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

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

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more