Evolutionary Theory Can Adequately Account For An Objective Morality

Thanks Dimmitri, I look forward to this brief debate. The Naturalistic Fallacy In order for naturalism to adequately account for objective morality, it must demonstrate how an "ought" can be derived from an "is". Unfortunately, I do not think my opponent has given a successful justification besides merely asserting that it does. A mere synthesis of communal statistics with our biological well-being only gives us a statistical norm of what happens to be good for us, not a moral prescription of how we ought to be. For naturalism, the external world has no intrinsic teleology (or final cause) apart from what a conjunction of purposeless matter happens to form. Science is a mere descriptive discipline that tells us how things are but not how they ought to be. For example, the fact that a plant is healthy when watered does not suddenly provide us with a moral obligation to water the plant. On the other hand, if it is our teleological intention to produce a healthy plant, then we "should" water the plant to achieve that end but not everyone must have that intention nor would we say that the plant ought to be healthy unless that is its proper function. In which case, we’d be assuming an Aristotelian view of final causes, which is inherently theistic in nature. When evaluating his provided argument, I think we can clearly see how it fails to ground morality. Premise (1) appeals to a natural process that is only concerned with the adaptive survival that can for all intents and purposes, be used to justify all sorts of crimes. For example, if we take premise (2), we can imagine a scenario where there is only enough food for one person. Even if they shared the food, it would not be enough to get to their destination. Thus, for survival, both of them are obliged to murder each other. Would this be right? Even with a sufficient food supply, there's a distinction between knowing what makes something flourish and whether we have an obligation to make "flourishing" our intention (refer to the plant analogy). If the person intends to promote well being then he is pragmatically doing good by fulfilling those intentions but if the person does not intend to promote it then he too is pragmatically doing good by fulfilling those intentions. These are clearly not the same as moral goods. For these reasons, I consider the conclusion to be demonstrably false. Moral Responsibility When it is said that we “ought” to do something, that implies that we “can” do it. However, under naturalism, we cannot be held morally culpable for our own actions any more than asserting that natural disasters are morally responsible for the destruction of human beings. If physical determinism is true then we are coerced into doing as we do because of prior causal conditions. This completely undermines any attempt to ground morality in naturalism. Possible Worlds For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this account of morality is true. The problem is, this would only be contingently true upon our brains rather than necessarily true - that is to say, it would not be true of all possible worlds. For example, it is conceivable that a psychopath could derive pleasure from inflicting plain on others and that would be its own means of flourishing. With such opposing conceptions of well being, I do not think there can be a uniform understanding of “good” for all groups if something that would otherwise be recognized as “evil” in some other world is now seen as good. In fact, this is already the case in our world as about three million psychopaths reportedly exist in America alone. There may also be a possible world where no living organisms exist at all. In which case, there wouldn’t be any moral truths even though they are said to be necessary. If morals are only contingently true then how can we expect them to be universally binding on all people? Furthermore, if we appeal to a moral landscape of the continuum of well-being, then we could say that the elderly are passed the peak of their "flourishing" and have now declined into social dependency. This consequently burdens society from flourishing as it should and therefore it seems logical to conclude that the elderly ought to be put to death. In another scenario, perhaps one person sacrifices his own life to save another but what would be right about this? Either way, a life is lost so does that entail that they’re equally bad decisions? That seems absurd. Therefore, I think we can safely conclude that Harris’s moral landscape is not an adequate foundation for objective morality because human well being is not identical to moral goodness. Hope to see my opponent try to refute these unrefutable criticisms!