Moral claims aren’t in the business of trying to predict anything, so it’s not clear what you would even want from them to be the equivalent of “able to do so predictively”. — Pfhorrest

Scientifically minded people, religious fundamentalists, and postmodernist social constructivists all disagree on how to judge truths about what is real. — Pfhorrest

But every single datapoint matters, and all we have access to are a bunch if single datapoints. — Pfhorrest

There is if they agree on a methodology by which to judge what is or isn’t moral.
...
You do if you both agree on what counts as evidence, which is not a moral question but a more general philosophical one. — Pfhorrest

But you can collaborate such that progress is achieved mutually, improving both your perspectives on charity and as a consequence the practical approaches that arise from them. — Enrique

That's all fact-based objectivity is in any sphere, inanimate, behavioral or whatever, the constructive convergence and equilibrating of theoretical viewpoints attained by a united front of revisionary, synthesizing experimental processes. Objectivity isn't "out there" to be irresolvably disputed depending on your point of view, it is a kind of cultural paradigm that creates joint truth by human sharing. — Enrique

If there's a universal core of oughts that applies to everyone - a privileged flavour derived from necessities of human functioning by an intellectual synthesis, it seems Pfhorrest wants to say these are true since they describe the deep structure of our oughts, and they are binding because they are actually occurrent. @Kenosha Kid comes in at this point and says because they are descriptions, you can't get behind the map of our oughts to get at the territory of any universal principles of morality without it ceasing to be a map. — fdrake

But we did. cultural practices varied enormously according the what little evidence we have from archaeology. — Isaac

Yes, I believe the God of Abraham religions are the chief cause of some of our most serious problems because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mean living with false beliefs and not science. — Athena

Every individual observation rules out some possibilities about what might be objectively real. An account of objective reality has to account for every single observation, otherwise it’s not actually objective. — Pfhorrest

It kind of sounds like you’re implying confirmationism here, that enough observations can prove something to be true, rather than the falsificationist view that anything might be true that has not yet been observed false. — Pfhorrest

There being an objective reality means that something can be actually false, not just disbelieved; and there being an objective morality means that something can be actually bad, not just disliked. — Pfhorrest

No doubt. All that is the empirical mode of perception. That altruism, empathy, and good...justice, beauty, liberty, etc., are not detected by the senses, even if objects of them are, indicates some other mode of presence must be possible. — Mww

And there it is. A different mode of presence. In addition to the empirical mode given to your senses by the person, the person also presents to your rational mode some activity of his that elicits a feeling in you not given by the person as an object, but by what the person is doing. — Mww

Dunno about a sense of qua feeling or emotion, but anything a priori is absent any and all matters of experience. From that, any cognition resulting from the conjoining of conceptions is thought only, hence a priori. — Mww

Anyone can observe the object of my action. If that action has been determined by my lawfully deterministic will, it is a moral action. And indeed, possibly an immoral one. — Mww

Not a contradiction, but a confusion of source: reason used to determine moral things, reason used to determine all things........unconscious decisions. — Mww

Are there different kinds of problems? — Mww

I wouldn’t call those factors of problems. Factored into problem solving, perhaps? — Mww

That still leaves rationality fully in charge of that of which we are conscious. — Mww

My unconscious mind is not the me I know, so if it causes errors in me, then the rational mind I know should be the boss. — Mww

The interesting bit of morality is the culturally mediated bit. That, I think, would have been less the case in pre-agricultural times, not because they relied more on the defaults, but because there was only one culture to learn from, there was a strong line of non-pedagogic influence (mixed ages), a relatively stable environment, small group sizes (minimising Chinese whisper effects), no strong advantage to selfishness, no virtual social groups (which are too easy to manipulate). — Isaac

For me the only key elements I have as my foundation are that it has to be pre-human (Frans deWaal's work on primates and Sapolsky's peaceful baboons seem compelling evidence to me that pro-social behaviour is pre-human), and it has to be largely culturally mediated - by which I mean learnt through childhood, with perhaps some limits and constraints set by evolved predispositions. — Isaac

When someone says that a cold-blooded murder is morally good, the appropriate response is "No, you're not using the words correctly, that's not the sort of thing we call 'morally good'". — Isaac

It's a bunch of small pieces of the one big objective "ought", in the same way that individual observations are only small pieces of the one big objective "is". — Pfhorrest

You have "no access to any objective reality" either by those standards. You only have the small pieces you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say is looks true, looks true). Similarly, you only have the small pieces of "objective morality" you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say feels good, goods good). In both cases, objectivity just means accounting for all of those experiences together without bias. — Pfhorrest

That just evidences the confusion I'm trying to clear up here. You seem to place "objective reality" in the same category: that objective reality isn't the unbiased total of all possible empirical experiences, but it's some thing out there somewhere that causes all those experiences. — Pfhorrest

That the human has qualities is irrefutable, so what does it matter where they come from as long as it is tacitly acknowledged they are present? — Mww

There is no intrinsic contradiction is supposing the quality of good is every bit as present as the quality of altruism or empathy.
...
Altruism is represented by selfless acts, empathy is represented by your “emotions and insights”, good is represented by my “moral dispositions”. — Mww

System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of.
— Kenosha Kid

Agreed, in principle...

on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity.
— Kenosha Kid

I submit that reason must be used to determine anything of which determination is possible. — Mww

Ambiguity merely regulates the certainty of the determination. — Mww

So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?” — Mww

This suggests my unconscious mind actually does something to the picture of shaded squares. — Mww

Why couldn’t optical illusions just be an error in judgement, given from improper understanding of that which is the cause of it? — Mww

There is a direct relationship between racism and Christianity and the problem with education that we have experienced, preventing our democracy from being fully realized besides having a prison system based on false beliefs and the highest number of incarcerated people in western culture. The belief system supports the military-industrial complex and the notion that our military is serving God. That is a bit of a moral problem with serious ramifications. — Athena

As such, it needs to be fought. — tim wood

Failure to accept evolution and the sciences that study our humanness is a very serious morality problem with social, economic, and political ramifications. — Athena

Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch if “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”). — Pfhorrest

It’s really not though. There being something banging on the door is there being something that is actually (objectively) moral — Pfhorrest

I’m just saying that the persistent shared experience of something banging on the door is all there is to there being something really banging on it. — Pfhorrest

But to agreed that there is this persistent shared experience of something banging on the door, yet deny that anything is really banging at the door, because of a doubt that monsters exist, is to conflate any belief in SOMETHING banging at the door with a belief in monsters specifically doing so. — Pfhorrest

we have left the reasoning for what-is-to-be-done behind. And that will always be moral reasoning, when the thing to be done is primarily qualified by the goodness of it. — Mww

Before heading off on that dialectical tangent, does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires? In other words, does your “generic problem solving” type of reasoning distinguish itself from the type of reasoning that grounds your “compelled to behave”? — Mww

If empathy boils down to mere recognition, which requires something to be observed, apparently negating being unaware. A philosopher will naturally balk at any phenomenon that does not present itself to our rationality, especially a stimuli-response example of it. — Mww

Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of? — Mww

Jeeez, it sucks getting old. After spending all that time with a book written by him, it never even crossed my mind. Predispositions. (Sigh) If I’d been proper and used his last name with all those equivalences, I might have got it right. — Mww

Again, encultured responses to a situation outweigh rational considerations. — Isaac

It's parameters are set by the tools we use (the hard-wiring), but within those parameters, there's considerable scope and modifications to the environment or social structures reveal those other options. — Isaac

Usually with innovators (the active development of social norms), a smaller group size leads to greater diversity as there's less of a tendency to revert to the mean (we see this in some of the seemingly bizarre cultural practices in isolated tribes). — Isaac

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say social dominance was therefore selected for. I think it's sufficient that it remain a threat. If you see social behaviours as the result of culturally propagated norms, then it only need be the case that anti-social behaviours be possible for there to be an advantage to fierce egalitarianism. — Isaac

Again, you further seem to qualify that with something about taking into account everyone's meta-ethical positions and coming to some 'more right' meta-ethical position, but a) I've yet to establish how this actually happens, and b) even then, the sum total of everyone's meta-ethical positions is still an 'is', there's nothing to say we 'ought' to take that to be our meta-ethical position. — Isaac

But "harmful" and "bad" seem to me roughly synonyms. — Pfhorrest

That is the "notion of good" that we share, and exactly why I say to appeal to hedonic experiences as the common ground for determining what in particular is good. — Pfhorrest

This is exactly the conflation of phenomenalism with nihilism that I think underlies half of the views I'm against — Pfhorrest

To me, “externally validated” might mean physically exhibited, manifest outside the agent himself. — Mww

External validation for altruism is easy....actually helping somebody immediately validates it. — Mww

Empathy....maybe, maybe not. Being empathetic towards someone is a rational activity, so....not much external validation there. — Mww

What’s the earliest proper exposition of your altruism/empathy social drives? — Mww

DK.....(stabbing haphazardly)....direct knowledge? — Mww

So where do we go from here? — Mww

The pattern-recognition you reference has nothing to do with whether physicalism, idealism, or some other ontological system is true - or else with what types of causality (efficient, teleological, formal, material as just some examples) are true - or else with the nature of time (e.g., presentist, eternalist, or what not) - or else with what laws of thought (law of identity, of noncontradiction, of excluded middle) are true - or else with the nature of self as that which is conscious of (e.g., it being a machine or not). — javra

That we have historically established a set of metaphysical beliefs X which have been used to engage in the modern empirical sciences we have; which, in turn, have empirically evidenced themselves to be fruitful in innumerable (but by no means all) ways; does not negate the fact that today's empirical sciences are necessarily founded on metaphysical beliefs X - this in the plural. — javra

One is active, the other passive. The active one is about influencial members trying to stand out — Isaac

This means that both some kind of social dominance hierarchy and some degree of group leadership, present in all humans and in all three African great apes, can be plausibly hypothesized to have existed in the African common ancestor.
The above argument has been made at the level of behavior, but implicit in it is the notion that the African common ancestor and its four descendant species are genetically disposed to develop dominance behavior and group leadership. I have cited several theorists who suggest that dominance tendencies may be innate, and I agree with them. However, in considering genetic dispositions to hierarchical behavior, it is important to be as precise as possible about the types of behavior that are readily learned: both competitive dominance and submission are useful to individuals organized by dominance hierarchies, be they orthodox or reverse.
When a behavior is universal or even very widespread, the question arises whether it is not part of "human nature." In beginning to think in more specific terms about human nature as a potential influence on cultural behavior, we may be better off thinking about coevolved genetic predispositions that go in contradictory directions or, more specifically, about the empirically identifiable universal or widespread ambivalences these are likely to generate than about monolithic stereotypes such as "warlike" versus "peaceful" (see Boehm 1989). Given that so many locally autonomous small-scale societies exhibit egalitarian behavior, it might be useful to try an "ambivalence approach" here as well.
... In small-scale societies that exhibit very limited hierarchy, potential victims deal with their ambivalence by setting aside their individual tendencies to submit and forming a coalition to control their more assertive peers. As a result, prudent (and sometimes equally ambivalent) leaders set aside their own tendencies to dominate and submit to their groups even as they lead them. I have said that the social result of this interaction is a consensus-oriented community, a group that cooperates well and that remains small because in the absence of strong leadership it so readily subdivides. Its small size in tum tends to keep major factions from forming and stabilizing. The resulting unity of purpose makes it possible for all or most members of local communities to unite against leaders and, by threat of disapproval or active sanctioning, circumscribe their role. These would seem to be the personal and social dynamics that keep a typical egalitarian society in place. One aspect of these dynamics is an egalitarian ethos, both a cause and an effect of the ambivalences just discussed.
... In stronger chiefdoms or kingdoms a not too dissimilar underlying ambivalence may exist, but it is accompanied by a very different ethos that legitimizes ranking or class distinctions among the main political actors, substantial exercise of legitimate authority by leaders, and sometimes even physical coercion. These changes are accompanied by a decidedly submissive behavioral standard for the rank and file, which no longer assertively defines itself as "equal," and the emergence of strong leaders who properly look to their own special interests as well as to group interests.
... What is distinctive about egalitarian humans is that the rank and file manages to retain the upper hand. The overall approach to solving common problems in these groups is consensual (see Service 1975), and this approach is applied very effectively to the internal political sphere by use of moralistically based sanctioning. Perhaps a key feature in explaining egalitarian behavior is that one person's attempt to dominate another is perceived as a common problem.
... I have suggested that "egalitarian society" needs to be reconceptualized in terms of some universal causal factor and have proposed a specific behavioral explanation in terms of reverse dominance hierarchies: the main political actors idealistically define themselves as peers, and on a practical basis they make certain that their basic parity is not too seriously damaged by individual domination. This viewpoint takes human intention to be a powerful independent variable, one that interacts, obviously, with important constraints of social scale, social organization, and natural and political ecology.
Granting the serious limitations of reliable data, simple foragers, complex hunter-gatherers, people living in tribal segmentary systems, and people living in what I have called incipient chiefdoms would appear to exhibit a strong set of egalitarian values that express an active distaste for too much hierarchy and actively take steps to avoid being seriously dominated. In a sense, these societies may be considered to be intentional communities, groups of people that make up their minds about the amount of hierarchy they wish to live with and then see to it that the program is followed. So long as all of the main political actors continue to define themselves as peers and are able to make this definition stick, a reverse dominance hierarchy is maintained even though certain features of hierarchy may be present. When authority becomes strong and intergenerationally transmitted and when classification of people into hierarchical categories takes on serious meaning for their lives, the transition from reverse dominance hierarchy to orthodox dominance hierarchy is complete, even though limits to domination are still recognized and enforced.
... I have suggested that smallness of scale may be a predictable side effect of egalitarian behavior because such behavior keeps groups subdividing, while small, intensively cooperative groups remain able to unite effectively and control their leaders. In short, there could be an important functional symbiosis here that might be useful in helping to explain why human groups seem to have remained minuscule for so many millennia.

Do you think this has much influence on them? I mean, if this hypocrisy was pointed out, do you imagine it would make them uncomfortable enough to want to change, or is our capacity to invent new narratives too slippery to catch that way? — Isaac

I only have the paper citation, but have you read Sapolsky's research on baboons (Sapolsky RM, Share LJ (2004) A pacific culture among wild baboons: Its emergence and transmission)? It's quite revealing about the role of culture even in animals like baboons in maintaining social systems. — Isaac

For example, juvenile rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) housed with stumptail macaques (M. artoides) assume the latter's more conciliatory style (de Waal and Johanowicz 1993). — Sapolski

A number of investigators have emphasized how a tolerant and gregarious social setting facilitates social transmission (e.g., van Schaik et al. 1999), exactly the conditions in F93–96. — Sapolski

It seems to me that social groups have two systems for creation and maintenance of behavioural norms. One is active, the other passive. The active one is about influencial members trying to stand out, the passive one is like a game of Chinese whispers, each member simply trying to copy the other (to reinforce group identity) but making small errors in doing so. — Isaac

Nice commentary, Kid. In 1954 I wrote a short paper on this for my physics class in high school. At the time I loved reading science fiction. Of course, the technical details were beyond me, but my teacher, an elderly lady we all loved was impressed. — jgill

Really, we're innately biased (as machines, no less) to be causally deterministic? Then how is it that most people hold onto the bias of being endowed with some form and degree of free will? — javra

It doesn't answer why one set of innate biases ought to be accepted on face value while another form of communal bias ought not. — javra

But having a non-rational altruistic reaction, says nothing about the possibility, or indeed even the validity, of determining a moral action because of it. — Mww

If so, we are still left with what to do about it. — Mww

Help others may be a general rule of altruism, understand others may be the general rule of empathy, but both of those do not instantiate the rational prerogatives of the subject who merely understands the rule., but knows not, because of it, how he should act concerning it. — Mww

Still, if harsh and perhaps even unwarranted, it permits the philosopher to say to the psychologist....you’ve taken what I’ve given and made a gawd-awful mess out of it. (Kidding. Nobody really says that. Do they?) — Mww

One's presumption of causal determinism - just as with one's presumption of physicalism - will be fully metaphysical, rather than empirical. — javra

How do empirical observations of balls and such determine that our intentions - which always intend, and are driven by, some goal - are in fact not teleological (and this without the use of metaphysical considerations and conclusions)? — javra

True backward causation introduces true randomness (even if the universe was otherwise deterministic, the moment that information from the future arrives introduces a fork in the timeline, and from the perspective of someone living through that moment it’s random which timeline they “end up in”). So it seems that something that seems to approximate backward causation (ordinary prediction) would in turn introduce something that looks approximately like randomness, i.e. chaos, even if everything was technically strictly deterministic. — Pfhorrest

How is the very nature of causation a topic that is in the purview of the empirical sciences—rather than in that of the philosophical branch termed metaphysics?

To me this is a Hume 101 question. Succinctly explained, a cause is not a percept—and so cannot be empirical (as empiricism is understood in modernity). — javra

Love the film, but I don't find that it expresses or advocates any real political theme. — Maw

Are you implying that there are no longer any social groups, or that individuals belong to too many social groups such that those groups no longer matter? — Luke

Many social workers, for example, are cruel to their own children on their return from work - stressed out by a hard day 'altruistically' helping others, they lash out at their own families when they get home. What would explain this phenomena if these people just happened to be more in touch with their empathy than others? I think a better explanation is that they've joined a social group whose norms are the helping of others, but when at home they follow the very family-management norms they've just spent the whole day observing.
...
We wear different masks for different social roles.. there's nothing wrong with that, until one of the masks seems to so wildly contradicts another that we feel there's no possible unifying narrative. — Isaac

With a few notable exceptions, inequality (not meeting the needs of your fellow) is unheard of in nomadic hunter-gather tribes, but as soon as there is settlement (the ability to store surplus) we start to see the emergence of it. — Isaac

As I believe you've mentioned, most rationalisation is post hoc, we try to understand the behaviours we're inclined to do (and the objectives and affects we're inclined to feel) in terms of a narrative which attempts to unify what are, in reality, a completely disparate set of urges/feelings. I think persuasion has to be more subtle than philosophical debate ever is. It has to present an attractive alternative narrative, one which makes the undesirable behaviour stand out as incoherent. Then there's a concomitant need to present an alternative set of social norms (as behaviours, not theories) for people to feel comfortable with, and a social group whose identity is dictated by those behaviours. Only all three aspects will work, I think. Narrative, social norms, available social group identified by those norms. — Isaac

Asking that question presumes you known what is or isn’t moral, which is exactly the question at hand. Can we know that? If so, how? What does that even mean? — Pfhorrest

But, for example, when an ex-girlfriend long ago complained to me that someone she saw at work told her to smile, from that description alone I didn't understand why that was bad. I imagined myself being at work and someone telling me to smile, and I imagined that I would take it as a friendly gesture, someone trying to help cheer me up. — Pfhorrest

Your discussion here gives a good solid account of why we have a lot of "ought" intuitions, why we evolved to be eager to accept that certain things are good or certain things are bad, and so to easily agree with at least some other people when they claim that something is good or bad. But that evolutionary account doesn't establish that or why those things are good or bad, just the cause of us often thinking so. — Pfhorrest

And despite that frequent agreement in the contexts where such agreement was evolutionarily advantageous, we also have frequent disagreements, especially now (the evolutionary "now", past 6-12Ka) that we live lives so different from the ancestral environment. — Pfhorrest

Moral objectivism is only the claim that those disagreements can be rationally (small-r, not big) resolved: we can talk about why (as in reasons, not causes) one person or group thinks something is good or bad and another thinks otherwise, and work out some kind of unbiased conclusion. — Pfhorrest

The irrational insistence comes from neglecting the difference between costs a dollar and costs a dollar more. Such error follows from a cognitive neglect, the causality for which is merely a language game. — Mww

Redundant compared to....what? — Mww

And what is a moral truth? Morality is a rational enterprise, sure, but mere rationalization doesn’t necessarily give truth. If morality is qualified by its good, truth could only apply if and when a moral disposition is truly good, which is a blatant redundancy, for there is no such thing as a good that isn’t good truly. — Mww

But it certainly can’t be the case that genes are responsible for that redundancy. — Mww

it is still much more parsimonious to suggest, and indeed much more evident, that we are moral beings, than it is to suggest nothing we do matters. — Mww

As regards this inconsistent amnesiac, here we see why psychology branched from philosophy. The latter makes no room for dysfunctional impairment, while the former requires it. My philosophy tells me how I think, your psychology wants to tell me how wrong I am. Yours tries to warn me of pending mistakes, mine doesn’t warn me at all, but forces me change my thinking because of them. Difference being, of course, while. neither warnings nor experiences are always heeded, experience always carries the much more severe penalties and, even more importantly, carries the higher likelihood for change. — Mww

If we could only come to terms on how that relates to morality, we’d be off to the rodeo. — Mww

We’re never taking a description of an experience that someone had and reaching a prescriptive conclusion from it, and so not violating the is-ought gap. — Pfhorrest

The relatively wealthy walk straight past the homeless (when Sitting Bull toured with the rodeo for a time he apparently gave away his wages to the destitute in the cities - it's not that he was more saintly than the rest, just that he'd not been inculcated into ignoring them). — Isaac

Hunter-gatherer communities are notoriously lax with their children, letting them do almost anything. The one exception in most cases is that sharing is enforced. One of the ways egalitarianism is maintained is that non-egalitarian behaviours are simply never seen, and so can't be normalised, and so resist rationalising belief formation, and so are forcibly admonished, and so are never seen... — Isaac

Interestingly, slavery used to be non-racist. Slaves were taken from defeated territories, from those in debt, or just random enemies. It wasn't until Christianity made the subjugation of one's enemies less noble that a new justification was needed and so sub-human races were invented. The behaviour persisted because it was seen and copied, all that was need was a new post hoc justification to match other beliefs (formed from other behaviours elsewhere). — Isaac

We'd rather include as many people as don't present a threat. The trouble is twofold 1) we are surrounded by non-compassionate behaviours which create belief systems to justify it, and 2) there are people whose objectives are advanced by leveraging those belief systems toward some particular group. — Isaac

Eudaimonism (very primatively) says: if well-being (optimal capabilities/readiness for moral conduct), then habitualize virtues by (a) exercising them and (b) avoiding/abstaining from exercising vices; the "ought" prescribes a moral agent's readiness and not which preferences / rules / actions are or are not applicable to any given (or hypothetical) situation. In other words, what's 'hypothetical' for eudaimonists is derived from the conditional goal and not how to resolve the situational dilemma/tradeoff. — 180 Proof

True. But nothing entails such "divorcement". In fact, eusociality requires convergence - complementarity - of self & group more often than not (as you point out vis-à-vis "antisocial behavior"). — 180 Proof

"Relativism" is too arbitrary, or reactive, to be as reliable as a morality needs to be for efficacy over many circumstances and thereby for mimetic success (e.g. cultural transmission). — 180 Proof

The "naturalistic default" - my metaethical naturalism is kicking-in - implied by this mismatch of drives & environment is pluralism, or logical space to game-out heuristically many different approaches to managing this drives-environments mismatch and ranking them by their utility ranging over variably many circumstances over time; there are [some number] X ways in [some number] Y situations with [some range] Z reliabilities, and ethics - moral philosophy - reflects / speculates on the plurality of these paths rationally [inventories the universe tools] and selects the most optimal path pragmatically [assembles a toolbox for eusocially sharing a commons of scarce goods, services, opportunities]. — 180 Proof

There is, to my mind, no such thing as a "natural justification" that is not a naturalistic fallacy (and thereby an ideology). — 180 Proof

I'm afraid, KK, collapsing the is-ought distinction has left "Natural Selection" to fill your "existentialist void" (i.e. scientism-of-the-gaps). — 180 Proof

Maybe the notion of "group" is too top-down and can be reconceived as bottom-up community (ecosystem). — 180 Proof

How do you account for, or understand, the salience of Hillel the Elder's "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow"? — 180 Proof

I read the book; it’s at academia dot com from a bing title search. I dumped my write-up commenting on it, being wrong on one count and superfluous on the next. — Mww

I didn’t encounter anything in the book that relates to your half of this conversation, hence my commentary on it being superfluous with respect to the OP. Which leaves me to think you just wanted me to be exposed to modernization. So, thanks.....I guess. — Mww

We do moral things without the need to ask why, but if we do ask, we can only ask ourselves and only ourselves can answer. I grant the intrinsic circularity, always have. Like I said....blame Mother Nature. And if we do ask, is never our altruism or empathy receiving the query; we can ever only ask our reason. — Mww

If altruism and empathy were naturally selected predicated on small groups, but we no longer inhabit small groups specifically, did altruism and empathy evolve in keeping with the evolution of group size? — Mww

I reject that an individual suddenly becomes moral just because he inhabits something more than a small group. How small is small? Is a hundred people a mall group? There never were 8M people in a large group until relatively recently, so.....seems altogether arbitrary to me. — Mww

What is the frame of reference that is not violated by hypocrisy? — Mww

Conscious decision making is judgement, in which things are related to each other and a conclusion is drawn. Judgement is a facet of reason, and we make judgements every time things relate to each other. — Mww

private boolean giveToCharity(final Object situation, final float currentBankBalance, final String charityName) {
...
}