Somehow I knew this was Patricia before opening the article (cbc.ca, neurophilosophy, and morality only have so many names associated with them). I had a number of discussions with her about this about two or three years ago, and my key take home from those is that you have to let go of what you personally think the term morality means when you enter into a scientific context. Moral behavior is not 'moral' in the absolute sense that is being rejected here, it is 'moral behavior' in the sense that it is what the average human being thinks society thinks the 'moral' behavior is in the given situation. The fact that, on average, there seems to be some agreement on this is fascinating. How such a thing evolves, and the reasons for its persistence are vital questions that we have to grapple with.

Another observation that I have had on this is that trying to convince philosophers that morality can be reduced to a decision problem and thus that Kant is not wrong, rather that he is just an asshole who didn't know that Turing complete systems exist, is a very hard thing to do. Their reaction against the dangers of belief in the categorical imperative is extremely well founded, and instructive for those who think that things like smart contracts might be a good idea.

One great advantage of defining traditional morality as being closely equivalent to the evolutionary imperatives of our biological substrate is that we can stop playing the stupid post-hoc rationalization game where we try to come up with rational explanations for what is fundamentally contingent behavior. This in turn provides us with an entirely clear space to start to imagine what post-moral society might look like, and envision what algorithmic morality might look like if we were actually able to feed Bentham's machine with all the factors instead of the stupidly limited number of measurements and dimensions that are usually imagined and that remain centuries out of date with the current state of the art in logic and computation.

Whether we want to live in a society where we have agreed that everything can be decided upon must be reducible to a decision problem, or whether we want to allow ourselves the get out of jail free card that is denying that we know enough to make the decision at all is another question. However, before we can even get there we need to be freed from the misbegotten idea that morality is in any way universal, or derived from natural law, or that natural law even exists. Out of an incredible body of work I will always thank Patricia for taking this head on.

I should also note that the argument that morality is rooted in biology is in no way mean to belittle what evolution has discovered. Patricia has argued that many of the positions taken by modern defenders of enlightenment ideals wildly undervalue so called traditional or local knowledge as "unenlightened" because that knowledge was not arrived at from first principles, but from long, hard experience accumulated and passed down over generations, and that westerns in particular have an abysmal track record when it comes to thinking they know better and thus not listening to the people who know that the reason why the crops are not planted by the river is because the hippos will come out and try to kill you if you do.