Skip to main content

quick note for future inquiry: utilitarian genetic psychology of virtue questioned

This post is still being edited... it's pretty unclear as written... hopefully editing will clarify

This has to do with the problems with a utilitarian understanding of motivation when it is used in evolutionary psychology. 

Utilitarians look at human actions have genuine desirability solely in terms of the expected consequences. No inherently desirable actions. But they grant that repeated action can cause one fuse (or better, confuse) the desirability of the action with that of the outcome. Hence the admiration we have for virtues such as courage.

Replace "repeated action" with "repeated generations" and you have at least one explanation of the origin of virtue quoted with approval by Darwin in the Descent of Man. And you are not far from today's evolutionary psychology.

The problem is, why would any animal act courageously to protect kin in the first place?

The initial answer, it seems to me must be that we should be asking a related question about similar behavior in non-humans. They take risks and endure pain for the sake of others without the help (or hindrance) of reflection. It must be that they desire to do so non-reflectively. But even non-reflective awareness of how to act in a dangerous situation involves an awareness of danger: but how could an instinctive awareness of that come about?

One possible answer is that he might be encouraged to do so by others, who praise such an action with the hopes that others will practice it. But such duping could occur only if the action was already a possibility.  And it is a possibility only if it can seem intrinsically desirable to at least one person. In other words, duping presupposes the desire to act courageously.  But such admiration doesn't arise in a utilitarian system. Or rather, it is subsequent to the practice of courage.  So social duping or the like cannot explain how the practice of courage arises in the first place. What we need to explain is how the action could look admirable, good, even apart from its utility to others. But if it can appear that way even prior to group utility, then utilitarianism's account of motivation has a big gap in it and is possibly superfluous. And to argue that the social shaping or duping motivates us to act courageously is to explain in a circle.

So if one is to have an evolutionary account of virtue, one must explain how virtues seem admirable WITHOUT relying on circular explanations (such as social shaping) offered by utilitarianism.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).
Post a Comment
Read more