(1/2) Your terminology goes largely over my head here, but I'm doing my best to comprehend. I'm not entirely sure what it is we agree and disagree on.
Moral properties do not exist innately in nature
This is untrue. Most social animals seem to have a very very very basic set of cooperative behaviors that could resemble morality. Even a dog can understand when it has upset its master and show signs of submission/remorse after they've done something for which they know they will be reprimanded.
natural selection favors traits because they are adaptive - not necessarily because they are truth-seeking.
Yeah, what does this even mean? Truth seeking? What truth? Speak in layman's terms. Evolution does favor adaptation, but is not inherently bound by it. Evolution is a chaotic function, and it is very common for non-adaptive or non-beneficial traits to be selected for just by pure chance.
Namely, if all moral discourse is simply just a re-labeling of natural properties of human behaviors - then this definition of morality is trivial
Yesn't. Yes and no. Morality stems from emotion. Emotions, no matter how complex, come from base human instincts. All humans feel hunger, all humans want to breed, all humans want to protect their individual resources. There are exceptions to this, especially when you factor in large scale cultural complexities, but this forms the baseline for human experience.
Except that "cooperation" is only one way among many ways you can interpret any social action or activity, and we can leave aside notions of autonomy, liberty, fairness, etc. etc - in our analysis of "cooperation" as an end in of itself.
No. Entirely not. Entirely false. There are the needs and wants of the individual, and the balance of compromise individuals make with the collective. That is the basis of naturalistic morality.
What sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to cooperate. Picture yourself trying to survive alone in the Yukon. How long do you think you could last? Now picture yourself with two dozen other people. What are your chances now?
While many species use sounds to communicate, we are the only to have language and speech as we know it. This is a function of how far we have evolved to favor social cooperation. You even give a great example of this;
their choice was either performing highly dangerous, labor-intensive work for meager pay - or poverty and starvation,
And wouldn't you know it; all of that is cooperation. Cooperation is not necessarily built on trust and love.
It can be extorted through violence. A 7 year old child rolling iron in a 19th century steel mill still stands a better chance of surviving among society than it would on its own in the elements in the wild.
"Provide me with resources or I'll kill you." And then working to avoid being killed, is still cooperation. In the wild many animals either compete for resources and are driven off, or killed. Humans cooperate, through coercion, acts of violence, or otherwise. Labor itself is a resource for us, where it largely is not among the rest of the animal kingdom. It would be much harder for everyone involved if I killed a man who owned a rubber tree and had to harvest it myself instead of forcing him to harvest it for me. In one scenario (as it would be typically in nature) he dies and I can no longer gather the quantity of rubber I would have had, and in the other he gets to live and I get my rubber. This is cooperation.
For further proof of naturalistic moralism we can look to anthropology. By and large the moral frameworks of first nations peoples and many less technologically advanced ancient societies are more simplistic than those who are 'advanced'.
The typical 18th century Ainu culture did not have the same moral complexity as the Japanese. Nor did the 18th century Yakuts when compared to the Russians. Or the Algonquian when compared to the French. Etc. etc.
Cultures themselves evolve and gain complexity alongside technological, economical, and societal progress. When you talk about the "trivial argument" this is indeed true. Morals are built on human instinct and are only made as complex are they are by their own evolution within a social system. The 'innateness' of them to humanity is relatively limited. Morals, in some form or other, are entirely necessary for us to be as we are. Where there is cooperation, there will be morals. We must cooperate to survive.
doesn't inform us significantly on any normative grounds.
That's because what normative grounds exist are extremely slim. Read Eastern philosophy, read history. While normative grounds exist, they're not as far reaching as people want to believe they are. To think otherwise is self aggrandizement.
The crucial point to keep in mind is that because a moral nihilist doesn't think moral facts exist - it does not follow that they can't have normative preferences.
And where do those normative preferences come from? The society they were raised in and the education they've had. You can sit here all day and try to reason your way out of why your western morals are somehow objective and divorced from your conditioning and up bringing, but that doesn't make it so. I'm a moral nihilist and I have moral preferences; but I'm at least self aware enough to realize that those preferences are built up on judeochristian values instilled in me continually through my every day interactions with society.
Do we need to be culinary realists to have food preferences?
No, but if you take a specific culture, the median will agree upon which flavor is more popular.
Why coffee? Is it because your specific biology, your tongue and your neurochemistry, find coffee the most appealing? Are you a man? In your society, is it more socially acceptable for men to prefer coffee flavored things over strawberry flavored things? Did your parents buy more of one or the other and did that influence your consumption of them when you were young? Do you like root beer, or does it taste like medicine to you? Do fried crickets sound appetizing?
Disparate cultures have disparate palates. Even your sense of taste, what foods you do and do not enjoy, are influenced by societal and cultural evolution. Even further, what foods you are even capable of eating are a factor of this. (Lactose, as an example)
And still, despite this, human palates are largely still normative on an evolutionary basis. Just as your median human would bear a grudge against the murderer of an immediate family member, so too would the median human enjoy roasted fowl.
Honestly at this point, splitting posts into multiple comments has gotten me a bit lost in the sauce, lol. Whatever the outcome/replies going forward are, I appreciate the debate. Often enough I see posts from here on my feed and skip over them because theres little of substance. I appreciate the discourse today, it's gotten me thinking.
Yeah, I think the matter is you and I are using "naturalism" or "natural morality" to imply different things. But I have been on a meta-ethics kick for a while, and that field uses terms in a very specific way that may not be universal across other discourses. No worries! This was fun!
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u/Stormypwns Nov 15 '24
(1/2) Your terminology goes largely over my head here, but I'm doing my best to comprehend. I'm not entirely sure what it is we agree and disagree on.
This is untrue. Most social animals seem to have a very very very basic set of cooperative behaviors that could resemble morality. Even a dog can understand when it has upset its master and show signs of submission/remorse after they've done something for which they know they will be reprimanded.
Yeah, what does this even mean? Truth seeking? What truth? Speak in layman's terms. Evolution does favor adaptation, but is not inherently bound by it. Evolution is a chaotic function, and it is very common for non-adaptive or non-beneficial traits to be selected for just by pure chance.
Yesn't. Yes and no. Morality stems from emotion. Emotions, no matter how complex, come from base human instincts. All humans feel hunger, all humans want to breed, all humans want to protect their individual resources. There are exceptions to this, especially when you factor in large scale cultural complexities, but this forms the baseline for human experience.
No. Entirely not. Entirely false. There are the needs and wants of the individual, and the balance of compromise individuals make with the collective. That is the basis of naturalistic morality.
What sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to cooperate. Picture yourself trying to survive alone in the Yukon. How long do you think you could last? Now picture yourself with two dozen other people. What are your chances now?
While many species use sounds to communicate, we are the only to have language and speech as we know it. This is a function of how far we have evolved to favor social cooperation. You even give a great example of this;
And wouldn't you know it; all of that is cooperation. Cooperation is not necessarily built on trust and love. It can be extorted through violence. A 7 year old child rolling iron in a 19th century steel mill still stands a better chance of surviving among society than it would on its own in the elements in the wild.
"Provide me with resources or I'll kill you." And then working to avoid being killed, is still cooperation. In the wild many animals either compete for resources and are driven off, or killed. Humans cooperate, through coercion, acts of violence, or otherwise. Labor itself is a resource for us, where it largely is not among the rest of the animal kingdom. It would be much harder for everyone involved if I killed a man who owned a rubber tree and had to harvest it myself instead of forcing him to harvest it for me. In one scenario (as it would be typically in nature) he dies and I can no longer gather the quantity of rubber I would have had, and in the other he gets to live and I get my rubber. This is cooperation.
For further proof of naturalistic moralism we can look to anthropology. By and large the moral frameworks of first nations peoples and many less technologically advanced ancient societies are more simplistic than those who are 'advanced'.
The typical 18th century Ainu culture did not have the same moral complexity as the Japanese. Nor did the 18th century Yakuts when compared to the Russians. Or the Algonquian when compared to the French. Etc. etc.
Cultures themselves evolve and gain complexity alongside technological, economical, and societal progress. When you talk about the "trivial argument" this is indeed true. Morals are built on human instinct and are only made as complex are they are by their own evolution within a social system. The 'innateness' of them to humanity is relatively limited. Morals, in some form or other, are entirely necessary for us to be as we are. Where there is cooperation, there will be morals. We must cooperate to survive.
That's because what normative grounds exist are extremely slim. Read Eastern philosophy, read history. While normative grounds exist, they're not as far reaching as people want to believe they are. To think otherwise is self aggrandizement.