Life and Evolution by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030395896
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

7.4 Reassessing the Superiority of the Adaptive Link Account Over the Tracking Account

So far, we have tried to contextualize moral realism and the tracking account from the basic tenets of moral realism itself: its cognitivist character, its claim that evaluative language is representational, and the feature that evaluative judgments are true or false by virtue of corresponding properly with particular facts. So, the tracking account would hold that we can describe facts of the world independently of our interests and desires by virtue of which our evaluative judgments are true or false. And some of the facts that determine the truth values of our moral judgments are evolutionary. For example, the judgment “Caring for our children is correct” is true in virtue of the evolutionary fact that taking care of our children promotes our fitness. Or the judgment “Not to be reciprocal before cooperative attitudes is incorrect” is true in virtue of which not being reciprocal before cooperative attitudes does not promote our fitness.

In this sense, evolutionary facts are facts about fitness. But what kind of fitness are we talking about here? We take a multi-level selection approach a là Mayr (2002), Matthen (2003), Okasha (2006), and Martínez and Moya (2011) in which selection operates primarily on organisms since it “has direct effects on both a higher level (characteristics of [groups and] populations) and a lower level (characteristics of genetic pools)” (Martinez and Moya 2011, p. 5). This focus on the organismal level means that the fitness we are primarily considering is individual fitness. Now, altruism and other moral behaviors are usually explained through genetic or group fitness, so it could be argued that if we focus on individual fitness, the implication will be that in some scenarios acting in a non-altruistic way will be seen as morally permissible. For example, cheating in a prisoner’s dilemma scenario could increase the individual fitness of an organism if the other organisms involved are not cheating. The cheater would be free riding on the non-cheating group by getting benefits at the expense of the others. If this translates into more offspring for the cheater, then the cheater would be fitter and we would have to conclude that cheating is morally obligatory or at least morally permissible. But as Trivers’ (1971) and Axelrod’s (1981) analyses show, mechanisms could evolve to make the non-cheaters more individually fit than the cheater. The non-cheaters could evolve mechanisms to become “reciprocal altruists,” i.e., organisms that can distinguish cheaters from non-cheaters, which leads them to cooperate with other non-cheaters, but not with cheaters. This would preclude the cheaters from getting the benefits of cooperation and make the non-cheaters more fit, and therefore, make cheating morally impermissible.

But what if there are subtler cheaters, who cheat only when they realize that their cheating is not going to be discovered? This more refined cheater would be ripping the benefits of cooperation while sometimes free riding without having being discovered and, therefore, not losing future opportunities to cooperate with non-cheaters. This strategy would seem to be more adaptive than the one of the non-cheater and, therefore, not morally impermissible.

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