Friday, February 15, 2019

Adaptation and Varieties of Morality

Evolutionists since Darwin have conceived Human 'Morality' to be a manifestation of 'superiority', based on the observations of more cooperative behavior than that among chimps.  So, presupposed in such a conception is that 'Morality' consists in a corrective to selfish behavior, and it ignores the plain evidence of regimented instinctual mass behavior in many 'lower' species.  An alternative concept begins with Marx's insight that tool-use is the distinctive Human characteristic, and the premise that internal organization is an adaptive strategy of the Human species.  On those bases, the scope of 'Morality' is indeed the entire species, but with no fixed structure.  In other words, the Universality of the scope of Morality is not to be confused with the Universality as a normative criterion, an error that Kant seems to make.  Accordingly, the diaspora by which the species spreads around the planet from a single location at an early phase of its history, the Individualism of the post-Medieval era, and the subsequent tendencies towards Cosmopolitanism, are each examples of 'Morality'.  So, if the standard Evolutionist concepts of the relation between 'Evolution' and 'Morality' are any indication, ideologies are as slow to assimilate the full implications of Darwin's discoveries as they have been with those of Copernicus, Galileo, etc.

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