Comment on Savulescu: "Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction"

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:39:03 GMT

I don't expect everyone to agree about morality. However, there are certainly common elements in the world's moral systems - common in ways that are not explicable by cultural common descent.

Cultural evolution is usually even more blatantly directional than DNA evolution is. One obvious trend is moral evolution is its increase in size. Caveman morality was smaller than most modern moralities.

Cultural evolution also exhibits convergent evolution - like DNA evolution does.

Most likely, like DNA evolution, it will eventually slow down - as it homes in on an deep, isolated optimum.

If there is one such optimum, and many systems eventually find it, moral realism would have a pretty good foundation. If there were many different optima with wildly-different moralities, it would not. Probably an intermediate position is most realistic - with advanced moral systems agreeing on a many things - but not everything.

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