We should be cautious about giving evolutionary stories to account for every behavior that seems to have a biological correlate. It is the biology that provides the actual object to observe and experiment with. I don’t think we are disagreeing. My point is that the biology offers hard evidence and some of the evolutionary stories, as Churchland points out, are just making stuff up.
Ah gotcha.
Yes I think we pretty much agree overall.
Right, a complex question that does not yield a simple solution. For the longest time the emphasis was on human nature, that changed with the work of cultural anthropology, and then culture was everything and human nature denied. More recently we have come to see that both play a role. The nature/nurture debate has resolved in a similar way.
Exactly. Inherent tendencies manifested in brain structures, endlessly sculpted back and forth by experience manifested in patterns of neural connectivity, possible in sophisticated critters like us born with plenty of brain plasticity/ ability to learn. Unimaginably complex in detail, but we can get big picture ideas of what's going on.
Pluralism is understandable in the context of basic tendencies being triggered or sculpted by experience, environment and culture, but is it the best we can do?
I do not think that moral uncertainty and disagreement is something we are likely to overcome. How, for example, might we resolve the question of abortion?
I dunno. What would Aristotle say?
But at least I think I know why I dunno!
Like some others around here, I have a theory! Here's how I'm thinking about it, still a work in progress, and I'd be interested in your
thoughts -
Conscious experience is what brings potential Oughts into a world of Ises (the Ises being of the type Churchland describes).
Because it brings Value and Meaning and Mattering into the world. In other words it brings Subjective Qualiative properties into a world which is otherwise only able to be described in Objective Quantitive terms.
So it Matters how I behave towards you, because it can impact on your Quality of life, your qualiative experiences (as opposed to how I behave towards a rock or toaster or tree). My actions can cause you to suffer, or be happy and so on.
And you have inherent Value, because of your ability to consciously experience a quality of life (unlike a rock, toaster or tree).
To summarise -
Your conscious qualiative states entail you having interests in the state of affairs, which I can affect. Therefore my
actions can Matter to you. And my actions Mattering entails me having Oughts. Same applies to all critters with a quality of life.
Maybe such a framing should be called Mattering rather than Morality (I nicked this idea of Mattering from Goldstein), but I think it works as a basis for Oughts. And it isn't undermined by issues of Subjectivity vs Objectivity, or how it arose, through evolution. It still Matters anyway.
But can it answer specific questions, like abortion? I don't think it can give clear cut rules,
because by its very nature qualiative experience isn't neatly and objectively quantifiable. That's Harris's problem, and why all attempts at objective exceptionless rule based morality inevitably stumble imo. And why they
must fail, according to my Mattering framing. It's apples and oranges, Objective and Subjective, Quantitive and Qualiative. That's why weighing the benefits and harms to the pregnant woman can't be perfectly calculated and given a number, a formula, and then weighed against the benefits and harms to the foetus. (It's particularly complicated in the case of abortion, because we're talking about
greater potential harms and benefits for the foetus (a potential quality of life) vs
existing lesser quality of life benefits and harms for the woman).
And quality of life can be experienced in many different types of ways,of 'flavours', not directly comparable/quantifiable. So while it feels easy to answer (quantify/calculate) a question like - Ought I to disbenefit myself by ruining my clothes jumping into a pond to save a drowning toddler (Singer's example) in terms of qualiative harms and benefits , it's not so easy compare in a calcuable way many different types flavours of experience in less extreme cases.