I think I'm just about done. This isn't a joined-up conversation where you respond to what other people post in a meaningful way. You just have a grab-bag of ill-fitting talking points and you pull one out as a response to what other people post with no evident rhyme or reason.
This is your predictable but erroneous response. The fact that Homo sapiens and earlier forbears have had rules about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour (i.e. morality) from the very earliest days is the core of the argument to which you refuse respond. Furthermore the precursors of such behaviour are to be found in our simian cousins and elsewhere among social species. In short, rule-based behaviour is commonplace in nature.
As is cheating on the rules and benefiting by doing so. This is a point which you seem determined to avoid understanding, possibly because it entirely undercuts the simplistic idea that morality is as simple as doing whatever it is we evolved to do.
Yes, “evolved instincts towards cooperation are necessary for moral behaviour”. They “form the basis for moral behaviour” in the human animal. Do you have any reason to think otherwise?
Yes. Specifically, the staggering variation in human moral ideas. The Taliban have moral ideas, George W. Bush has moral ideas, buddhist monks have moral ideas, Gandhi had moral ideas, suicide bombers have moral ideas... but the differences between them are so enormous and so stark that the idea that they all spring from one unitary, instinctive source is either false or utterly trivial.
Either that's not the fundamental basis of most of our moral ideas at all, or it is such a weak basis that knowing more about it will tell us nothing at all about whether the "right" moral ideas are those of the Taliban or not.
No one is arguing for the existence of “aerodynamic genes”. We are looking at the evolved tendency of curiosity about how the world functions; the more we know the better our chance of survival. The development of better and more aerodynamic spears via trial and error is essentially the same in principle, albeit less sophisticated, as what we do today re aircraft.
You are not addressing the point. What on Earth makes you think that genes are only the basis of our ideas about aerodynamics in the most banal and trivial sense , but simultaneously think that our genes are going to be some amazing source of new insight into our ideas about how to live? Isn't that blatantly idiotic?
Nope! Once we understand that we are an altruistic social species, it is perfectly simple via induction to establish codes of behaviour based upon this knowledge. This was instinctively so for our most primitive forebears. I’m sure they weren't concerned with the “is/ought” problem in the Paleolithic era.
Now once again you are banging your head on the is/ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy. Suppose it did make sense to say that we evolved to behave thus and so, where does that get you? How do you bridge the gap between "I have an evolved instinct to X", where X is defend the community or perhaps to opportunistically rape, and your conclusion "therefore it is morally right to do X"?
Of course evolution does not give us “morally perfect instincts instead of a mishmash of naughty and nice instincts”. Where did I say otherwise? But, for any social species, the benefits of being part of an altruistic group outweigh the benefits of individualism and to this end we restrain individual selfishness and promote the building of more cooperative groups. The genes that survive will be the components of the beings who best integrate within a cohesive society.
We already explained this to you. Your ideas about evolution are both simplistic and false. If one bunch of organisms evolve genes for a social rule in a cooperative group, another bunch will evolve genes to cheat, or to exploit rule-followers, and so
ad infinitum. The winner will not be the best integrator, it will be the organism best at gaming the system, by strategically breaking the rules to its own benefit while maximising their enjoyment of the benefits of those rules.
You are back to claiming that “good” and “bad” are qualities in and of themselves. How do you decide what “inclinations” are “good”?
No, I'm just assuming that like most amateur moral philosophers you do eventually sidewind your way back around to endorsing all the usual moral rules, so that if your rules end up endorsing rape it demonstrates a contradiction.
In practice behaviour is deemed good or bad depending upon whether or not it enhances social cohesion. Thus protecting babies and penalizing rape is likely to enhance the welfare of the tribe. This is why societies throughout history devise codes towards these ends.
This is a different soggy spot in your argument which we haven't previously been kicking, but since you bring it up again, you seem to be equivocating between "is deemed" and "is". This highlights your failure to grasp the description/prescription distinction, I think.
Saying X "is deemed" to be right is a strictly descriptive statement. Anything at all could be "deemed" right. The interesting question is whether it "is" right, which is a prescriptive question.
Science can tell us what is deemed to be moral. It can't tell us what
should be deemed moral, and unless you are a full-blown moral relativist it's uncontroversial that not everything which was ever deemed moral is moral.
It’s the theory of evolutionary biology, not mine per se, and its concept of morality is grounded in what we factually know about evolved human nature NOT in some academic philosophical conclusions deduced from assumed axiomatic premises.
Well there's your problem. Without assumed axiomatic premises you'll never get off the ground, you'll just be flapping in circles forever as you are currently doing.
