Intended by who?

I can see the position (though I dispute it) that it is nothing but description. I dont accept that there is inherently anything 'functional' about it - I think Vael probably made the most cogent criticism of this view.

By no one. Who intended the heart to pump blood? Same idea.

If there's nothing inherently functional about morality, then it's either useless, or a construct we've created to use for whatever purpose.

We simply don't know why survival is in itself good, but we do know that we have to eat. So we work from there...Maybe one day, we will know conclusively - why survival is good - but currently, all we can do is speculate.
An individual's morality/behaviour may at times appear to not align with the function of collective survival (the same way someone's use of sexual organs may at times appear to not align with this function). However in reality (under current environmental constraints), even somebody's choice to not reproduce is perfectly aligned with the function of survival. The reason that an individual's morality/behaviour (in the case of sexual reproduction) may appear to not align with the function of survival is because we're forgetting to take the environmental constraints into account. The key is that morality stems from the function of survival, and is glued to this function, although there are varying degrees of moral freedom available in fulfilling this function of survival, due to the need to adapt to changing environmental constraints.

Therefore, the primary thing for determining whether a person's behaviour is moral or not is their choice of behaviour under specific environmental constraints - as I mentioned earlier. If their choice of behaviour is different to behaviour that's needed to overcome the specific environmental constraints/ensure high chances of collective survival - then that behaviour is immoral. So for example, if someone chooses to not reproduce - although a seemingly immoral behaviour - they're not in fact behaving immorally if the environmental constraints call for such behaviour (i.e. overpopulation and not enough resources to go around - reproduction would increase the use of those resources and thus lower the chances of the collective surviving in the long term). If however, their morality/behaviour is misaligned with the morality/behaviour necessary to overcome the specific environmental constraints, then their behaviour is immoral.

My main point point is thus that the most moral behaviour will always be the one that increases the chances of the collective surviving in the long term (behaviour that helps overcome environmental constraints), and the most immoral behaviour will be the one that significantly inhibits those chances (behaviour that does not help overcome environmental constraints). If you have no argument against this, and you wish to continue nit picking in the semantic holes that I have left behind, then carry on, but it will not do anything to refute my overall argument.
No they're not. People who undergo sterilization are behaving morally (under the current environmental constraints - approaching overpopulation). People who practice celibacy are also behaving morally, for the same reason. Pessimistic antinatalists who advocate extinction are behaving immorally, and they usually are mentally ill (at least the ones that I have met).
Evolution has not and can not produce a form of life that does nothing but suffer horribly. You heard of dopamine? serotonin? and other 'happiness' chemicals?

Or it's something which exists independently from us which we use for a purpose.

If the claim is that morality can only be used to promote fitness then that claim is obviously false because people plainly can and do use morality in other ways.

Are you saying that you believe that survival is good in itself but you can't provide empirical evidence as to why?

I honestly don't know if you said anything in the above 3 paragraphs.

False. Evolution most certainly could produce such a life form. How could you say it's impossible?

Because good is defined by bad. Bad is defined by good. Light is defined by dark. Dark is defined by light. Happiness is defined by sadness, and sadness is defined by happiness.

For any sadness to exist, there must be some happiness.

I have all the empirical evidence I need - sex is very enjoyable for me.

I choose life not on faith that - survival is good - but on empirical evidence around me - e.g. sex is enjoyable, eating food is enjoyable etc.

It's not the same as having faith in God, if you're making some poor attempt to equate the two. We have plenty of evidence/reasons as to why existence is preferable to non-existence. None to warrant belief in a God however.

So your evidence that survival is GOOD is that sex and eating are ENJOYABLE? Is this a correct characterization of what you are saying?

I can see, taste, smell and feel food using four of my senses. Not sometimes, but always.
This is evidence that food exists.
When I taste food, it feels good, and I want more.
This is evidence that food is enjoyable.
I therefore want to eat more food in my life, and hence must live longer in order to do so.
I thus attribute more value to surviving (than dying) due to the value that comes with life - food, sex, alcohol etc.

However. When you put your faith into a God, with no consistent sensory evidence - like smell, touch, feel, hear or see - it's strictly faith, with no evidence to warrant the belief.

You make a lot of mistakes because you assume things without double checking the bible.

The Work of the Holy Spirit

5 “But now I go away to Him who sent Me, and none of you asks Me, ‘Where are You going?’ 6 But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. 7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you. 8 And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: 9 of sin, because they do not believe in Me; 10 of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; 11 of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.
12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. 14 He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. 15 All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you. John 16 (NKJV)

1) It feels good for you to do X.
2) So you want to do X as much as you can.
3) So you conclude that you living longer will allow you to do X more.
4) So you living longer leads to more X and more pleasure from X.
5) Therefore, the survival of the human species for a long time is morally good.

I spot 2 mistakes already, and it's not all because of my bias in writing that out (hint: 3 is not a given, and 5 does not follow at all).

I never claimed 5 in response to your question, so I don't know what it's doing here....

My arguments as to why behaviour that contributes to our chances of survival is moral - are all throughout this thread - and they have less to do with 1 single variable like: people's enjoyment of food; and more to do with the function of survival. Additionally I am not saying that the enjoyment of food is the only or primary reason for me, or anyone else wanting to survive - as you seem to be implying in 5).

Finally, why is 3) not a given? Are you saying that I have a higher chance of enjoying food for longer if I die? than if I attempt to survive? I'm quite positive that my chances of enjoying food for longer will be higher if I survive....unless you have some evidence of life after death to present to me?

Ah, it appears I've edited myself into not making sense. What the point was supposed to be is that sometimes, doing something that's enjoyable can shorten your life, so just doing as much X as you can lead to a shorter life and then less overall enjoyment than doing X in moderation with other things. Therefore, your goal isn't necessarily to do as much X as possible.

You sure? Let's go back to the beginning:

So, you started by claiming that whatever increased our species' survival was morally good. You were asked why survival was good. You said you didn't know, but you had evidence that survival is good in that enjoyable things help you survive.

If you just trace the argument backwards, don't you see that you are in fact claiming the 5 steps I posted?

John Ritenbaugh elaborates on this further in his article The Fruit of the Spirit when he quotes Ephesians 2:1-3 and explains:

"This reveals to us that every human being who has ever lived (except Jesus) has been enslaved to a way of thinking generated by the prince of the power of the air, Satan. Because of this, we fulfilled the desires of our flesh and mind. Indeed, because our minds had little else with which to work, we could not produce anything else! We produced the fruits of a spirit but not the Spirit of God."

I Corinthians 2:7-8 clarifies this:

But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

By using those who killed Christ as an illustration, Paul shows that everyone has been held captive to ignorance of God and His way. God's wisdom was hidden from "the rulers of this age." Had they had it, their minds would have had the material to reach a far different conclusion about what to do about Christ. They would have produced a different result.

The wisdom of God was hidden from us too until God began to lead us by His Spirit. I Corinthians 2:10-12 informs us of the change this has wrought in our lives:

But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.


Read more: http://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/fuseact...#ixzz1dyJf1EiZ

Moral relativism is the world brainwashing you to think like everyone else and be oblivious to Jesus Christ.

If Satanic thinking isn't a powerful force in the world then how did infanticide become a worldwide phenomenon? Only for Judaism and Christianity to wipe it out and then infanticide rears its ugly head again in the 20th century in the form of abortion to become as common as infanticide when for thousands of years aborting babies was a socially unacceptable practice?

And what's the argument for abortion? Pro-choice. A woman having control of her body. Well how do you know the woman is in her right mind when she makes her decision whether to have one or not? A lot of women repent of abortion.

Unfortunately it still isn't working.

On a different note--in reference to your conversation with Neue, since you are generally such an ontological slut, why are you a relativist about beauty?

Women don't own their own bodies. God already owns everything by right of creation including the human body.

Though even theists forget this when worshipping.

William McDowell, I Give Myself Away
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=...ail&FORM=VIRE3

If the flood story and the Amalekite story (among others) is true Yahweh engaged in and ordered infanticide and the killing off fetuses. So they must sometimes be moral.

The bolded is very unhelpful. I suggested that perhaps you aren't giving a moral theory (i.e. a theory about what is right and wrong), but rather explaining the origin of our moral attitudes (i.e. why we believe that something is right or wrong). You say that my suggestion is correct, but then in the very same sentence also say that evolutionary biology is providing us with better answers to moral questions (i.e. questions about what is right or wrong). Which is it? Or do you mean to be doing both?

As I said before, I think where you're going wrong is that you are either not distinguishing at all, or not distinguishing carefully between the explanation for why we have the particular moral attitudes we have and whether or not those moral attitudes are correct, and you are only reinforcing this suspicion here.

I also want to say that I admire your forthrightness in presenting your views here. Some of the posters on this forum are hesitant to put forward their views, whether because they are afraid they will be attacked or mocked, or because they are worried they will be unable to defend them, etc. It is refreshing to see you take such a bold stand, even if I think you are wrong.

This seems to be giving away the whole game for you. You say that we are "social animals," and that is why altruistic strategies and the moral beliefs they engender exist. But on the genetic model, that clearly gets the causation backwards. Rather, we are social animals because the altruistic strategies work at propagating the individual genes. If they didn't, then we wouldn't be "social animals." Thus, it would be more accurate to say (under your evolutionary moral model) that the primary moral imperative is individual survival and that strategies for collective survival are correct only insofar as they also enhance individual survival. It is the case that sometimes our individual survival is enhanced by some collective action strategies, but if individual survival (really propagation of genetic code) was not enhanced by these strategies, then presumably they would no longer be selected for.

A good example of this is in iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas. Why is it that always cooperate is not the best strategy? After all, cooperating seems to be the strategy that best promotes collective survival. The reason why this strategy fails is because a population of such "social animals" would be easily taken advantage of and then replaced by a defector mutation--even though such a mutation would presumably be harmful to the collective survival of the population as a whole.

You need to be much more careful in your logic than this. Under your assumptions it is plausible that some of our moral attitudes are the result of the evolutionary utility of altruism. However, since this utility reduces to the individual gene, we should also investigate whether there are other non-altruistic-based moral attitudes that also are of benefit to the gene. Such moral attitudes might very well conflict (although they needn't) with our altruistic moral attitudes.

I'll also point out that on the genetic model a parent sacrificing her life for that of her child does reward individual survival. Remember, I'm not supposing that evolution rewards the individual survival of a particular person, or even of a particular instantiation of a gene, but rather that of the genetic code itself (with the previous caveats about it not actually being about survival but propagation). And since the child also carries some of the genetic code of the parent, the survival of the child can be more important in propagating that genetic code than that of the parent.

You're still just denying the hypothetical...which makes me suspicious that you can't answer it. So, first, I specifically didn't provide a comparison class in my hypothetical to prevent you from assuming that I was thinking of the myself as living in society A. There is no real reason to think this, as I can (and do) compare my own society to some future society that relative to my own is more advanced, but who's survival is also less certain.

Second, if you think that I really do prefer society A as described (and you acknowledge that this preference has moral implications), then you have to give up the claim that we can describe our moral beliefs as being based on the goal of collective survival alone. Society A is explictly less successful on this goal than society B, so you'll be unable to explain why I prefer it.

Okay. I just disagree with you here. I think that the advances in medical, scientific, and technological fields (I noticed how you dropped cultural here) have made our lives much better, but I am not convinced that they've greatly enhanced the long-term survival of the human race. They have decreased the danger of, e.g. being wiped out by bubonic plague, but I'm not sure that the increased danger that comes from environmental damage, nuclear warfare, superviruses, etc. don't cancel out these improvements. I'm not saying that it our overall chances of long-term survival haven't increased, I'm just saying that I am skeptical that it has. Thus, your claim to explain my preference for the more dangerous society A because I actually think all of those things enhance survival seems pretty suspect to me. Now you would have to also explain why I think I don't actually think those things enhance survival when I actually do think so...

Also, how can you say that my preference is not immoral? I am explicitly claiming to prefer a society that has a lower collective survival probability. Doesn't that go against what you think is the ultimate basis for our morality?

Probably belief in God. This is a legitimate hypothetical, and one that I think that atheists (and theists) should think about--basically, how much should we let pragmatic factors influence what beliefs we hold? Now, of course, I don't actually think it is true that our belief or disbelief in God has the dramatic outcomes you describe here, but that doesn't prevent me from answering as if I did think so. Why is the fact that you think my hypothetical doesn't describe reality preventing you from doing the same?

The point of a hypothetical is not to align with reality, but to help us investigate our conceptual and theoretical claims. The reason they are useful for doing so is because our conceptual and theoretical claims generally have counterfactual and hypothetical implications, and hypothetical reasoning can allow us to explore whether we are willing to accept those implications or not. If we are not, then we know that there is a problem in our theory.

It's your theory. If you don't want to allow your theory to be falsified, there isn't much I can do to stop you. As I noted above, I don't actually think this is such an unreasonable hypothetical, as I don't have your great confidence that advances in these fields have enhanced the survival probability of the human race. But your prima facie confidence that our moral claims are based on enhancing collective survival seems high enough that I'm not really sure what would convince you otherwise.

Edit: in thinking about it more, describing my preference as a hypothetical is misleading. As a matter of fact, I actually do have a preference for Society A over B. That is not a hypothetical at all. If I really do have such a preference, then it doesn't matter whether Society A is real, likely, or even possible. What you need to explain is how it is possible for me to prefer something that I think has a lower collective survival probability. It seems to me that your only option is to claim that I don't actually have such a preference or that this preference doesn't impinge on my moral beliefs.

People don't have any ability to resurrect anyone. Nor do they have foreknowledge or the supernatural ability to guide other human beings through life continuously. At some point even parents have to let go of their children but God doesn't.

If you think about it God has to be in a class by Himself because He's the only one with power over life. He's the only one that can give you a new body and raise you to new life.

Is it a thing? Where does it exist? Is it like a soul? Is it a tool? If it's a tool, it has a purpose and a function. If it has a purpose and a function......

How is morality "used" in other ways? And how are those ways ultimately not about personal survival?

Even if you argue the most altruistic act e.g., self-sacrifice to save another life, it can be argued that the sacrifice was for the survival of the greater whole.

yeah or becoming pointless. thanks for the effort you put into this, but everything you just wrote is like a foreign language to me. however i try to follow your parallel to discovering abstract math objects and learning about the complexity of nature, or envision idealizing to moral axioms and 'mapping back' to the real world, i just come up with 'humans can learn about a descriptive morality'. i am unable to fathom where or how should/shouldn't come in as objective, or how they can have any meaning at all without the added notion of subjective utility (or the will of god etc.) to me the notion of mind independent values is no different than saying what humans do matters to a rock

cheers

Well I think so. I was just pointing out the false dichotomy.
Nowhere. Or the same place as other abstract objects, whichever you prefer.
Using my idiosyncratic definition of soul, it kind of is (in that it isn't spatial). But it's not qualitatively very similar, no.
This is just the same error. We use it as a tool, so we give it a function.

When a caveman kills an animal with a rock it doesn't imply the purpose of rocks is weaponry.

My first thought is that it's because I haven't thought about it enough. I enrolled in a course on the philosophy of aesthetics once but took an instant dislike to the lecturer and withdrew after a week.

My second thought is that, just because I grant objective existence to lots of classes of object, it doesn't follow that I should deny the existence of any subjective concepts.



...there was a bit here I've now editted out trying to explain why beauty is subjective, but I ended up arguing it was objective. I think my first guess might be right. I'll have to think about it.