For his question on moral law, Egnor set up his prompt as a dichotomy:<\/p>\n
Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This phrasing makes my answer an easy one. \u00a0I don\u2019t think morality can have its source in natural selection. \u00a0As I wrote earlier this week<\/a>, evolution doesn\u2019t operate with some kind of preset or optimized telos<\/em>. \u00a0Evolution eliminates the unworkable, but it doesn\u2019t differentiate between different stable states. \u00a0Plenty of objectionable societies are stable enough to persist, no matter how objectionable their morals are.<\/p>\n
For the last self indulgent math metaphor of the year: imagine that you could represent the entire set of possible societies on a coordinate plane. \u00a0Obviously, you\u2019d need more than two characteristics or dimensions to describe societies fully, but for the sake of simplicity, imagine you can. \u00a0You could assign a \u2018morality score\u2019 to each society with higher scores denoting more moral behavior and lower scores reserved for slave-holding, genocidal regimes. \u00a0If, for every society, you placed a dot at the height of its moral score directly over the point on the plane that represented that society, you would end up with a surface that might look something like this:<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n
Some points would be higher than others. \u00a0The entire map might be a smooth surface, changing gradually as you tweaked the characteristics of the societies, or it might be full of jagged discontinuities. \u00a0Either way, some points would be local maxima \u2013 no point next to them would have a higher \u2018morality rating.\u2019 \u00a0The graph might have only one maximum (the best of all possible worlds), or it might have dozens or hundreds.<\/p>\n
The trouble is that it would be hard to try to distinguish a local maximum from the absolute maximum. \u00a0And certainly, from the point of evolutionary pressures, a local max would be a stable strategy. \u00a0Depending on the flexibility of the society and the range of possible mutations, a higher maximum might be out of reach, if evolution were left to work on its own. \u00a0The interim steps to reach the higher peaks are too unlikely and unstable.<\/p>\n
If we want to move between peaks, we can\u2019t rely on evolution. \u00a0It needs to be a human-directed and human-instigated process (possibly a transhumanist<\/a> approach to morality?). \u00a0The two most basic steps we\u2019d need to take would be to increase our sensitivity to moral differences between societies and expand our ability to imagine a broader range of societies (fiction can be particularly helpful here). \u00a0But none of this comes without effort. \u00a0Natural improvement of morality comes too slowly to be of use.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/4256452356987023523-4708647410089336459?l=www.unequally-yoked.com\")
<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"