The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce: Goodreads; his website. This is only a partial review, as I DNF'd in chapter 2 because... well, for reasons I find somewhat hard to concretise. He is an academic (wiki2) and whilst the book is not a dry academic tome it does have all the whiffling and qualifications leading to pointless digressions and obscurations you expect from academia (see-also this review). Furthermore, he doesn't actually know what morality is, which is a bit of an issue for him; even more of an issue is that he attempts to get around this bijou problemette by nibbling around at the edges8; unfortunately this leads him into pointless digressions about moral judgements, which seemed like his main interest; at least, that's how it seemed when I gave up.So I should explain why I'm bothering to review this: it is because I had thoughts that interested me while reading it, which seemed worth writing down.
Before I go on, you should read my review of The Foundations of Morality to make sure we're on the same page; and I should read it, to make sure I don't contradict myself... right, I'm back.
I see that there, I didn't commit myself to any comment on "evolution". In reviewing Reason and Morality I explictly said "those rules bind because they have "evolved" to"; by writing in that fashion - putting evolved into quotes - I meant to be ambiguous about whether they had genetically or culturally evolved. But clearly they have evolved, in that they were not simply imposed by fiat of law or god at some single time. Whether we imagine that people have some "moral organ" perhaps in analogy to a "language organ", or that it is all cultural, or some mixture, doesn't particularly bother me at the moment1. Our Author is in favour of morality having evolved3, but perhaps somewhat weirdly or so it seems to me, it doesn't seem to be a major preoccupation of the book; perhaps it is in the bits I skipped.
Let's get to the shite bits. If you read his wiki page, there's a section on "Moral error theory" (this says OA is one), which contains "the moral error theorist maintains that moral judgments are truth-evaluable assertions... but that the world doesn't contain the properties (e.g., moral goodness, evil, moral obligation) needed to render moral judgments true". It is indeed true that the physical world doesn't contain moral goodness or evil; these are meta-properties imposed on it by humans4. Just as a story doesn't exist in the real world: in the real physical world, there exist books which are leaves of paper with squiggly black marks on them grouped into "words" and "sentences" and "chapters", but none of these things physically exist, they are organisational concepts; see also [[Popper's three worlds]] if these ideas are unfamiliar to you. But OA's problem is letting this language confuse his discourse: because he doesn't know what morality is, he gets lost in discussing "moral judgements" as an attempt to get close to saying something about morality - I think - but then goes all philosophy about moral judgements presuming a moral object to judge, which of course doesn't exist, objectively7. Moral judgements are the workings of our moral sense; they are the states-of-mind of people who have considered from a moral viewpoint a given situation.
In order to confuse things further, he then discusses Moore's paradox, which is a new one on me. It may be new to you, too, so go skim it; try to avoid your revulsion at the blatant philosophical wank. So the situation is of someone saying "P; but I do not believe P". And the gloss is that this is absurd, but not contradictory, because "It can be true at a particular time both that P, and that I do not believe that P". But the problem is that the setup is someone saying "P"; not the fact-of P. And saying P (in the course of honest discourse, which this is assumed to be) is equivalent to "I believe P". Because everyone knows that stating P does not make P happen and is not ironclad evidence for P, because everyone makes mistakes; by saying P you are merely expressing your belief in P6. And so the situation is equivalent to "I believe P; but I do not believe P"; which is not a paradox, it is merely a contradiction.
From a Goodreads review: A brilliant analogy Joyce uses is with the way we see color: I see my walls as red, even though the 'redness' is actually not as much in the wall as in the way lightwaves from the wall interact with my eye. But: the redness really is in the wall: the wall has physical properties that affect the way light interacts with it9. Compare: two men indulge in homosexual relations and are seen by a third, who "sees" immorality and judges it so: where is the immorality? It isn't in the real physical world, because we enlightened people of the cold west know that homosexuality is not immoral in our culture; but we are so enlightened we know that people of other cultures may say it is in theirs5.
A niggle: Kant [says] that actions motivated by prosocial emotions cannot be considered morally admirable... I am more than happy to side with common sense against Kant on this point... In fact, I am willing to endorse the view that on occasions a per-son whose motivations derive from explicit moral calculation rather than direct sympathy is manifesting a kind of moral vice. This is weird. We have, so to speak, two sorts of "moral organ": the quick instinctive moral judgements that we use constantly without really thinking about for everyday matters and is governed by the hypothesised "moral instincts"; and a slower harder thoughtful consideration of more difficult, less common issues; this you might say is governed by our general-purpose thinking engine. Most people are inclined to go with the quick results, even in situations where they really should be using the slow; certainly, the slow should be more reliable, and give better results, whenever it is invoked honestly and carefully. Why OA should consider this "moral vice" I don't know; he provides no explanation or example.
I think that's enough.
Notes
1. Should I care? Do tell me why. OA spends some time explaining why even if we were sure morality was genetic, we shouldn't be bothered for free will type reasons, and I'm fine with that.
2. Which all turns up as a big blob by one user who does little else. I deduce either a fanboi, or the man himself. Either way, I'm going to treat it as accurate.
3. Minor aside: in the wiki article on Evolution of morality he gets barely a look in.
4. Or other moral beings.
5. Ours is better; obvs; but that's another post.
6. When discussing contingent properties of the real world.
7. Maybe he thinks morality is objective, and therefore there must exist moral objects? Probably not... actually I think that's one of my problems with the book, he presents many thoughts but rarely endorses any7a. Moral objects seem weird to me, but then I'm not a theist, so I have no source for any desired objective morality. It is obvious that different cultures have non-identical moralities - indeed different people do. We observe that all cultures contain some shared morality - mostly, do no harm - but this is because cultures that don't put that into their morality fail to thrive. I've said this before, somewhere.
7a. This is, in my view, unhelpful, at least in the area of philosophy. There are zillions of different views, and philosophers are skilled at generating new ones, much in the way that Sabine Hossenfelder criticises mathematical physicists for pointlessly inventing new "possible" particles. The need is to eliminate old wrong views by considering them carefully; to clear away the deadwood that the philosophes so love.
8. The "nibbling at the edges" issue is interetsing, in that it reminds me of Popper's theory of knowledge: Conjectures and Refutations. You acquire knowledge of a thing by guessing, then trying to see if you're wrong. Not by doing what OA does, trying to understand tiny bits of it at a time.
9. This confusion about intrinsic vs accidental properties of things has been around since the antient Greeks. Descartes (see esp footnote 4) for example was not alone in thinking that the fundamental property of matter was extension and everything else was an accident10; but we now know about mass, charge, spin and so on.
10. Gemini agrees. But rather weirdly thinks this a good thing, ffs.
Checking up on Hazlitt with Gemini
While writing this, I had a terrible fear that my fanboi adulation of Hazlitt was vulnerable to some brilliant philosophical debunking that would point out his obvious crass errors. So I Googled it, and Gemini told me, and I paste it below. I feel that Gemini has done a fair job, and am happy with the answer, because all these criticisms are stupid. I'm also moderately sure that at least one of my commentators would have been happy to jump on any flaws.
Henry Hazlitt’s moral philosophy—primarily outlined in his 1964 book The Foundations of Morality—is considered "wrong" or heavily criticized by certain philosophers and economists primarily because it reduces all ethical systems to a form of rule utilitarianism centered entirely on social cooperation. [1] (https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/03/question-to-the-non-ideal-theorists-of-justice-what-do-you-think-of-henry-hazlitt/)
Critics, including academic reviewers and rival political theorists, argue that his framework fails for several key reasons:
* Rejection of Natural Rights: Hazlitt dismisses objective natural rights or moral intuitionism, arguing that moral rules are merely utilitarian conventions hammered out over centuries to foster social utility. Critics who believe in inherent human rights argue this makes justice subordinate to collective cooperation.
* Economic Reductionism: Reviewers have chided Hazlitt (a renowned free-market economist) for tailoring his ethics to justify private property orders and classical liberal market frameworks, making morality look like an extension of abstract economics rather than an independent philosophical truth. (https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/review-foundations-of-morality)
* Overly Optimistic Harmony: Hazlitt claims that an individual's rightly-conceived long-term self-interest always neatly aligns with social cooperation. Critics argue this harmony is naive and fails to account for real-world scenarios where brutal exploitation or systemic injustice can genuinely benefit a ruling individual or group at the direct expense of others. (https://fee.org/articles/hazlitts-the-foundations-of-morality/)
* Dismissal of Metaethics: Hazlitt openly criticized modern moral philosophers for getting bogged down in linguistic and metaethical analysis, leading strict academic ethicists to view his approach as overly simplistic or evasive of deep philosophical complexities. (https://www.hazlitt.org/e-texts/morality/ch23.html)
If you would like to explore this further, let me know if you want to compare Hazlitt's view with Kant's deontology or look more closely at his defense of rule utilitarianism.
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