On a genealogy of morals, so to speak

A recent blog post by Massimo Pigliucci, which contained within it a Philosophical Salon piece about the dichotomy between Hobbes thinking humans essentially (in the philosophical sense!) evil vs. Rousseau thinking them essentially good, got me to thinking, especially when Massimo also had psted a Pysche piece about Wilfrid Sellars and "the myth of the given."

First, contra Hobbes, if we truly were “evil” we’d never have developed the level of cooperation to create civilizations in the first place! I’m not sure if Hobbes ever even entertained that idea, but I think it pretty well kneecaps him.

That said, I was further inspired, per the title of this piece, to riff on Nietzsche and thing of a “genealogy of morals,” or rather, whether such a thing can totally exist.

Can we make such a simplistic judgment, or one that looks to be a simplistic judgment, as well as a species-wide one, and also one that still has a whiff of the religious about it? I say no, and here’s why.

And, what I really mean on species-wide descriptors of “good” or “evil” is that …. Could that not be seen as a recursive moral form of self-reference, and thus subject to a equivalent of Gödel / Tarski issues? Good thought on a morals-focused Christian religious holiday, eh? (Massimo normally posts on Fridays, and this one fell on Good Friday.) In other words, since humans as a species, in part via and because of that cultural evolution, define what “good” and “evil” are, isn’t this a form of recursive moral self-reference?

And now, to go further.

Taking this a step further, are human definitions of morality, if self-recursive, a version of something kind of like a Euthyphro dilemma?

In other words, is something evil because a near-absolute version of humans decides it’s evil? Or does evil exist independent of human judgment?

The former version risks going beyond consequentialist theories of ethics into pure relativism. After all, torture was thought to be highly moral not too many centuries ago. And, in a further ethical quagmire, was usually supported in terms of “higher good.”

The second half of the dilemmic fork is somewhat different than in Plato’s original, at least the way I am setting things up. As a methodological naturalist, of course, I see no Platonic Ideas of “good” and “evil.” But, if moral value judgments are not part of cultural evolution, then what? Evolutionary psychology, which to date has proven itself to be sexist and other things? A better-developed version, under different title, of the evolutionary development of psychological and philosophical structures?

The reality is that, per a comment by Massimo, in we critters, biological and cultural evolution have intertwined, and both probably have some parallel to epigenetics as well. What that means is, contra Nietzsche, there IS NO “genealogy of morals,” in that sense, to be laid out. 

Speaking of, I have just received in the mail a copy of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's "Moral Skepticisms" and am looking forward to it. 

And, to go beyond moral skepticism to moral existentialism, to me, it is often better to say that, rather than either good or evil, humans simply "are."