[lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 17:46:45 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Mon, 8/12/08, wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:
> I find that claims regarding what is "natual" or
> "non-natural" in moral and
> political contexts typically express naught but the values
> and traditions of
> particular persons and those of the tribes into which they
> have been
> socialized. There doesn't seem to be anything
> universalizable about appeals to
> the natural.
I replied:-
>It is unclear to me why we could predicate something 'universalisable' >on
>'nature'.
I meant to say - it is unclear to me why we could _not_ predicate something
'universalisable' on 'nature'.
>(Is "survival of the fittest" a
> universalizabale maxim?)
I replied:-
>It can be treated as such, though I think it best to treat it as a claim that
>is strictly false as a universal claim that 'only the fittest survive', though
>containing a surprising amount of truth if understood as >the claim 'many
>adaptations aid survival'.
It might be added:- it can be treated as a 'universalisable maxim' in two
different ways.
1) as a tautology or near-tautology, whereby we infer that if something
survives it is 'fitter' than something that does not; the problem is that we
are offering a circular or non-argument for we are offering no independent
measure of 'fitness' aside from survival, so when asked to show why it is that
the fittest survive, we can only assert that it is because survival is the
criterion of fitness - a plainly circular argument and no real explanation.
2) as an empirical claim. Here it would seem to be strictly false. For
evolutionary history is so beset with contingency, whether through meteors or
disease or other changes to a creature's 'ecological niche', that we can only
empirically speak of 'fitness' relative to a certain 'ecological niche' - so
that a very well-adapted creature given a certain 'ecological niche' [e.g.
dinosaurs] might not survive some radical change to that niche, whereas some
creature that comparatively struggles when the dinosaur's rule the earth may
survive the radical change and prosper from the dinosaurs' extinction [e.g.
small mammals].
It seems to me possible to argue that, while we cannot deduce an 'ought' from
an 'is', nevertheless we _ought to_ take human nature [e.g. human frailty] into
account in setting our moral and political compasses. This would mean 'human
nature' may be a crucial factor to take into account in our moral reasoning.
This would not mean we had grounded morals on 'human nature', for the weight we
give 'human nature' as a factor here is not a given but itself requires a moral
evaluation and decision.
Donal
Waffling-on-Sea
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