird is and they have no memory of the bird they fought after the fight is over.

From this, we can make a sort of prisoner's dilemma with different outcomes. Since they are competing for resources, we can award the different outcomes different points to illustrate what they lose or gain from outcomes :

• Win : 50 points (for winning)
• Lose : 0 points (for losing)
• Injured : -100 points (hawk losing to hawk)
• contest : -10 (for meeting doves)

An individual that scores many points is an individual that tends to leave behind many genes in the gene pool.

If a dove meets a dove, they will spend some energy on a stare down and they will both gain -10 points. However, one will win and gain 50 for a total of 40. Let's say that on average, they win every other stare-down contest. Then you can say that the average pay-off for doves in a population consisting of doves only is +15 - the middle ground between -10 and 40. So the average score for every individual in the population so far is +15 ..

What happens when a hawk appears? The hawk will win every fight and so it's average score will be 50 - all win. It will leave lots of genes behind because it's strategy is so successful, but then his offspring will also grow up as hawks . Maybe the strategy is so successful that all doves are killed and we now have a population consisting only of hawks. As before, if a hawk in a population of hawks win every other fight, the average gain for every hawk is -25, halfway between -100 and 50. So you see, a hawk in a population of hawks every individual does worse than in a population where you only have doves. If you then reintroduce a dove to the hawk population, the dove should do better than the hawks again because it doesn't pay the cost of being severly damaged in fights.

So you see neither a dove population or a hawk population is expected to arise from this - they are not evolutionary stable. If everyone was doves, that would give the highest gain for everyone, but that social strategy is susceptible to being exploited by hawks (a hawk could appear through gene mutations and evolution). In the same way that hawks may exploit a population of doves, altruism is exploited in nature by selfish individuals and the population you end up with probably has both the equivalent of hawks and doves. So the population you end up with does not have the optimal strategy point-wise, which is all doves. Instead of hawks and doves, you can say you have a population of birds that always groom eachothers feathers (doves). A selfish bird that never grooms back would thrive in such a population - everyone would groom him and he doesn't have to spend any energy grooming others - so again the altruistic grooming behaviour is exploited by the selfish bird who's genes will spread.


The hawk-dove scenario is extremely simplified here and it can be elaborated on. Biologists like to set up lots of variables like kinship and explain them with math, but suffice to say that this is for illustrative purposes just to show how altruism can be exploited. In many populations, animals have adapted to remembering eachother and also with figuring out the would-be exploiters before they are exploited and so on, so you don't come across pure dove-hawk scenarios in nature. You can have societies and social rules where exploiters are excluded that push the population towards the optimal.

Gods damn, this is a long post now .. sorry. I can't blame anyone for not reading my wall of text. :p

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Kamikazi Kat

I can't believe I read that entire thing.

So, to put it in simpler words. A population of only doves is the best way to go, but all it takes is for one hawk and the whole thing gets screwed up.

I guess you could compare hawks to a disease or a virus. No matter how many doves, as long as there is just one hawk, the disease will spread.

Guybrush

Yes, when talking about evolution in populations, it only takes one hawk to ruin the bliss that is all dove.

The hawks and doves are living in an anarchy though. A hawk in a population of doves can do whatever it wants and get away with it. In populations, exploitation strategies have countermeasures and so it's often an evolutionary arms-race between exploiters and the would-be-exploited. Identifying and/or remembering exploiters is often a good strategy. Vampire bats may share blood with other bats who are starving, but those who only take and don't give back are probably ousted from the bloodsharing and that makes the exploitive strategy less successful and the numbers of exploiters will go down.

Perhaps you could use that as an argument against liberalism.

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anticipation

what if the hawk is really old or tiny and the doves kick the shit out of it?

swim

live free die hard

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