"The grounding of morality is evolution" And You know, or think that how?

Br Lem · 20h · The grounding of morality is evolution. The way we tend to talk about morality is fundamentally wrong. This is not unique to either believers nor non-believers; this problem is pervasive in philosophical discussions of morality. There is an understandable intent toward abstraction in the discussion. To perhaps misuse the term, to make a foundation of morality necessarily 'transcendent' (objective) or determine that it doesn't exist at all (subjective). But as useful as methodological abstraction can be in many domains, including within the domain of morality, the grounding of morality cannot be disconnected from experience, indeed, from biology. We tend to speak of 'right' and 'wrong' as if they could even in principle be considered a different sort of Platonic ideal in the same way that numbers are 'real' in that they're not dependent on minds to 'exist' (in some sense). The entire domain of moral thought is grounded in the recognition that we tend to feel good when we do good and bad when we do bad. At it's heart, it's an observational investigation, not merely a conceptual one. As language and community was developing, we'd have noticed this pattern, and at some point tried to figure out _why_. The answer, of course, is that we evolved as a social species to tend toward a behavioral dynamic balance between selfish and altruistic behaviors toward our group. Organisms that tended too much toward selfish behavior would have either abandoned their social structures, or been abandoned by their group. Organisms that tended too much toward altruistic behaviors would not likely have survived or reproduced sufficiently to pass along those genetic tendencies. The 'grounding' of morality isn't transcendent or abstract. Neither is it non-existent. It's in evolution itself. Morality is the mechanism that the 'organism' of the community uses to continue and propagate itself. No external arbiter is required, nor even possible. Morality is a survival trait of a societal organism. MRM @ Br Lem Ah, Gandhi. And William James. Like evolutionary biology and Darwin, and AR Wallace, Gandhi emerged as an original individual with psycho-social and cultural spiritual-religious tools, including his law education and contact with interfaith theosophy. Involving enriched elements that don´t ignore Jesus except in neglect. Darwin asked, "What does Christ have to do with science, except maybe evidence?" Darwin had no clue that his own character concerned with being reasonably kind, as with his church project with wife Emma and kindness to AR Wallace and the like, opposition to slavery, distinction from credit-stealing dinosaur anatomist Rich Owens´, were all high integrity Christian behaviors, like Quaker founder G Fox 200 years earlier. D also suffered physically from his intense rational scholarship. He didn´t know about, much less seek spiritual healing with J Blumhart in Switzerland or Germany, for example. He liked hydrotherapy, but didn´t get his hydrotherapist´s insights into psychology. Darwin´s biological insights were part of his specialization, but he was not a spiritual genius, like Gandhi and William James later, or Quaker founder G Fox earlier. (see below) Same here in the OP. What does the OP´s reductionist view say? What an evolutionary phenomenon! Well, that´s not irrelevant or without true info and data, but it is woefully insufficient, and in attempting to negate and deny other key elements and aspects, ideological and fallacious. Just a "societal organisms." There are none. Guess what that is? That´s an abstraction, a metaphor, a use of a concrete image word-symbol "organism" mixed with a human-psycho-social referent word-symbol "society," in which the concept of the word-symbol "biological evolution" has been developed as part of human historical and psycho-socio-cultural development. Uh oh. Take Piaget´s move from natural history and philosophy to pioneering child development work in psychology. First of all, "The 'grounding' of morality isn't transcendent or abstract. Neither is it non-existent. It's in evolution itself." As if that were a sufficiently informed view. It´s not. Do ants tugging at a leaf or big piece of sweet fruit, or big, dead cockroach, get analyzed merely evolutionarily? Hardly. One wants to tug it, then another. Individual action with biomechanics and neuronal firing, with social action perception neurons on the backburner. Evaluating how to sink in mandibles, and how to tug, in rela tion to fellow colony ants. Then the social action neurons kick in, and the fruit or cockroach starts heading to the colony in concerted actions. "I tug thus," or "I push thus" in a joint effort of ants using mandibles, etc. Evolutionary biology is part of, but not sufficient for an adequate analysis. Even in evolutionary biology, the basic principle used involves recognizing and classifying causes, Ultimate and Proximal. When you try to rule out the "transcendent or abstract", you´ve projected, since your very analysis is abstract conceptual biology, a bit transcendent in its own way, reflecting in fact other transcendent realities, aka systems, of phenomena and knowledge. Only, instead of interrelating knowledge of different levels of mechanics and human psycho social processes, you´ve fumbled the ball, after calling the ball not the elephant in the room, but "pigskin evolution," to use and mix two other kinds of human psychosocial metaphors. For s tarters, humans make American footballs in a very real psychosocial context, and "elephants in the room" has its own complexity. I got my own college degree in Bio Anthro, and began my own focus on the evolution of speech and symbol use, and on to religious ritual, "genes, brain, and behavior," and microsociology. So, as "Morality is the mechanism that the 'organism' of the community uses to continue and propagate itself. No external arbiter is required, nor even possible." Yeah, let´s get some ant physiologists in here, please. And for scholars of human behavior, a nice team including anthropologists, like a guy with a degree, me. jFirstly, morality is a human behavioral capacity, and "mechanism" is not a sufficient metaphor when ignoring interacting bio (not just evo.), psycho-social and cultural knowledge. In fact, concrete empirical references shatter ideological smoke, mirrors, and mirages. Take ancient Rome. Conquering ancient Greek Corinth in one case, and Carthage in another both in the 140s BC/E, and later Sulla sieging Athens in the 80s BC/E, the Roman generals committed much slaughter and enslavement. Interesting nuances emerge in empirical study of the details, but Sulla´s case alone is illuminating. He was besieging Athens when his own friends were arriving from Rome, where a rival general was causing violence. In Rome. Nice politicking. Sulla´s friends included some cultured folks. The Athenians were proud folks, an interesting correlate to their historical culture including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They had annoyed Sulla in their pride as they refused to submit, and Sulla was ready to act normally and massacre and enslave. His friends, however, included some who really valued Athens´ cultural status, so that they begged Sulla to spare the city and its people. Gen Sulla altered his plans a bit in response to his friends, in that case. Thank Zeus? Or Jupiter? Not really. Although Plato´s account of Socrates´ origins as a philosopher gives an account in which the Oracle of Delphi incredibly sparked Socrates. An incredible account, correlated with other, many modern, related spiritual-religious cases, suggesting transcendental intervention. And then came Jesus, and a fascinating and complex history that led to Christian post-monastic Universities, as the fruits of Christianized modern philosophy inspired new inquiries to create religious integrity, as in Luther´s inspired Reformation, and tolerance, as with Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and T Jefferson et al. That spirit of integrity and tolerance wasn´t primarily Greek, where slavery was never questioned. The end of legal slavery in Western Europe was spurred by a spiritual-religious experience based knowledge and practice community emerging in George Fox´s leading the co-founding of the Quaker-Friends. Their high integrity spiritual community in a hundred years had individuals organizing and protesting slavery in Parliament. Quaker organizing blazed centrally along with more isolated efforts to inspire University activity. One scholar-professor held an essay contest that spurred T Clarkson, who researched, wrote, and won. He became the central driving force, while W Wilberforce in Parliament had higher status and became better known. In the US, William Lloyd Garrison may be known, John Brown, and Abe Lincoln most of all, but Garrison was in association with Quakers, and so on. Just as knowledge of weapons proceeded from arrows and broadswords to cutlasses, rifles, and cannons by the Civil War, knowledge of spiritual-religious knowledge has developed through the social sciences and humanities, including shamanism and the Kalam cosmological argument. That is how philosophical scholarship uses mul ti-disciplinary empiricism and more to determine truth, not overspecialized appeals to one scientific discipline and ideological materialism.