The Philochistos 1973 commemorative debate

Thanks again to Pro for his arguments and rebuttal. Morality as a byproduct of desires was a simplification. To recap, I mentioned goals, interests (both related to desires), kin altruism, group altruism (as pertaining to evolution), laws, and religion. Desires, goals, and interests propel evolution and also create what we call “values”. Kin altruism and group altruism are both conducive to survival. Thus, caring for others helped to propel evolution. Laws in part reflect morality which itself helped to ingrain moral sentiments and to universalize them. Religion has played a huge role in enforcing moral laws throughout history and provides divine authority to make people obey them, fear not obeying them, and see rewards in living by them. Thus, religion enforced moral feelings within humans and helped to validate and universalize them. This explanation is obviously simplified, but provides a coherent summary.Since this debate has a shared BoP, it is also important to compare my account of morality with Pro’s. Pro invokes God, which I argue is an unnecessary postulate and encounters its own difficulties. My explanation, while perhaps not complete, fits coherently with the scientific picture of the world that humanity has thus far garnered. It’s consistent with our rational view of the world and therefore logically preferable. Pro himself states, “Arguably, all of our belief-producing cognitive faculties were the product of evolution”. If our cognitive faculties are produced via evolution, then an evolutionary perspective of morality gains further rational preferability. By “preferable” I mean that a rational analysis would hope to find an explanation that fits into the evolutionary perspective, and that the evolutionary framework is to be the starting point. Pro argues that I’ve fallaciously mistaken a correlative observation for a causal explanation, i.e. that I haven’t shown morality is based on desires. I feel this leaves out the majority of my argument. I started out making the correlation between desires and morality; then I set out to provide a causal explanation for morality that starts with desires. Some semblance of what we’d today call morality began during evolution due to social or institutionalized desires; when creatures began imposing collective desires, not as a legal code, but corresponding to more innate, intuitive ideas of right and wrongness that were shared collectively. Pro assumes I’m connecting all desires--even individual--with morality, even though I’ve been referring to social, collective, or institutionalized desires. A thief, while acting by his own desires, is going against collective desires, which is what I correlate more with morality. That being said, I would not go so far as saying that every distinct moral sentiment directly corresponds to a set of desires, since morality is much about feelings e.g. conscience and much has been inherited and assumed prima facie.I’m not sure how I’m committing the genetic fallacy. My entire account of morality assumes morality is part of non-objective features. The debate is not about whether statements such as “stealing is wrong” are correct, rather about what they mean. The realist position is that the statement applies an objective property “wrongness” to the act of stealing. The argument I’ve made is that it represents an institutionalized moral norm, not that the statement is false. This debate is about the content of such moral claims, not their validity. My argument leads to the conclusion that moral claims do not impose objective properties. I’m arguing that morals are mind-dependent, not that we should dispense with them. Morals are a function of evolution and a byproduct mainly of desires, similarly to taste in food. Pro’s second objection is even more untenable. First, he continually misrepresents my argument by assuming my claim is that evolution is an unreliable means of acquiring knowledge (as shown above, I do not state that). Second, it assumes we can’t delineate moral beliefs from logical ones in the same way that we can distinguish the subjectivity of music and taste in food, from objective facts. The statement “Miles Davis was a great musician” can be revealed subjective by an appeal to evolution but that does not endanger mathematical statements like 5+5=10. That would be absurd. No normative conclusion can be derived from descriptive claims. Pro has made an argument that attempts to derive norms from an entirely descriptive framework. Simply stating the argument does not escape the fallacy. A convincing moral claim would be: it is permissible to kill in self-defence. Preemptive war is a comparable form of self-defence. Therefore, preemptive war is permissible. The argument stays within the confines of morality in order to make a moral claim. Reaching entirely out of the moral framework is erroneous. Pro’s argument: 1. It is the case that God is the sovereign and supreme ruler of the universe.2. It is the case that God forbids adultery.3. Therefore, it is wrong to commit adultery.The conclusion does not follow from the premises. IF we presume that God is the supreme ruler and that he forbids adultery, this implies only that committing adultery defies God’s will. The premises do not dictate any other property of adultery. Invoking the concept of morality is a fallacious jump. No syllogism can be formed where a normative conclusion follows logically from descriptive premises. But the deepest flaw in Pro’s case is that it rests on the existence of God. God can’t be simply presumed. Invoking the supernatural requires additional proof, which is why naturalistic claims are preferable. The only evidence he’s given is that Jesus reveals it to us. But simply saying that we should love our neighbors as ourselves does not imply Jesus was making an objective claim. The claim that Jesus rose from the dead is further undefended, but would not strictly matter anyway.