Skip to main content

Remark by Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos re ethics and evolution

Way back when I read Cosmos and Mind  and discovered that Sharon Street rejects "mind-independent" moral truths for the most interesting reason.  She says the moral theory is inconsistent with natural selection because there's no reason to think that natural selection would put us in touch with mind-independent truths. So she concludes that Darwinians, such as herself, must avoid giving an exalted status to these sorts of claims.

Some thoughts on that: first of all, wouldn't one who arrives at such a conclusion (evolution is true, therefore ethics ain't as true as we thought) about moral claims arrive at a similar conclusion regarding causal claims?  How could one, therefore, claim to know the sort of necessary truths that characterize science.  How can Sean Carroll say with confidence that Laplace is right if natural solution provides no plausible scenario in which knowing math and science would be advantageous?

I suppose one could always argue that such knowledge is just a more complicated version of particular knowledge, but that counter doesn't seem to support the type of determinism that so enamors Mr. Carroll.  Is the awareness of determinism a more complicated version of our knowledge of contingent facts?  Is the awareness of universality a more complicated version of our knowledge of particulars?

On the other hand, the problem might be resolved by clarifying "mind-independent."  Maybe this way of characterizing higher level truths is deeply flawed in a manner analogous to how Kant's talk of a "Ding-an-Sich." Maybe such truths are not to be thematized as being true independent of all minds but rather as capable of being known by all other rational minds.

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

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
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