This is a problem I have been acutely aware of for several years, but that does not seem to motivate much constructive work in either philosophy or among evolutionists. Does this seem like an important problem to anyone else? Bridging the Gap between Philosophy and the Science of Morality “Evolutionary biology is young and excited, and would like to take over morality. Philosophy is old and experienced, and knows that this is a pipe dream and, even more to the point, that evolutionary biology should be ashamed of itself for thinking that way. … Moral philosophy, for its part, is a Johnny-come-lately attempt to intellectualize— to organize and explain, and usually to rationalize— a human experience that had long been a functional part of what it meant to be human. Long before there was any formal moral philosophizing, morality was rooted in the human journey both genetic and cultural. … Moral philosophy has for millennia been examining morality from every conceivable standpoint, and has developed and refined a strong analytical method. However, it is empirically impoverished, starving for data, lacking direction for its creativity, wandering through every conceivable cranny of thought space just to stay alive. It needs something more from the natural world than the vague intuitions of the proverbial man on the street and a set of historical views of how the human mind operates. In this context, the current dysfunctional relationship between moral philosophy and evolutionary biology is a travesty.” (Lahti 2014) In this vein, David Lahti entertainingly and evenhandedly reveals the sometimes extreme mutual misunderstandings and resulting mutual disdain between evolutionists studying morality as natural phenomena and moral philosopher’s reacting to that work. This mutual misunderstanding has harmful real world effects. Moral philosophy is denied any substantial science based grounding in the natural world. Science is denied the collaborator it needs to make its rapidly expanding understanding of morality culturally useful. And the world is denied something it sometimes appears to desperately need, a robustly constructed secular morality grounded in the best science and moral philosophy have to offer. The highly intelligent and well intentioned academics in both disciplines would have solved this miscommunication problem long ago if this was not the thorny, deep rooted, tangled mess it is. How might we start hacking away at this mess in the near term? Lahti, David C., (2014). On the Partnership between Natural and Moral Philosophy. In amazon/Understanding-Moral-Sentiments-Darwinian-Perspectives/dp/1412853966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420855135&sr=8-1&keywords=In+Understanding+Moral+Sentiments%3A+Darwinian+Perspectives%3F
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:05:08 +0000
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