I’ve argued with @VirtueSophist about this a couple of times but I really don’t see any way around it.- Morality, religion and in-group signals are all ways of maintaining cooperation among a species that has needed it to survive @VirtueSophist
@Benthamite Aristotle’s much-misunderstood telos is not far off from what you’re saying, you know.- @Benthamite For instance, while today we would say that the bird with the beak which is just the right shape to get its food evolved
- @Benthamite that way in response to its environment, Aristotle simply said that to get food from that part of the environment in that way is
- @Benthamite the telos of the bird; part of its purpose. This purpose is, in fact, understood functionally. It is why the ancients did not
- @Benthamite see a gap between is-ought; they understood species, as well as specific roles that people had to play in a community,
- @Benthamite as having a functional component that bundled in the oughts. To be a good specimen of that species of bird, it ought to get food
- @Benthamite in that particular way. To be a good sailor, one ought to steer one’s ship skillfully without causing it to crash on the rocks.
- @Benthamite And so on.
- @VirtueSophist So what was your problem with thinking of morality instrumentally?
- @Benthamite Well, it’s all a matter of perspective. The question is instrumental to whom, and to what end.
- @Benthamite Conferring honors upon people is, in one way, an instrumental means of encouraging people to be honorable.
- @Benthamite But on the other hand, a truly honorable person will not need such external incentives.
- @Benthamite Moreover, there is some sense in which even if honoring does not encourage further honorable behavior,
- @Benthamite we often believe (rightly) that an honorable person simply deserves to be honored.
- @VirtueSophist Assuming that’s true, and I’m not sure it is, it still is only the case because we evolved to be that way.
- @VirtueSophist Being “truly honorable” is something we want because groups with honorable members had a greater rate of survival
- @VirtueSophist and reproduction among individual members of the group. Honor and virtue sound nice and all, and I do think that we can learn
- @VirtueSophist a lot from those theories http://adamgurri.com/?p=1072
- @VirtueSophist but at the end of the day they evolved to serve a purpose.
- @Benthamite There’s something a bit wonderful about that though, don’t you think?
- @Benthamite We think of evolution in terms of nothing but brute calculus; cold, cynical, cut-throat. “Red tooth and claw.”
- @Benthamite But that process gave us honor, and courage, and love, and beauty. It gave us mercy, and sacrifice, and faith, and tenderness.
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