But is entropification a real regularity, or is it just a function of the way that human beings interpret the properties of a given object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I wouldn't get too hung up on what entropy "actually is". Like the notions of force or energy before it, the more we can construct a useful system of measuring reality, the further away from any concrete notion of reality we are going to get. In modelling, our analytic signs of reality replace the reality we thought we believed in - our synthetic intuitions due to psychological "direct experience".

So you either go with Kant and Peirce here, or you don't. And entropy thinking is way of conceiving of reality that is demonstrably more general or abstracted, less particular and concrete, than what it replaces. In the end, we only know that it pragmatically works.

Another explanation (from Google's define:behaviour) includes "the way in which a machine or natural phenomenon works or functions.". — Michael

So you are denying that the primary definition is about intentional action within a social context context?

The fact that you complain when I use psychological-sounding concepts, then use them yourself without even admitting that is what you are doing, shows you really aren't willing to think this through.

Get back to me when you can account for physical events without talking about the forces that particles feel, or the laws they obey. Demonstrate that there is a fully un-psychological language available to us.

"Behave" isn't a psychological term, so I don't understand this. — Michael

Not sure where you get your definitions from. :)

behave
bɪˈheɪv/Submit
verb

1. act or conduct oneself in a specified way, especially towards others.
"he always behaved like a gentleman"
synonyms: conduct oneself, act, acquit oneself, bear oneself, carry oneself; More

2. conduct oneself in accordance with the accepted norms of a society or group.
"‘Just behave, Tom,’ he said"
synonyms: act correctly, act properly, conduct oneself well, act in a polite way, show good manners, mind one's manners, mind one's Ps and Qs;

And once again I have to explain to you how I am a moral anti-realist. There is no "Good", there are only goods spread out across a population and abstracted as a "Good" in virtue of the basic triad. — darthbarracuda

Yet you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" in claiming that because pleasure is what is, then pleasure is an ought.

And so ethics involves the systematic distribution of care across a population. — darthbarracuda

As I keep saying.

Apo said he recognized pleasure as a mug of beer - but this is a shallow misrepresentation of what pleasure is. — darthbarracuda

Or a sarcastic one.

So like I said, the only thing that makes chocolate and sugar a long-time bad habit is that it will diminish the welfare of the individual. That is invariably what ethics is about: person welfare. Any other conception leads the train off the rails. — darthbarracuda

And so you continue to agree with what you claim to disagree with.

Ethics is about the flourishing of the social group. It is about caring about others in ways that creates reciprocal benefits. And that is a tricky balancing act because - as game theory can spell out mathematically - the "right balance" has to involve the possibility of selfishness too.

We can care about the suffering of others, but then reality has to come into play - rational principles like proximity which you so strenuously want to deny.

It makes more sense for me to care about my immediate family, my immediate community, than to worry about the fate of those so distant as not to have any reciprocal consequences. My starving or sick child has to matter more than some random starving or sick child in Syria or Somalia. So I might give a little money to the Red Cross, but would sell my house to save my child.

So on the one hand, you accept that ethics is about enlightened self-interest - the mutuality and reciprocality that is the definition of social organisation. But on the other, you transmute these rational goods - the secrets of successful organisation - into transcendent goods.

You talk dualistically about biologically-evolved feelings, such as pleasure, pain and empathy, as if they were Platonic abstracta. You treat the qualia as things in themselves - ineffable properties of sentience - rather than biological signals with pragmatic meaning. And in doing this, you ignore all the spatiotemporal complexity of the real world in which social organisation must operate to instead impose a scaleless notion of suffering that floats Platonically above the world we have to describe.

You just ignore proximity arguments, or any kind of complexity really. And you claim to be a moral anti-realist and yet you claim transcendental reality for suffering. Are you starting to see how it doesn't add up?

A physical law is just a proposed description of how things have behaved (and presumably will continue to behave). — Michael

So why do inanimate things now "behave". Why do you find yourself continually using psychological terms to describe what you appear to believe are non-psychological causes? When do we get down to your bare naked description of physical causality in such a way we are explaining and not just "describing by psychic analogies we believe to be fundamentally wrong/fundamentally question-begging"?

Well it would be quite odd to think of entropy as an intentional act. It seems like the opposite of intentional to me, what happens when intention doesn't intervene. — Metaphysician Undercover

My argument is that all regularity is the product of constraints. So for entropification to "keep happening" there has to be a global prevailing state of constraint.

Now you are picking up on the connotation that intentionality must go with having a choice. You can intend to do one thing and not another. And of course, the Universe in general - in making entropification its general rule or intention - seems to lack this choice-making. It doesn't permit alternatives. And yet that the Universe is organised the way it is must be some kind of choice.

We can imagine that it might have different rules. But then by the same token, if it was in fact free to explore all possible options, we would also it expect to arrive at the optimal choice, the optimal balance, simply by natural selection. Whatever works best - in terms of "being a cosmos" - would be what would have to triumph in the long run.

So given a naturalistic point of view, the Universe is intentional in having made a rather definite choice during its early developmental history. This is what works.

It is not of course a conscious choice. But then consciousness is one of those words we bandy about without any naturalistic definition and so isn't of much help in talking about the natural world.

It's not that it acts a certain way because it is the law. It's just that it acts a certain way. It's not a matter of intention or purpose or any other conscious drive. A ball on hill will roll down it. Opposite charges attract. And so on. — Michael

You're smart enough to know how weak that is.

You object to my imputing intention or purpose to a physically simple level of being. And yet you happily use the notion of "lawful" without apparent definitional discomfort. Then when challenged on this, you change tack to say, well, things "just act in certain ways" - when the point of even invoking laws is that things are found to act in fundamentally general ways.

So the normal language of physicalism is far more question-begging than the jargon of systems science.

It is associated with eco-philosophy in my mind, which I suppose fits fairly well with your systems approach. — unenlightened

Yep. Ecological thinking is systems science central. It is synonymous really.

Except that it doesn't. Quite apart from encouraging potentiallty damaging co-dependency even to the point of deviancy (sado-masochism, for example) reciprocity is not a desirable feature in most relationships. A teacher doesn't wish to be taught by his pupils, a parent doesn't seek discipline from offspring, a policeman doesn't wish to be arrested, a soldier certainly does not expect to be killed. — Barry Etheridge

The advantage of it being a basic precept is that it can then be developed in more particular fashion. So are your examples all revealing further natural features?

What I would pick out is that they go to the naturalness of developed hierarchies. The balancing of the twin imperatives of competition and cooperation has to be achieved by one becoming dominant in scale, the other submissive, in an organised society.

S+M is a twisted play on that hierarchical social relation. Perhaps it is actually immoral or unnatural when taken to a damaging extreme.

Teaching is naturally organised in hierarchical fashion. One has the wisdom to impart, the other has the need to learn. Same with parents and kids. Or police and crooks.

As to soldiers, I think it is the generals that don't expect to be killed. But soldiers certainly expect the other side to fight.

Well dung is good for dung beetles and rose growers, affection is good for humans. — unenlightened

So the relating is the relating which promotes growth or flourishing?

It's just something that happens given the laws of physics. — Michael

What could be more question begging than saying the material world acts a certain way because it is the law?

When you follow the story of thermodynamics through to the level of complexity represented by a social system, you can see that its fundamental dissipative dynamic can best be described in terms of competition and cooperation. And thus you can see why a basic moral precept, like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", makes natural sense. It encodes a natural organising balance.

It is easy to see what proximity relates. So what does the good relate?

I'm just not sure how understanding natural propensities relates to normative rules of behaviour. Surely the former is only relevant if it helps us determine how best to achieve some desired end? It certainly can't tell us which desired ends are good, can it? — Michael

If the most general propensity of nature is to entopify, then we can consciously consider our moral precepts in that light.

If your notion of "the good" has to be then modified to get passed its traditional transcendent presumptions, or even completely abandoned as a useful term, then great.

I think "purpose" is the wrong word to use here. It suggests intention, which nature doesn't have (unless you count us wanting things as nature having intentions, or unless you're arguing for panpsychism). — Michael

Natural philosophy is about taking finality seriously, but in ways that are suitably deflationary.

So finality is seen in nested hierarchical fashion as {propensities {functions {purposes}}}. Or to use systems jargon, {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

Things with brains thus can have purposes, conscious intentions, teleological plans. But at the other end of the spectrum, even the physico-chemical realm has propensities or teleomatic tendencies.

And no, this leads not to pan-psychism but to pan-semiosis. It is a claim about a material world organised by the "immateriality" of a system of signs.

You are taking empirical observation of what "is" and saying this is what we "should" be aiming for. — schopenhauer1

Or rather I am saying there is what is. And it has its reasons. And that frames our choices. We can either go with nature's flow or - for some reason - decide to swim against its tide.

So the difference consists in actually knowing the purposes of nature and thus being able to make some conscious choice.

Although why you would want to live your life in a way that is naturally dysfunctional is a mystery to me.

I guess to clarify what I was trying to say is that humans are not fixed instinctually to follow any balance. — schopenhauer1

This is simply to ignore the science to the contrary.

Your ethical assumptions.. "Me like survival...survival good.." "I learn good ways for survival...this one-issue policy to stop global warming" "we follow that..everyone good".. "me ethical prophet intuiting what is good" "me Tarzan :)" — schopenhauer1

Isn't this rather specieist if not racist? Or maybe you think it's witty?

Here's the naturalistic fallacy again — schopenhauer1

You remain confused about this. It is Darth who is advancing the naturalistic fallacy here in suggesting that pleasure, pain and empathy are natural properties the good (and bad).

In philosophical ethics, the term "naturalistic fallacy" was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.[1] Moore argues it would be fallacious to explain that which is good reductively in terms of natural properties such as "pleasant" or "desirable".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Of course Moore wanted to argue for some ineffable notion of the good. And so he was wrongly focused on a particular kind of metaphysical notion of what even "is". His argument was against qualia - pleasure, pain and empathy regarded as objects of experience.

My naturalism is physicalist (with its semiotic twist) and so it has quite a different metaphysical basis.

For me, what "is" is material. And what "ought" is thus some empirical observation about the necessities of material self-organisation. I am not a closet dualist like Darth and so the "ought" part only needs to have the ontological status of historical inevitability.

I don't claim a transcendentally absolute existence for "the good". Therefore I don't have to justify a strong distinction between is and ought. They become merely the same system observed over different spatiotemporal scales.

In the short-term, everything is what it is, even if it is disorganised and chaotic. In the long-term, what that everything is, is then what it "ought" to be in the sense that by definition it must have struck on the fruitful balance that enables its own long-term persistence.

So do you see the difference yet?

If you presume a metaphysics based on substantial existence with external causes (like a world of material action ruled by some transcendent principle), then is~ought is automatically a naturalistic fallacy. It simply restates the assumption that the rightful cause of a material action - its finality - comes from "outside" the world. By ontic definition, it doesn't come immanently from within.

But my metaphysics is a process ontology based on immanent causality. Finality must arise within the system - to the degree that any final cause exists. That is why I keep pointing you at the laws of thermodynamics. That is what finality looks like in the real material world to the best of our scientific knowledge.

And so now - by definition - there is no problem with ought arising as the historical inevitability that is immanent self-organisation. It can't be a natural fallacy as the oughtness is built in, not hived off as some mysterious further transcendental principle - the desires of a creating god or the abstract objects of a Platonic realm.

Once self-awareness becomes involved, we no longer "have" to do anything, whether that be re-introducing restraint or moving towards a "better" balance... These all become hypothetical imperatives.. prescriptions for this or that lifestyle, but none of them are justified in and of themselves, only suggestions for living this or that lifestyle. — schopenhauer1

Unfortunately you give humans too much credit for self aware insight.

No one would get morbidly obese or a hopeless alcoholic if they could freely make well-informed choices. Most folk in fact struggle to help themselves - fight their evolved urges. And then our societies build in those bad choices for some reason - selling sugar by the bag, alcohol on every street corner.

So that is why we need morality that works. We have a real problem in being natural creatures in a world where we have got good at removing natural constraints.

And you are not going to fix that problem with a faulty philosophical model of morality.

what's pleasurable isn't always good and what's good isn't always pleasurable. — aporiap

Well put. The "good" is never going to be found so simply in personal feelings. Otherwise chocolate and beer would be the highest good. :)

I do like this idea of innate, universal intuitions being the guiding force for an ethical theory. But I think there are moral intuitions distinct from our pleasure/pain judgements. — aporiap

It makes sense that we are biologically evolved to value the world in ways that work. And pleasure, pain and empathy are all biologically evolved "intuitions" in that regard.

But the example of chocolate and sugar illustrates the fact that moral judgements have to be complex. What's good in the short-term as instant gratification of an impulse may be very bad as a long-term habit.

And humans bring on this particular moral dilemma for themselves. It is because we are smart enough to refine food that we can produce all the sugar and alcohol we like. The "intuitive" responses we might have due to a lengthy evolutionary history become mal-adaptive after we have removed the constraints on our ability to satisfy our urges.

If we were thinking morally, we would have to identify then what is actually "the good" that nature had in mind originally, and how we can then re-introduce the constraints so as to arrive back at that "better" balance.

So as you say, what is pleasurable ain't always reliably good. And it becomes a cruel kind of empathy to share your sugar and alcohol with your children or pets.

But we can - by taking this naturalistic approach - start to see how "the good" was defined for us through historical evolutionary forces. Pleasure, pain and empathy all existed as intuitive evaluations of something. And that something is mostly the obvious thing of meeting the goals of life - ie: to grow, to reproduce, to flourish.

Yep. You want to believe what you believe and being asked to substantiate your claims becomes an inconvenience.

Again there is a difference between saying morality just is social organisation that works and taking the stance that morality is somehow optional or a free choice.

Not my problem if you can't understand the argument.

You are still talking right past my naturalistic approach.

History is full of events being diverted by contingencies.. — schopenhauer1

And yet the domestication of the planet, the curve of fossil fuel exploitation, and the overall human population, ride right over all that.

You are telling me that the forest is made up of many trees. I can only nod and say yes, while reminding that you are avoiding the point.

To you, the survival of present relationships in nature "feels" right, — TheWillowOfDarkness

It "feels right" because rational/empirical investigation supports that. So the feeling of which you speak is called a reasoned belief - a demonstrable constraint on uncertainty.

By definition what survives the test of time, survives. It's not a measure of who can survive. Many others could have survived, if only people had acted differently. — TheWillowOfDarkness

As usual you give the impression of typing without thinking.

If it can make a difference that people acted differently, then there was something they were doing wrong.

And what I am doing is focusing on what "doing right" actually looks like. I'm asking the question of what generic principles can we identify that would be useful in redesigning our current moral codes so as to consciously achieve the future outcomes we might prefer.

It still amounts to admitting what I said has truth to it- varieties can become the dominant, even if it starts out small/unpopular. — schopenhauer1

I hardly need to admit what I already say is basic to my position.

Of course, the further notions of hierarchical constraint and propensity are then also basic - indeed more so, in explaining why the small/unpopular must exist, even merely as a fluctuation.

Now, you are just asserting the opposite what you admitted to briefly above- that local variants can eventually BECOME the general trend. — schopenhauer1

Do you not yet understand the difference between the possible and the likely?

So, rather it is the other way around.. even if one person does not have a kid when they could have, one instance of harm is prevented. — schopenhauer1

And I've nothing against this as a rational judgement. Indeed, it seems to me a responsibility to think of whether the world is going to be a good enough place before you do in fact bring children into it these days.

If enough people were collectively making a rational assessment of the state of the world and acting by refusing to breed, then it would quite fast become a political issue. Governments would have to react with policy changes that started to deal with the realistic fears potential parents might have.

But to claim that life is generally "too much suffering" just by being life is - for me, for reasons I've outlined - an irrational line of thought.

What works may be what remains, but what works best is not always the path taken. Contingencies may lead to outcomes which are useful, but not maximally useful. — schopenhauer1

Yes, but over time water finds its way to the lowest level. And the contingent story of how the trickles became the river fade into history. So you are raising objections which are irrelevant.

What actually matters if we are talking about recent human history is that it has now become a far more complex situation where humans themselves are changing the evolutionary landscape. We are affecting the environment so dramatically that it does count as a general phase transition. We are kicking the eco-sphere into a new age - the anthropocene. And to the degree we are actually smart primates, we can get to shape the outcome in some self-conscious fashion.

So it is not my point that nothing is changing or that we have no say in the changes. Instead - in highlighting the thermodynamic imperative of fossil fuels - I seek to focus attention on the deep drivers. Being conscious of the game is really the only way to actually have some control of its direction.

To contextualise it to this discussion, who exactly says human life must be part of the nature which works out. Perhaps, as the anti-natalist argues, that's the part of working nature which ought to end. — TheWillowOfDarkness

So the anti-natalist suffers from the ought-isn't fallacy, Nice. :)

Fortunately my own argument is something quite different. I say it is obvious that nature has to "work out". It would be irrational to think otherwise.

And I say morality exists to encode wisdom about the nature of that working out - its generic social-level principles. Morality thus is naturally aligned with nature. By definition it is what persists as what can survive the test of time.

So moral philosophy that doesn't seek to align itself with nature in that fashion is irrational. Or would have to be argued for on the basis of some form of anti-naturalism, like the commandments of a supernatural being, or the preferences of romantic feeling.

But my point refutes what you seem to be saying in regards to the idea that new ideas of morals cannot work if it is not something in the repertoire of what worked before. — schopenhauer1

But I didn't argue that.

What I have argued is that we can expect that in a successful organism, the historical constraints will be well organised. That is, they will reflect the hierarchical structure, the proximity principle, that I have mentioned often enough now.

So the most general constraints will be the ones that are the most resistant to change. While the kinds of things which are most local or personal - like whether I have some standard rule about eating vanilla or chocolate icecream - will be the most susceptible to variation.

So you seem to only give credit to something AFTER it has become the dominant theme, but refute it when it is just starting out, thus making it a circular argument because even current trends started out somewhere. — schopenhauer1

Circularity is a standard problem in mechanical thought. But in organic thought, it gets fixed by hierarchical organisation - a systems logic of constraints and spontaneity.

So it is not a problem if a system spawns local variety while tracking global continuity. It can do both at the same time. If the local variety proves to have value, then its own influence will grow such that it becomes itself an appropriate level of generalised constraint.

But what actual novelty did you have in mind here? Veganism? Antinatalism? What?

My argument is that it is unlikely to be a winner to the degree it tries to swim against the general tide. If it is ill-designed in terms of system fundamentals, it would be given little hope of emerging as a success. So the organic view would never say something was impossible, but it can with reason say why a possibility is vanishingly unlikely.

I've already given that kind of argument against antinatalism. It is simple maths that even if 99 out of 100 couples decided to be childless, it only takes one couple - for whatever transmissible reasons - to start breeding and your antinatalism is toast. Selection acts as a filter to find what works. And what works will replace what doesn't.

So I have no problem with starting out with your "tiny experiments". Organicism take growth/entropification as fundamental. Everything else then follows with natural logic.

Thanks for repeating what I said.

It is fundamental to organicism that history only acts as a (historical) constraint and so spontaneity or degrees of freedom are required to allow actual adaptation to the future.

It is a familiar problem with Darwinism that natural selection - as understood mechanistically - can only remove variety. This is the problem that a constraints-based view of systems overcomes as it says natural variety can in fact only be constrained, not eliminated. So now the production of variety becomes a non-problem as ontically it is always going to be generated. Natural selection is always going to have variety to work on.

And it is this organic principle that I have elevated to the level of morality or models of fruitful social organisation.

Freewill, for example, is our ability to produce various arguments and various action choices due to the focusing constraints of our socialisation. Society gives us a social framework of ideas that can impinge on our rather unpredictable individual journeys through life.

We always know just where we are in regard to social norms and so can negotiate what looks to be the most fruitful personal responses in terms of that dynamical balance we have to strike between the good of the self and the good of the group (in whatever extended sense the notion of group-hood happens to be in play in our culture at a particular place and time).

So yes. In arguing for naturalism - natural philosophy, the systems perspective - I am arguing for organicism against mechanicalism, as well as for immanence against transcendence. We thus agree that history is not prescriptive - a desire to eliminate variety - but serves simply as a constraint on the continuing production of variety.

Obviously when someone says that "human suffering and animal suffering are equal" they're not claiming that the forms of suffering that animals can experience are the exact same ones as the ones humans can (or vice versa), but that one unit of suffering is intrinsically just as bad regardless of what kind of being experiences it. — zookeeper

But it is this notion of "one unit of suffering" that is in question. It relies on the creaking philosophical apparatus of mind/body dualism.

Are you seriously claiming that you thought that DC's claim that "human and animal suffering ought to be presumed to be equal" was meant in such a way that "animals don't suffer from existential dread so no they're not equal" is a valid logical counterargument? — zookeeper

As I say, what I "seriously claim" is that DB's position relies on dualism and the treatment of suffering as quantifiable qualia. So I attack his position at its ontological roots.

But that is more about how he has argued in other threads. In this thread on specieism, it is the inability of his dualism to deal with obvious psychological discontinuities between speechless animals and language using humans that has been the particular focus.

My best guess would have to be that you think prescriptive claims are inherently nonsensical, useless or something along those lines, and that's why you insist on treating them as descriptive claims. Is that right at all, or even close? — zookeeper

Has it been a secret that of course I take prescriptive claims (based on transcendent ontologies) to lack any good basis?

But at the same time - as I don't want to be misunderstood now as just a moral relativist - I have argued that naturalism supplies its own natural prescriptions. For systems to exist (for any length of time), they must be capable of persisting - dynamically reconstructing the conditions of their own being. And to do that means being ruled by some dynamical optimisation principle - like the social systems imperative of balancing local competition and global co-operation.

So naturalism is going to talk prescriptively about what has to be the case when it comes to anything even being the case. And that starts with the impossibility of even talking about morality in the absence of a social system that works well enough to last long enough for its moral organisation to be a topic worthy of mention.

Darthbarracuda. So yes, I should have said DB. :)

I don't think there is a natural warrant for it. It seems natural to us, but it is a cultural standard, ultimately grounded in Christian ethical theory. — Wayfarer

It is natural behaviour in the sense that the group benefits from all its members having equal opportunity. That maximises the group's degrees of freedom. All individuals start on the same level when it comes to being able to pursue the group's goals and so the role of historical contingencies - such as a family history of poverty or wealth - is minimised.

In other words, social democracy and its call for level playing fields makes obvious good sense even in an economic growth situation. It maximises the group potential for creativity and adaptivity.

So the rationale for Christian social behaviour is quite naturalistic - the reason it endures. It is only the claimed ontological basis that appeals to supernatural forces. And who believes in God anymore? (Not Anglicans.)

However the trick that organised religion pulled was to convince enough people that there were beliefs and powers that transcended their existing social structure. There was one God who ruled over all kings and tyrants. So getting people to act in the name of rational abstractions required religion as a stepping stone.

So yes. You can say Christian moral philosophy identified the smart way to organise human societies once they started building cities and building up trading networks. But that came out of an identification of rational social principles, not because of what God had to say about "Christian feelings".

Right - there's the rub. Humans are differentiated by 'existential dread' - which is precisely a consequence of self-awareness and the sense of separateness from nature that humans have but that animals do not. Much of what goes under the name 'philosophy' comes from the contemplation of the source of that dread - 'who am I? What is the meaning of it all?' But then, you say, that it is something that can by understood in evolutionist terms. See the sleight of hand there? — Wayfarer

Well first let's dispose of the OP. And accepting that sentience has these sharp discontinuties as well as its underlying continuities is the start of beginning a sensible conversation on "specieism".

If you now want to discuss something else - morality as the wise habits of social organisation - then what I would say about existential dread is that sensible folk accept life for what it is and get on with making the most of it in rational fashion.

If you find yourself stuck in a loop asking "who am I?", you are not listening to the natural philosophy that says you are primarily an actor within a community. There isn't really "a you" that is distinct from the pattern of relations that is your social engagements. So "you" have the best hope of finding "yourself" by looking outwards to the world you are helping to co-create rather than inwards in search of some mysterious essence - a soul or will or anything else so disconnected from reality.

What I'm saying is that your pragmatic naturalism is very good - as far as it goes. But it doesn't serve as the basis for a moral code. Given a moral code, a pragmatic approach may well be best, but that code can't necessarily be derived from or justified on the basis of naturalism. — Wayfarer

Again, as I always have to keep saying, my naturalism is constraints-based. So it already says that we will only find broad limits shaping our personal actions. Thus morality is about constructing a hierarchy of constraint that runs from the broad and inescapable necessities (we need food, shelter, etc) to the very personal (I must get rich, get smart, get contented, etc).

So the point is to be able to fix the biological constraints at the correct distance from the other constraints, such as the cultural or the personal. I have never said biology ought to dictate anything. I only say it sets the scene in a basic way. And we need to understand what "it" wants of us if we are going to be able to fix those constraints at the right distance in terms of living our lives.

This hierarchically organised approach is in sharp contrast of course to regular moral thinking which wants to tie our actions to overly concrete abstractions. Things are good and bad in a black and white fashion. But a constraints-based approach is naturalistic because it only ever talks about fostering propensities to "do the right thing" and so tolerates exceptions, either accidental or deliberate, to a reasonable degree.

This is an evolutionary logic - and one that places positive value on individual competitiveness or local degrees of freedom. So I can choose to be vegan, or a Nazi, as my personal moral choice. On a small scale, as a local experiment, it is not particular immoral in terms of even cultural norms, let alone the much more distant naturalism of our biological history. It is only as veganism or Nazism becomes an organising idea - a constraint - at a larger social or biological scale that it starts to be judged by the forces of natural selection.

So if you are going to go the natural philosophy route, it is much more Pragmatic in this fashion. It is all about constructing an appropriately organised landscape across which our behaviour adapts. Like an onion, we have to be able to place biology at its best distance from our moment to moment decision making.

Yes, that's an important part of my position. — andrewk

Great. Then we agree and it is the qualification that DC [Darthbarracuda] has been denying.

For me, and this may be just me, the domain of ethics seems to be delineated by the simple consideration that it is about making decisions that I expect to have an impact on the feelings of other beings that I believe to be sentient. — andrewk

And so if there are degrees of sentience, then there can be degrees of impact?

Why can't the good be unattainable? Why must we be able to attain the good? Why must the good be constrained to be compatible with our own limitations? — darthbarracuda

What is this "good" that you keep harking on about? I'm sure you must have a clear definition of it as you talk about it so much. But what is it in terms of the real world?

You tell me. Is the protection of the poor based on a reasoned analysis of the comparative value of individual lives? — Wayfarer

You switched your example for some reason. But I'm not seeing a problem with coming up with rational arguments for why human societies ought to protect their poor.

Your continuing objection to darthbarracuda's claim that "speciesism is wrong" seems to basically be "no, because the definition of morality is what a group considers right/wrong and currently most people don't consider speciesism wrong so you're wrong by definition". — zookeeper

In fact I said DC was wrong in claiming that human suffering and animal suffering ought to be presumed to be equal as we have good reason to believe that animals don't suffer from existential dread, for instance.

And then morality in general has no transcendent or Platonic basis. It is simply the wisdom by which human societies live. So it could only be a group thing.

And being naturalistic in that fashion, it would be no surprise if morality evolves in step with lifestyle evolution. So what we do currently, or previously, can be examined in terms of why it worked - and by definition it has worked because here we are. However we are free to make a new kind of sense of the world, as encoded by our new moral codes.

But then, the anthropological examination of what has worked does throw up general and obvious "rules" - such as the ones that establish trade-offs between competitive and cooperative behaviours in any social group.

So, what if we're in a situation where resources are seriously scarce - which collectively, I think our culture is going to inevitably face - do we let some people perish, so that others might flourish? — Wayfarer

I doubt that "we" would get the choice. And we know the answer. If things get tight, fairness doesn't have a hope.

So the best ethical response is to act in ways that reduce the chance of things getting tight. Then also to start building up resilience in our local communities.

A utilitarian might convincingly argue that the healthy will benefit a lot more, if freed from the drain of supporting the elderly or disabled. Of course we see that, rightly, as an abhorrent argument. But that is really for reasons of conscience. — Wayfarer

But is it abhorrent or is that just the way you currently look at things from a fairly privileged position?

I don't think moral philosophy has any value if it simply takes whatever current PC view of life happens to prevail and then tries to project that on "everyone" at "all times" as the categorial norm. If your morality has no reasoned justification - its simply an endorsement of what one feels - then why even bother with philosophical discussion at all. It is merely propaganda.

Probably because we are able to conceive of realities that are not. — darthbarracuda

We can easily conceive of things that don't work. I mentioned marxism and flower power as examples. So that doesn't help your case.

Looks like we're even then! — andrewk

Not really as what you wrote was self-contradicting and so made no sense to me.

You said: "The discussion was about ethical justifications for treating humans better than animals." And then "Those reasons have nothing to do with ethics."

So I'm baffled what you might mean.

Your comment: "They are simple transactional considerations," did not help explain.

Please respond with an argument — darthbarracuda

Respond to the argument already made. Don't be a dick.

You are merely asserting that the anthropological history of morality defines what morality currently is or could be in the future, thus limiting its prospects. — darthbarracuda

Or rather I show why its future prospects would be self-limited for the same reasons.

As usual, you just ignore any actual argument I make. For instance, I've said often enough that living within the solar flux vs living off a fossil fuel explosion has produced a historical disjunction in terms of "morality". So the critical question becomes, well, do we like what that results in?

Hence why I am repeatedly said before that your position is inherently affirmative - affirmative of society, affirmative of progress, affirmative of life. — darthbarracuda

I talk about how things actually are. You talk about what you wish them to be.

No, you also give emotional arguments because you have placed value upon the "natural" state, — darthbarracuda

This is getting very silly.

You have jumped the is-ought gap here by implicitly assuming a standard that these reasons uphold. — darthbarracuda

The is-ought fallacy is your hang-up, not mine.

My argument is that morality is simply an encoding of the organisation by which a social system can persist. And to pretend it is anything more high-falutin' than that is a damaging romantic delusion.