“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, Though the Looking-Glass, as spoken by Humpty Dumpty.)
Evolutionists have long grappled with the problem of how morality
Moral philosophers (and evolutionary scientists!) are divided over the source, the final ontological grounding of the ethical.
Q: Is it a brute fact, non-naturalistically ‘existing’ in its own world, not all that dissimilar from Plato’s ideas?
Q: Is it an ultimate ‘something’ we cannot explain and must just accept?
Q: Or can the ethical be reduced to some non-ethical natural fact, like more effective survival or structures producing a more harmonious community?
Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober economically underscore the matter:
“How, given that there are strong scientific reasons to suppose that selfishness (at least at the genetic level) is a primary mechanism of natural selection, did we humans come to be so strongly attached to the value of goodness?
“How, given that there are strong scientific reasons to suppose that selfishness (at least at the genetic level) is a primary mechanism of natural selection, did we humans come to be so strongly attached to the value of goodness?
Or, to put it a bit differently, why don’t we think it is good to be bad? For those who believe that morality is real, but that it cannot be explained or justified simply by resort to the theological assumption that a unique human propensity to goodness is a product of a divine grace, this is a hard problem, and an important one.” CMI
