Rivka Weinberg AMA
This kind of “is having a kid ever OK” shit flabbergasts me.
Just posted the following question:
“Hello. Thank you for the opportunity to ask a question. How would you respond to the following?
“Any meta-ethics rests on a foundation of fitness, i.e. being to the benefit of survival and reproduction. All higher order modes are either offshoots of this (how to keep people from killing each other) or artifacts of the ongoing debugging of consciousness (itself a product of selection) as a mode in which the ethical discussions play out (the nature of pain, suffering, happiness, etc.). Things seeming to have a point, the quest for meaning, utilitarian heuristics, faith, virtues, etc all derive from some desire to secure the continuation of some essence into the future.
“Your formulation, as you admit, is not intuitive. I’d venture to say it is anti-intuitive to the vast majority of the population. Anyone who buys what you are saying is less likely to survive and reproduce. So how can a philosophy which is itself maladaptive be in keeping with any ethical system?”
Let you know if I get a response.
This is a super weird formulation.
Any meta-ethics rests on a foundation of fitness, i.e. being to the benefit of survival and reproduction.
I mean, you can employ whatever meta-ethic you want, that’s the beautiful legacy that David Hume left to us poor sinners, but…this doesn’t reflect either any kind of abstract necessity or any kind of common concretely-grounded foundation for practical ethics. So I’m having trouble seeing what good it does either theoretically or pragmatically.
Theoretically speaking, as I said, your terminal values are ultimately going to have to stand on their own (because you can’t derive ought from is, to put it in shorthand). If you don’t like the demands of fitness-based evolutionary ethics, if they strike you as being evil, there is nothing logical or empirical that can compel you to accept them as good. [Not living up to the demands of evolutionary fitness will make you less evolutionarily fit, of course…it may even make your moral system less evolutionarily fit, if it turns out that such things primarily piggyback through human reproduction…but, as the Sage of Ethics says, “who cares?”]
Practically speaking –
– this was originally like a ten-paragraph essay, but in fact I think it’s simpler and easier just to say “it turns out people care about being happy and fulfilled etc. way more than they care about fitness, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that they will sacrifice fitness for other moral goods, and so you schema turns out to be just as counter-intuitive to the population-at-large as the schema against which you’re arguing.”