Valued friend,
Allow me to thank you for yet another thoughtful, considered and balanced post. I am delighted to see that our dialouge is moving in the tangible direction... it is, of course, desirable to expand ideas/idation and then move towards synthesis... how else would we be able to advance understanding?
Now that we have established the role of biology and mind... material and meta-material.... we need to act boldly and ask ourselves the devious question:
What is the critical need of morality in human society?
What function does it serve?
As we have seen throughout the world, act of goodness, social responsibility and usual avoidance of violence in a relatively normal functioning society...doesn't necessarily require a religious framework.
In Northern Europe we have so many examples of this.... primarily policy, thinking by intellectuals and then policy changes...feeding into education... creating necessary conditioning in the populace... a shared ethos and morality emerges. The feedback loop continues and we do see pushing of the envelop of rights...humnas, animals and of course Nature at large.
Now is this has to do with propserity enabling morality?
Or is it inate in the above mentioned socieities? I know it is a very steep and slippery slope..
I do believe a new terminology is needed... since, religions also rationalise their frameworks...which might appear irrational to others.
This helps to shape the discourse.... perhaps scientific vs. non-scientific could be better applied while discussing.
Now the question would be what is science and whose science to use? It cuts both ways.
As you can clearly see by going through this dialouge a framework is emerging which can answer the Core of this thread title... I am grateful for your contributions in this regard.
Regarding the role of evolutionary dynamics... we need to see data as well. Why indians who moved to the US in the 70s became Motel chain owners and other minorities living there for centuries did not? Both were not white...
Also, a painful and very dangerous question that arises here.... how genes have effect on societal achievement... such dangerous questions must be avoided because bigots hijack it to their advantage. But we are taking a detached view of things..looking from outside in..as aliens!
Just a passing thought... how can humans have equal rights when moral frameworks change from society to society... continent to continent... for example why the richest regions in ME have a different morality than say Greece? So, does the prosperity thypothesis stand?
Dazzle us, please!
SPF
Thankfully, you have woven into your response the issues I wished to raise in this post.
I view morality as an innate sense that gets shaped by individual selection into a set of actionable values. Values and ethics are the practical manifestations that are shaped by group selection as a
modus vivendi to ensure that things keep moving along.
I must admit that although I am a Humanist, my views on the subject are evolving. One of the strongest claims that religion makes is that it provides a moral substrate. Unlike its claims in other areas, this is not as easily refutable. The reason for that I think is because not every individual or society undergoes the same processes and experiences, and there are certain situations that may render the possibility of moral evolution independent of religion nearly impossible.
And this is where things start to get really thick. At this point, let me abandon all that I have read about how evolution and morality work and fly blind, so to speak. I think this is necessary because breaking down the claims that religion makes requires some amount of mental gymnastics - it is unavoidable. But the clarity arising out of that makes the process worthwhile.
Let us examine the claim that religion begets morals, and that these morals evolve into actionable values. For a moment let us disregard that which is innate to us. Let us focus, instead, on the notion that science is value-neutral. Let challenge that claim with a thought experiment. Focus for a moment on the aspect of measurable/empirical evidence. It is intrinsic to the scientific method. My contention is, why is this not a specific value arising from a general sense if morality? How are we to assume that this aspect of the scientific method is a given? One can argue that without it, the method would fall apart. But I argue back that it is irrelevant. We
could have shaped up to disregard empirical evidence. We did not. And several people do disregard it. I fail to see as to why something based on our subjective sense of "ought" is treated as an objective "is"? You are insightful enough to get the drift of where things go from here.
The confusion arises because this scientific values do not treat things in simplistic terms of "good" and "evil". And yet, whatever process has guided the evolution of what we conventionally understand as morality has also guided the evolution of scientific values, be it consensus achieved through a process of elimination/trial and error, or simply being dropped from the heavens.
The distinction between the scientific values and morals is based on a false normative/descriptive divide that simply does not exist in this case.
So what does this mean for whatever a society can evolve morals independent of religion? The definitive treatise on the scientific method is laid out in
Novum Organum Scientiarum. However, Charaka and Ibn al-Haytham had arrived at similar conclusions earlier. It is instructive to study as to what extent their work was influenced by religion. And also that of Sushruta, Panini, Aryabhatta, Avicenna, Rhazes, al-Sufi, Al-Baruni, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. I know that Charaka and Newton were deeply religious - but it is an open question as to whether the Enlightenment and the Golden Age of Islam were
due to or despite religion. My views on this are evolving, I am yet to read all that is required to arrive at a conclusion.
Regardless of how that pans out, we can still move forward. Even assuming that all my subsequent reading shows that whatever we credit to science today owes a debt of gratitude to religion, it neither establishes that their method could not be discovered without any theological reference whatsoever, nor does it disallow the proposition that the process of evolution makes it tenable to leave religion behind in our forward journey. The process my be painful, but it is a price worth paying, because the cognitive dissonance that religious belief generates (indicates?) is best jettisoned for our moral progress.
Is Northern Europe homogeneous enough to derive specific conclusions from? Until recently, the Swedes were homogeneous enough. This homogeneity allowed norms to evolve through a process of discussion and consensus - something that is difficult for heterogenous groups to achieve smoothly. In fact, the ongoing situation with migration must be making this point clearer than ever before. As for whether economic prosperity has shaped this outcome, that is an area where we see heterogeneity - I am sure that the Baltics will offer a different history and present than Sweden. For that matter, even Finland was relatively under-developed until recently. So maybe it is a more complex example than it seems at first look.
Which leaves us with your very relevant questions about framework, genetic contribution and moral relativism. I think the point you mentioned about whether our norms are evolving along with economic development can be looked at as part of the framework question. At least so it seems right now. Definitely not to be sidelined though. I stop here for now and will continue in my next post. These issues require a lot of thought and I must break my sessions for want of time and attention.
