Happy Atheist Forum

A recent comment on my blog in response to this post (http://thatatheistbitch.blogspot.com/2009/06/where-does-morality-come-from-if-its.html) suggested that evolution plays no part in morality but that individuals figure out what is moral for themselves using reasoning.  What do you think?

The moral nihilists on here will agree entirely...

..there are no morals, actions are based upon desires, anything is fair game if you are willing to accept the consequences, etc.

Of course, this results in something resembling morality.  Most people don't want to kill other people, if they really think about it.  Why?

The consequence of murder and war is death.  It may bring prosperity for some, but if you are bloodthirsty you have a lower chance of surviving in a population of social animals that care for each other.  If you kill someone's brother, they exact a vendetta against you.
Those who live by the sword, die by the sword--and after they do, their genetic sequences die, too.

Furthermore, I believe I possess the quality of empathy.  Why is that, if my only basis for morality is reason?

Quote from: "Heretical Rants"Furthermore, I believe I possess the quality of empathy.  Why is that, if my only basis for morality is reason?

I think both empathy and reason control what we consider to be moral.  Some use more of one that the other.

I agree with Whitney. I think morality comes partly from reason, partly from empathy and partly from a host of other things I know nothing about. I think I read somewhere that a portion of our brain controls empathy. I think it was the "mirror neurons" but I might be remembering wrongly. If that's the case, it seems that evolution plays an important part of what people call morality. Reason also plays a role. Look at religious morality. That's all all about reasons.

In response to Heretical Rants, I suppose I'm a moral nihilist. As I said I accept that empathy can play a role in ethics. What the nihilist in me objects to is that morality is other people's reasons. Sometimes other people's reasons are fine but I will not reduce something as defining as my ethics to group think and dogma, especially when I think it's bullshit. I don't like to be nihilistic. I like to create things. Sometimes to create something new you have to first demolish what was there before, painful as it may be.

The way our brains evolved have everything to do with our morality. Considering that we see morality in mammals of much lower EQs I think evolution has everything to do with morality - not our own reasoning. Feelings, empathy, how our brains have been wrought and even pride or a search for oneness play large roles in the morality of most people. Some people apply more reason to their morality than others but underneath there are always assumptions or prejudice.

As I've mentioned before, I am an Ethical Nihilist in the sense that morals are not absolute and no action is therefore wrong.

Morality is mostly innate, and is simply sculpted by culture. Even 3 year olds have been shown trying to comfort other children who were sad or in tears.  That alone suggests that it has more to do with "nature" than it does with "nurture."  Also, readers should note that monkeys and other apes understand concepts of fairness and equality, as demonstrated time and again in experiment after experiment.

My own position on the topic is that morality stems from our evolved condition being pack animals. The dominant animal in the group (the alpha), as well as the larger collective mentality of the group members, together will set the expected behaviors... and those that choose not to follow those behaviors get ostracized from the group. This ostracization/separation from the group decreases their likelihood of survival (less access to food and protection), and also drastically decreases their reproductive potential (less access to mates). Over the long-term, those animals which acted according to the pack values out-reproduced those who did not.  The one who acts inline with the group psychology is more successful (as a general rule) than the one who does not (strangely, this actually helps to explain the commonality of religious practice to some extent... group behavior, ideological expectations, and access to mates and resources... it's all related to the prominence of religious practice in our culture ).  This logic about group cohesion and common morality/values applies also to apes, to wolves, to penguins, and to countless other animals.

In short, we're pack animals who exist in troops.  Morality evolved because... at it's heart... morality is about successfully being part of a larger group, whereby success is contingent upon understanding the expectations which exist about your behavior coming from your fellow pack members.


Speaking of the evolution of morality, here was a cool story:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/e ... 733638.ece (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5733638.ece)

QuoteSome researchers believe we could owe our consciences to climate change and, in particular, to a period of intense global warming between 50,000 and 800,000 years ago. The proto-humans living in the forests had to adapt to living on hostile open plains, where they would have been easy prey for formidable predators such as big cats.

This would have forced them to devise rules for hunting in groups and sharing food.

Christopher Boehm, director of the Jane Goodall Research Center, part of the University of Southern California's anthropology department, believes such humans devised codes to stop bigger, stronger males hogging all the food.

"To ensure fair meat distribution, hunting bands had to gang up physically against alpha males," he said. This theory has been borne out by studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes.

In research released at the AAAS he argued that under such a system those who broke the rules would have been killed, their "amoral" genes lost to posterity. By contrast, those who abided by the rules would have had many more children.

As per the thread title... No.  It's not pure bunk.  There is a lot of solid work occurring in evo psych.  Look at the publications of Steven Pinker (http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/) and David Buss (http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/), for example.  While (just like all other sciences) it's important to be cautious with specious claims and questionable people, most of the field is pretty solid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology).

Monkeysphere... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeysphere)

Quote from: "Kylyssa"A recent comment on my blog in response to this post (http://thatatheistbitch.blogspot.com/2009/06/where-does-morality-come-from-if-its.html) suggested that evolution plays no part in morality but that individuals figure out what is moral for themselves using reasoning.  What do you think?

Evolutionary psychology is little more than the study of instance and the development of the brain and mind

Quote from: "iNow"Morality is mostly innate, and is simply sculpted by culture. Even 3 year olds have been shown trying to comfort other children who were sad or in tears.  That alone suggests that it has more to do with "nature" than it does with "nurture."  Also, readers should note that monkeys and other apes understand concepts of fairness and equality, as demonstrated time and again in experiment after experiment.

I'm interested now iNow. You've made some high quality posts such as this one. What is your background?

As an aside, I've been reading a college 101 psychology textbook. It's interesting and somewhat disturbing in an interesting way. Today I was sitting on some steps smoking a cig. Something landed on my head. I swiped it away and it handed between my feet. Fear. A wasp. I squashed it with my foot. What disturbed me the most was not that I killed an insect or that I had come close to being stung but that I squashed it before the concept of wasp had even entered my conscious thought. It was the fact that my operant conditioning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning) unconsciously made the decision for "me" =).

Anyway, the OP was about evolutionary psychology. In this one instance, I think I was evolutionarily predisposed to be more susceptible to this kind of operant conditioning with respect to yellow and black striped insects (the ones that often sting) than, for example, flowers. I have the same predisposition with spiders.

Anyone read The Origin of Minds?

Quote from: "Kylyssa"A recent comment on my blog in response to this post (http://thatatheistbitch.blogspot.com/2009/06/where-does-morality-come-from-if-its.html) suggested that evolution plays no part in morality but that individuals figure out what is moral for themselves using reasoning.  What do you think?

Look at animals that live in groups, they have a sense of equality and fairness, and will look out for each other because it is beneficial for the whole group (and therefore themselves). This is behaviour that in humans most people would call morality (why many refuse to call it morality in animals and instead call them instincts baffles me), which to make us a successful species, must have come into play long before we had the capabilities of reasoning through language. The argument that reason is the only reason for morals is complete rubbish, because moral behaviour evolved, long before complex language and reasoning skills did. Because if we didn't have an innate moral behaviour, we would have never been a successful species, because 1 human, by itself cannot accomplish much.

Moral behaviour is simply a mix of self preservation and group work ethics, and not as some would claim the result of reason or religion.

Quote from: "AlP"I'm interested now iNow. You've made some high quality posts such as this one. What is your background?

Thank you for your kind words, AIP.  I appreciate that.  I only have an undergraduate degree.  I studied psychology, but had an emphasis in statistics and research design (I couldn't stand the counseling/therapy stuff, so stuck with the "science of the mind" and neuroscience side of things).  When I was in school, I worked as a research assistant in about five different labs (human cognition, the perception lab, human sexuality, and also worked closely with many grad students/friends on their dissertations).  One of the courses I took was actually Evolutionary Psychology taught by David Buss.  It was fascinating.  I then graduated, did work on a research project with the American Cancer Society, then did work on Phase 1 clinical trials of pharmaceuticals, and now I work for a large global manufacturing corporation in their training department doing a lot of database and finance work as member of a business management team.

Long story short, most of what I know is self-taught.  I have a curious mind, and I've been participating at various science forums for many years now, absorbing as much as I can.  Anyway, I caught the "science and research is awesome" bug when my (hot) human sexuality teacher asked for assistants to work in her lab.  I was like, "sex research?  hell's yeah!"  ... and I've been studying, researching, and learning about science ever since... even been noted by name on 3 different peer-reviewed publications for my efforts with these other researchers.

Thanks again for the kind words regarding my posts.  It's much appreciated.  Cheers.  

Quote from: "iNow"I studied psychology...

...ah a fellow social scientist in background...

Quote...but had an emphasis in statistics and research design (I couldn't stand the counseling/therapy stuff...

Neither could I...I did it for almost 4 years and never want to do that again...I love the research side - working on a study proposal for the Army right now  :D .

The reason people object is because EP leaves no gaps for god to hide in and makes Man 'just another animal'

Quote from: "Squid"I miss the time I used to have to make long, elaborated, well referenced posts...but I don't miss being a broke grad student  ;)

Quote from: "jbeukema"The reason people object is because EP leaves no gaps for god to hide in and makes Man 'just another animal'

I certainly agree that plays a role, but (just to be fair) there's more to the criticisms than just that.  Scientific American had two really well done articles/discussions on this recently.  I've shared those below.


http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -fallacies (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=four-fallacies)

QuoteSome evolutionary psychologists have made widely popularized claims about how the human mind evolved, but other scholars argue that the grand claims lack solid evidence.

<...>

Key Concepts

   

• Among Charles Darwin’s lasting legacies is our knowledge that the human mind evolved by some adaptive process.
• A major, widely discussed branch of evolutionary psychologyâ€"Pop EPâ€"holds that the human brain has many specialized mechanisms that evolved to solve the adaptive problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
• The author and several other scholars suggest that some assumptions of Pop EP are flawed: that we can know the psychology of our Stone Age ancestors, that we can thereby figure out how distinctively human traits evolved, that our minds have not evolved much since the Stone Age, and that standard psychological questionnaires yield clear evidence of the adaptations.

Here is a podcast they did a few months later (just last month, actually):

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podca ... e-09-07-17 (http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=evolutionary-psychology-under-fire-09-07-17)

QuoteWell it’s pretty cool when we can see scientific viewpoints turning, slowly of course. Also known as a paradigm shift. Right now, it appears evolutionary psychology (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psyching-out-evolutionary) is under mainstream fire.

Put simply, evo psych posits that favorable traits during our hunter-gatherer days persisted in our modern contexts. Natural selection carved our behavior and locked it in place. For example: so-called rape genes are passed on to modern males because the cave dwellers who carried rape genes sired more offspring and thus passed on that trait or adaptation to more descendents than those without the trait. And so that’s why we have rape today. This is obviously an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

The public is drawn to evo psych (http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=the-evolution-of-evolution-09-01-07) because it provides a most desired thing: a neat reason, or excuse, for who we are; how we behave. That is not easily questioned, because it’s essentially unverifiable. We can’t go back in time to prove it.

With the appearance of a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opinion/26brooks.html) and a feature piece (http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789) by Sharon Begley in Newsweek, the evo psych paradigm is being questioned in front of the general public.

These authors break the fanfare with two hits: evo psych depends on a relatively static environment over millennia, which evidence shows not to be the case. Our environment changes, and so the potential to engage genetic potential changes, dependent on the environment. Secondly, neuroplasticity appears to be firmly established, and the brain has extraordinary malleability and is able to adapt to different contexts over time. In short, the authors and their quoted researchers say the core of human nature lies in its “variability [across cultures and contexts] and its flexibility.”

Our morals exist because we are social animals.  Plain and simple.  Social animals tend to have a low tolerance for murder as well as demonstrating empathy to group members.  There was a study done where they taught chimps to pull a chain and when they do they get food.  Then they put 2 of them in cages where they can see each other and when one would pull the chain it would get food then the other one would get an electrical shock.  Once they realized this was happening they would not pull the chain.  One went 9 days before pulling the chain the other went 14 days.

There was another study done with a certain fox (I don't remember the species anymore).  The fox was a solitary hunter.  It lived by itself and would kill other members of its own species if they it got close to it.  Scientists breed the foxes to be more social and when they did there was less infighting, they wouldn't kill each other, and they wouldn't even bite the humans who were doing the experiments.  This shows you can breed morals into animals.  What we perceive as morals is just part of being a social animal.

I just read and I highly recommend The Origin of Minds by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham