[ExI] Origin of ethics and morals

[Stefano Vaj]

On 10 December 2011 05:13, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Our psychological mechanisms have been shaped by millions of year of
> genetic selection in hunter gatherer bands or small tribes.  And it
> was selection for appropriate responses depending on the conditions.
> I have shown in a simple model that going to war with neighbors in a
> time of plenty has dire consequences for genes that induce such
> behavior.  Likewise, *not* going to war when the environmental
> conditions called for it had equally dire consequences.
> The way we treat close relatives, remote relatives and strangers makes
> complete sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of genes.
>

Absolutely. But it is not clear to me why you refuse to categorise all that
simply as our ethology and psychology.

The real domain of ethics IMHO is the moral dilemma (to do what one is
genetically inclined or forced to do in the first place may generate
pleasure, to infringe one's own rules may generate guilt, but certainly
neither thing involves ethical decisions).

A moral dilemma implies that there is a real, actual uncertainty on what is
the "right thing to do".

An ethical "system" is in turn simply a set of answers and/or of theories
on how to solve such problems, which in turn reflects different values and
priorities, not to mention "anthropologies" in the philosophical sense.

A work which in my view remains seminal in this respect is Nietzsche's On
the Genealogy of
Morals<http://records.viu.ca/%7Ejohnstoi/nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm>.
Even if one does really share Nietzsche's specific conclusions on the
merits of what he is discussing, this short work would still remain in my
opinion exemplary anyway as to the method. And all the contemporary
"memetics" reading of how ideas arise, circulate and go extinct in human
societies nicely completes it.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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