Arepo sent an email to the people running talkrational and included me in it, not realizing that I'd pretty much disassociated myself from the place. Funny thing is that I was interested in what was starting here.

What am I?

A former christian fundy. I am also a person that has a personal morality based on the idea that my moral choices ought to take into account the impact those choices are going to have both on my life and the lives of those around me. Would a choice bring sorrow, loss and pain? Then it is probably immoral for me to do it. Would a choice bring happiness, joy and freedom? Then it is probably a good choice for me to make. It is obviously more complex than that. The individual matters and the group of people around him matter too in the choices made, and lots of other factors.

I have probably read less philosophy books than most any of you; no offense but I find most philosophy books dreadfully boring. A lot of my own personal philosophy is mostly bits and pieces I've picked up on blogs and forums mixed with my own mental meanderings.

I'm probably something like a practical consequentialist, or a practical utilitarian. I think utilitarian fits pretty good; even a calvinist friend calls me utilitarian. I'm also an evolutionary moralist. I think our moral sense of right and wrong is an evolutionary development that adapts us to fit in a society. It fits very well within the notion that most if not all of our adaptations are specific responses to increase the chances of species survival. Finding better ways to Feed, Flee, Fight and have sex in order to increase the odds of passing on our genes to our children.

Anyway, I've shot most of my ammo in my OP. Thank you for the invite, Jinx.

Hi Alethias, great to see you here

This forum's aimed at philosophers to about the same extent somewhere like Talk Rational is aimed at metaphysicians or epistemologists - ie barely. In practice most of the current discussions relate to ethics somehow, but I think that's just because we currently lack the critical mass to have enough other interests in common to sustain many topics on them. I'm hoping one day this will just be a place for consequentialists to hang out with like-minded people and talk about anything they please.

Re your brand of consequentialism, I've been thinking recently that we should propose a casual sort of terminological breakdown of consequentialisms a la 'strong atheism' and 'weak atheism' (can you tell I've stolen all my ideas from the secular community? ), to give a better sense of whose side we're on (and whose we're not). For eg, I (and I think Ryan, and probably some of the others) feel that most moral language hides weakly defined concepts behind over-familiar labels, and that we'd gain a lot of clarity by just giving up words like 'ought', 'right', and so on in favour of spelling out what you mean each time - which is often as quick. In other words, I don't think there's anything 'moral' about preventing suffering, because I don't think there's anything moral, period. (I don't know what a moral thing would look, feel, smell, taste, sound or parse like, and I'm an empiricist, so I don't believe in ineffable thingamijigs) I just think preventing suffering prevents something we all - by definition - dislike.

In practice, I don't think any of the above makes much difference - some consequentialists who claim to think their view has moral force act more consistently with consequentialist goals than me, some noticably less so. Given some of the unconvincing alternatives that even atheists and humanists often believe, I think the most important challenge is promoting pretty much any brand of universal ( (ie. not egoistic) consequentialism and worrying about the details later. Or at least saving the nitpicking for when we're bored My favourite eg of how much difference a little more thought put into our supposedly nonselfish behaviour can make is here. I defy anyone to read that and claim that donating money to Seeing Eye is 'moral'.

One last thought - I find evolution interesting in its own right (though I'm unconvinced by the idea of species selection as an explanation for things - I'm quite persuaded by Dawkins in that respect at least), but I've never really seen a connection between descriptions of why we do things and prescriptions of what we might do. I think it's pretty safe to say that any evolved sense of collective morality we have is quite badly broken, in the sense that even when we think we're doing good things we can end up causing more harm than good (tribal interests, and nationalism in general, for eg).

Anyway, I'm waffling again. Welcome to the forum

In other words, I don't think there's anything 'moral' about preventing suffering, because I don't think there's anything moral, period. (I don't know what a moral thing would look, feel, smell, taste, sound or parse like, and I'm an empiricist, so I don't believe in ineffable thingamijigs) I just think preventing suffering prevents something we all - by definition - dislike.

Sure. I don't pretend to be able to tell you or anyone else that there is such a thing as absolute morality. I tend to assume that actions that in some way increase happiness or pleasure or whatever word you want to use have at least some element of good to them, and actions that increase pain and suffering have some element of bad to them. For me a definition of morality would simply be that the potential for good outweighs the potential for bad, therefore it is moral.

I'm not being very precise; I apologize for that. I'm not a moral philosopher. I've thought a lot about my personal morality. I wasn't able to give up my christianity when it became untenable for me till I came up with something to replace it with for a moral framework. So far it's been good enough to cope with most situations I've faced.

Thanks for the welcome.

Alethias wrote:I have probably read less philosophy books than most any of you;

If you've read fewer than me personally, than I'd like to know how you managed to read a negative number of books.

DanielLC wrote:

Alethias wrote:I have probably read less philosophy books than most any of you;

If you've read fewer than me personally, than I'd like to know how you managed to read a negative number of books.

I've read "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand", by Leonard Peikoff...

doesn't that count toward the negative instead of the positive?

Hi alethias,

Alethias wrote:no offense but I find most philosophy books dreadfully boring.

No offence taken! I totally agree that philosophy can be a bore. While I sometimes read philosophy, I tend to be attracted to writing that applies to the real-world (e.g. ethics, consciousness). A philosopher Dan Dennett has said that though 90% of philosophy is crap, 90% of everything is crap. It's a fair point: not everyone can write clearly, directly and with real-world application. I think that there is a fundamental problem with 90% of philosophy which is that it wastes time on questions that aren't really very important. For example "when a tree falls and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?", "does an object's essence precede its existence?". Firstly, who cares. And secondly, if you insist on answering these questions then let's define "sound", "essence" and "existence" so we can put these matters behind us as soon as possible!

Welcome to the Felicifia Forum and I hope you enjoy yourself here! Like Arepo, I'm interested in what you mean by "evolutionary moralist". Do you mean that evolution has created our ideas and our morals, or do you mean that promoting our genes is the ethical and right thing to do?

RyanCarey wrote:Like Arepo, I'm interested in what you mean by "evolutionary moralist". Do you mean that evolution has created our ideas and our morals, or do you mean that promoting our genes is the ethical and right thing to do?

Excellent question.

I've noticed with many people, that what they say their morals are is often noticeably askew with how they actually act. I could be wrong, but I like to think of their actual, active moral structure as being based on a biological imperative, and how that biological imperative fits within the framework of the society around them. Put in different terms, I can't help but wonder if there are some basic evolutionary-based drives that help individuals formulate moral structures, and when there is a variance between what they say their morals are and how they actually act, it is because their societal structure is at variance in some way with their biological imperative.

Most any christian I've ever met will tell you that it is a sin to have sex outside of marriage. It is also true that the divorce rate amongst christians doesn't vary much from that of non-christians in the USA; sometimes it is slightly higher and sometimes slightly lower, and the primary cause of divorce, whether christian or not, is marital infidelity. To me this is a perfect example of stated morals being at odds with how the person actually conducts their life. My theory is that there is an evolutionary advantage to having the infidelity while still maintaining a stable family structure, so that biological imperative over-rides the stated morals.

If indeed such biological imperatives exist, I'm a big proponent of figuring them out and acknowledging them for what they are rather than pretending they don't exist, like most people seem to. If you are aware of it, you can cope with it and account for it in your actions and adjust to it, rather then just let it rule you.

So by evolutionary moralist, I guess I mean one that takes those evolutionary biological imperatives into account in how I formulate my morals. I also don't mean ruled by the biological imperative, but rather uses that to inform or guide my chosen moral structure.

An interesting topic for conversation.

You seem to be referring to evolutionary psychology. Personally, I don't see how it would help with understanding why people do things and how to change what they do. For example, evolution makes it so people tend to reproduce, but it makes no difference if they do it because they like to, because of peer pressure, or because of some bizarre process involving loving their mother but being afraid to do anything about it because they're afraid of their father and eventually deciding to have a relationship with someone like their mother and acting like their father (swap mother and father if said person is female). That last one was Freud's idea. Also, evolution has no effect on things that don't actually come up, so evolutionary psychology would make it impossible to predict what would happen in unnatural circumstances or to use such circumstances as tools.

How does evolutionary psychology affect your moral structure?

DanielLC wrote:How does evolutionary psychology affect your moral structure?

Dunno. Sorry.

I guess I'm referring to evolutionary psychology if that is how you have to pigeon-hole it, but that is not how I perceive what I'm talking about.

I think we have morals because we are evolved to have morals, because having morals benefits us in our ability to survive as part of a community. I could make guesses as to how human evolution has contributed to moral development, but it would be pure supposition, just as the idea that it is an evolved trait is pure supposition and could be entirely wrong. Some of my ideas on the subject are borrowed from Eric S. Raymonds musing. He's far from an expert; he's just another computer programmer, like me. But I find his essay on the subject of human promiscuity entertaining and to the point: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/promiscuity.html

DanielLC wrote:Also, evolution has no effect on things that don't actually come up

Hang on, this isn't true at all. Evolution builds you a certain way, and then you react to all stimuli accordingly, albeit filtered by environmental exposure. The challenge is figuring out in advance how something built in a particular way (let alone after the environmental filter) will behave. It might be very difficult in practice, but it's clearly not impossible in principle.

By the way Alethias, lest I've overshot the point, I should say there are a couple of philosophers around here - [urlhttp://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/]Toby Ord[/url] for eg - but IME explicitly utilitarian philosophers tend to straddle disciplines with the harder sciences or maths (which I take to be a good sign!).

And anecdotally, I feel like a higher proportion of computer scientists, doctors, vets, economists, engineers and maybe mathematicians are utilitarians than of philosophers.

Arepo wrote:

DanielLC wrote:Also, evolution has no effect on things that don't actually come up

Hang on, this isn't true at all. Evolution builds you a certain way, and then you react to all stimuli accordingly, albeit filtered by environmental exposure. The challenge is figuring out in advance how something built in a particular way (let alone after the environmental filter) will behave. It might be very difficult in practice, but it's clearly not impossible in principle.

There is no evolutionary advantage to how you react to something that doesn't come up. Put another way, if it never kept someone from having kids, and never made someone have kids when they otherwise wouldn't, it has no effect on evolution. You can't say that it's evolutionarily advantageous for someone with schizophrenia to stop having it after taking Quetiapine, and thus it would help them get over it. Naturally, people never take Quetiapine, so there's no evolutionary advantage or disadvantage to what happens when you take it.

I just found a page on wikipedia about evolutionary ethics which seems to be about why there's an evolutionary advantage to having ethics, and what ethics tend to result from evolution. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what ethics actually are, though.

ah, your position makes more sense now that you've clarified it, Daniel. We are evolved for a past age and its events. Now, we have to live with in situations that evolution couldn't possibly have predicted.

DanielLC:I just found a page on wikipedia about evolutionary ethics which seems to be about why there's an evolutionary advantage to having ethics, and what ethics tend to result from evolution. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what ethics actually are, though.

By this I understand you're confirming what Alethias has said: evolutionary ethics is really more of an exercise in psychology than a discussion of what we should do.