Subject: 
            Re: [evol-psych] Beyond the naturalistic fallacy
       Date: 
            Tue, 19 Feb 2002 00:05:24 -0500
      From: 
            "Phil Roberts, Jr." 
        To: 
            John Stewart 
        CC: 
            [email protected]
 References: 
            1




John Stewart wrote:
> 
> The Naturalistic Fallacy (NF) is widely (but wrongly) accepted as
> ruling out the use of evolutionary facts to found human values and
> ethics.
> 
> The NF notes that it is impossible to derive any value or ethic from
> a set of facts alone. 

Yes, but you also want to remember that Hume's conception of
reason was not one many hold to nowadays, and which would lend itself
to a particularly prounounced version of the NF:


   Reason is the discovery of truth and falsehood.  Truth or 
   falsehood consists in the agreement or disagreement either
   to the real relations of ideas or to the real existence 
   and matter of fact.  Whatever therefore is not susceptible 
   to this agreement or disagreement, is incapable of being
   true or false, and can never be an object of our reason.
   (Treatise, Book III, Part I, Section I). 


Nowadays, values are widely presumed to lie at the heart of rationality,
if not in the ascertaining of ultimate values, at least in the 
sense that a rational being "ought" to have a coherent value
system (e.g., value means to one's ends, etc.).  Usually this
emanates from the assumption that rationality is a strategic
attribute (e.g., means/end theory).  Personally, I think that
values are intimately involved with rationality, but that
it is a holistic attribute mother nature has merely employed
to achieve a strategic end.  By holistic, I simply mean that
for me 'being rational' is simply a matter of 'being able to
"see" what is going on', with the metaphor unpacked to mean
that 'being rational' is simply a matter of 'being objective',
not only cognitively, but valuatively as well. 

> To derive a value, a set of facts must include
> at least one value, and to derive that value requires at least one
> other value, and so on, ad infinitum.
> 

Agreed.  Indeed, that was the bug in Kant's ointment, in my humble
opinion.  The Categorical Imperative isn't truly a categorical imperative
at all, but rather a hypothetical imperative entailed by the implicit premis:

   'Given that one chooses to be rational', then blah blah blah.

To hold to his imperative categorically would be madness, in that it
would require that one conform to the categorical imperative for 
no reason whatsoever.


> On this basis, the NF does not only rule out evolutionary ethics that
> are based solely on facts. It also rules out all other approaches to
> human values that are not based on at least one value that is taken
> as given (i.e. that is groundless and without ultimate justification).
> 


This is an interesting way to think about Dawkin's position, as 
maintaining that our current understanding of natural selection 
predicts that there should be at least one given value in the system,
the absolute unquestioned value one ought to attach to maximizing
one's own interests (suitably defined to include immediate kin),
and with all other values in the system amounting to little more
than the coherent instrumental valuing of means to that end.  Of
course, he is not maintaining that this is the reality, but merely
that it is the one most likely predicted by our current 
understanding of how natural selection is presumed to work if
one assumes it to be a blind mechanical process devoid of 
foresight.

[snipped]

> 
> But what of a human who rejects evolutionary values on the basis that
> they cannot be derived by facts alone?  Such an individual might
> argue that he or she is not prepared to accept evolutionary values if
> that means accepting a value that is given and without ultimate
> justification.  If the individual applies the same approach to any
> other set of values, he or she will reject them all as well. Like any
> set of values, they must be based on at least one `given'
> value.
> 
> Such an individual would be paralyzed, without values or goals to
> guide action. I have never heard of an individual who has taken the
> NF seriously enough to take it to its logical conclusion in this
> way.  To do so would be a form of mental illness, quickly ending in
> death. But this would not concern such an individual. He or she would
> not value life. 

This is basically my own theory of emotional instability.  I believe
that we as a species are becoming a little too rational (too valuatively
objective) for our own good.  This has happened because, being the 
blind arational bitch that she is, mother nature instills in all her
creatures a sense of their own importance that is RATIONALLY INORDINATE.
And, as a species (our own, for example) reaches a certain stage in its
rational/cultural/memetic development its members increasing come to
question this inordinancy, and increasing come to require REASONS for 
maintaining it 
(needs for love, acceptance, purpose, moral integrity, meaning,
achievement, etc.).  As such, from the perspective from my theory,
emotional disorder is in fact the result of becoming "paralyzed, 
without values or goals to guide action", because the most central
value of the system upon which all the other values depend 
has been seriously comprised (self-value).



Phil Roberts, Jr.

'A Divergent Theory of Emotional Instability'
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/dada/90/emostab.htm