Emma Woolgatherer wrote:What a dismissive response to something so extraordinary!
Eh?
1) lots of animals show cooperative behaviour, sometimes to the point of seeming to be selfless. Let's not commit the
Natural Fallacy too quickly in response to such cooperation, though.
2) It seems to me that you are the one being dismissive, and that in being dismissive of human creation of new ethics.
Let's run through the start all over again.
Humans are animals who have genetic bases.
All human behaviour must necessarily rest on those bases.
Humans have undergone what is a qualitative jump in evolution with the evolution of:
a) grammatical language
b) the ability to develop new morals, and the ability in most humans to actually change their own morals and consequent behaviour.
It would be ever so nice if someone actually dealt with thse points.
Surely the video showed that a dog can be capable of far more than simple cooperation. This wasn't just basic reciprocal altruism. It looks like extreme, beyond-the-call-of-duty altruism. I can't think of any ethic about "goodness" that is significantly more meaningful. Behaviour like that is "good" enough for me.
If it's
"good enough for you", fine,
for you and if your actual actions reflect what you claim to believe. Of course, it all gets a bit more complex when we actually describe real-life complex ethical questions like public health insurance (see the present debate in the USA), policing, justice and criminology (see the present debate in Britain), or anything else real-life and complex. It would be nice to have those not ignored. And while a dog may seem fine to me (though frankly, why not bring in Naked Mole Rats and dolphins into it?), dogs and their behaviour just don't even begin to address those more complex issues. It's just not good enough for me and for many others.
Of course dogs can't "invent" ethics. Of course there haven't been any canine equivalents to Aristotle or Kant or Hume. But so what?
Uh, it's quite bloody important when we get to discussing the ethics of law and other things that really play such a big part in human societies and daily life. Sheeesh. It's why we have a thing called "secular humanism". It's why we have this board instead of some super-big kennel.
If a dog can demonstrate altruistic behaviour towards another adult dog, possibly not even its kin, and clearly with no indication that there might be an opportunity for immediate reciprocity, surely that tells us something about goodness.
No. One day the lion might lie down with the lamb,
the tortoise lie down with the hippo, and the snake lie down with the hamster, but what exactly that is supposed to tell us about goodness is already covered in the
fallacy of appeal to nature.
To point to unusually altruistic behaviour in non-human animals as a demonstration that "goodness" is not uniquely human is not to conflate cooperation and "a more meaningful ethic about 'goodness'".
Uh, yes it is. Of course, the nature of the difference becomes acute as soon as we get out of our kennels in the morning and head off to parliament to legislate about laws, or head off to the law courts to administer laws using a bit of common-sense. Etc.
No one's suggesting that the Chilean hero-dog was following some kind of internalised moral code.
Then let's look at how "goodness" is defined, eh? I think I've made that point three times by now.
But then, how many humans do that in similar situations? If one believes, as many of us do, and as Hume did, that moral behaviour is based on things like sympathy or empathy or compassion, then it is surely important to look at possible evidence of those things existing in other animals.
This point is covered already. Humans have genetic bases for behaviour, and as Hume said, sentiment is necessary for the force behind ethics. But the point is, and Hume acknowledged it in his own way, that animal behaviour does not explain human moral behaviour.
I share your concerns about purely evolutionary explanations for human behaviour, Gurdur, and the example you gave of Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape is one of the worst.
Thank-you. And since I said thanks to Nirvanam on another thread just now, the day is better than it could have been. By the way, A Natural History Of Rape is hardly the only bad evo bio answer out there pretending to be science. There are good reasons why many other physical scientists rather look down on the whole of evo bio.
But it doesn't have to be a choice of extremes. Why is it that arguments about this sort of thing get so polarised? As
Kenan Malik said, in his review of
A Natural History of Rape, "the dogma that human behaviour can only be understood in evolutionary terms is as foolish as ignoring evolutionary theory altogether".
No-one here is ignoring evolutionary theory in the slightest. Really, puh-leeeze.
Sheeeesh. I personally would love to see a bit of advanced evo bio brought into the debate here; it hasn't been, and in this thread I've had some really basic texts thrown at me as though they were proof of something.
Again, sheeeesh. Let me put the whole problem into a kernel for you:
If there is a thorny ethical question in a hospital to be decided, about a specific patient, you do not go to an evolutionary biologist to decide the moral question. Instead, you go to a medical ethicist (or panel of them) if you can afford the salary of an ethicist in your hospital, and if you can't, you go to the top medical doctor in charge and you hope like hell he or she has had ebough training in ethical philosophy.
If there is a thorny ethical question about criminal justice to be decided, you do not go to an evolutionary biologist to decide the moral question. Instead, you go to parliament, the courts and the electorate.
And so on.
There are really good reasons why evolutionary biologists are not called upon to decide ethical questions for humans. And there are really good reasons why the entire field of science in general is or should be subservient to the philosophy of ethics.
Sheeesh. I haven't even mentioned eugenics here, or any of the other fads, though I did mention the Tuskagee Syphilis Experiment to Paulo, though I am sure he will ignore it.
Let me give you some other examples.
You go to the most productive discipline in any area, that is, you do so if you want to be effective and productive.
You do not go to some wannabe field in its infancy instead, since you know you're going to get half-baked, uninformed answers (if you get any at all).
If you have what is called a Catch-22 mistake in thinking, you do not go to a neurologist, you go to a cognitive psychologist instead.
If you want to go to the Moon, you go to an astronomer and a physicist and chemist, not to an astrologer and a homeopath.
If you want to do linguistics, you go to a linguist, not a neurologist (before anyone else tries accusing me of ignorance,
, let me point out I am aware of cross-disciplinary double-degree progams that include both linguistics and neurology; I'm aware of them since that was in fact my field).
If you have an ethical problem to be decided, you go to an ethicist, not a biologist of any kind.
And if you want to develop secular humanist answers, you go to secular humanists, not evolutionary biologists.
I am very aware of evolutionary biology, and in fact I was aware of its predescessor, sociobiology. Evo bio has not yet answered any big significant questions,
and does not enable prescriptionism. See Hume. Evo bio is a field still in its infancy,
and evolutionary biology is a field often mocked by other biologists for the ludicrously over-wheening claims people in the field of evo bio often make.
Later, in a blog post of mine, I will give some examples of real biologists mocking evolutionary biology and its daughter, evolutionary psychology. Just as well no-one tried bringing in memes and memetics, otherwise I would have a field day with the hilarity.
And now:
what I have often seen in this thread and all the others like it is people trearting science like a religion. Ethics is a hard area, and regardless of what a tiny minority like to promote in a very ineffectual way (not even putting their own words into actions either), human behaviour is often not determinist, and there is room for human imagination in creation of actual new ethics.
But some try pretending in what is a rather pathetic and forlorn way that somehow, magically, "objective" moral answers can be discovered in the physical sciences (biology, physics) and so we will all have some magically-obtained code of morality that everyone will be happy with, and life will be rosy, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Or maybe we shall learn too why we should not dislike rape. Hey. It's another evo bio idea. Hmmm?
Well, bluntly, that's just all another form of religion. There are questions that the physical sciences cannot answer; even Dawkins acknowledges that. It all seems to be a fear of acknowledging the subjective and intersubjective nature of human prescriptionism,
And as for free will versus determinism; the only way science as a religion can make any sense at all is if human behaviour is utterly deterministic, and includes no free will in any limited form whatsoever.
And that would be a wholly unscientific claim to make --- determinism is simply one more quasi-religious claim. Genuine scientists are not afraid of saying,
"We do not know", and geuine scientists are not afraid of acknowledging category errors. The determinism/free will argument is one that cannot in the end be answered by the physical sciences, owing to all the primary premises needed. It can only be answered by each individual person for themselves.
If you have an ethical problem to be decided, you go to an ethicist, not a biologist of any kind. And there are a whole horde of very good reasons for that.
Since I kinda dislike wading through having to repeat points till they are taken notice of, I think I can leave this thread here.
Let me be just very blunt in summation. No-one builds human societies and systems of justice on the basis of evolutionary biology. And despite the religious fervour, evo bio will not discover any new human morals, it can only describe the very distant beginnings of them, and cognitive psychology is far, far better for describing the rest of the physical side of human morals than is biology, and the philosophy of ethics and politics will always trump everything else when it comes to actually deciding what ethics should be, and how society should be formed.
I think I will leave it at that; no offence, but I do get bored when basic points are simply ignored and we all repeat ourselves for the umpteenth time.