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timtyler comments on Savulescu: "Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction" - Less Wrong
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Re: "moral progress cannot fail to occur"
Moral degeneration would typically correspond to devolution - which happens in highly radioactive environments, or under frequent meteorite impacts, or other negative local environmental condittions - provided these are avoidable elsewhere.
However, we don't see very much devolution happening on this planet - which explains why I think moral progress is happening.
I am inclined to doubt that nature's values are orthogonal to your own. Nature built you, and you are part of a successful culture produced by a successful species. Nature made you and your values - you can reasonably be expected to agree on a number of things.
From the perspective of the universe at large, humans are at best an interesting anomaly. Humans, plus all domesticated animals, crops, etc, compose less than 2% of the earth's biomass. The entire biomass is a few parts per billion of the earth (maybe it's important as a surface feature, but life is still outmassed by about a million times by the oceans and a thousand times by the atmosphere). The earth itself is a few parts per million of the solar system, which is one of several billion like it in the galaxy.
All of the mass in this galaxy, and all the other galaxy, quasars, and other visible collections of matter, are outmassed five to ten times by hydrogen atoms in intergalactic space.
And all that, all baryonic matter, composes a few percent of the mass-energy of the universe.
Negative?! They're great for the bacteria that survive.
And I suspect those with "devolved" morality would feel the same way.
Sufficiently hostile environmental conditions destroy living things by causing error catastrophes / mutational meltdowns. You have to go in the opposite direction to see constructive, adaptive evolution - which is basically what I was talking about.
Most living systems can be expected to seek out those conditions. If they are powerful enough to migrate, they will mostly exist where living is practical, and mostly die out under conditions which are unfavourable.
If your environment is insufficiently hostile there will be no natural selection at all. Evolution does not have a direction. The life that survives survives the life that does not, does not. That's it. Conditions are favorable for some life and unfavorable for others. There are indeed conditions where few complex, macroscopic life forms will develop-- but that is because in those conditions it is disadvantageous to be complex or macroscopic. If you live next to an underwater steam vent you're probably the kind of thing that likes to live there and won't do well in Monaco.
Re: "Evolution does not have a direction."
My essay about that: http://originoflife.net/direction/
See also, the books "Non-Zero" and "Evolution's Arrow".
There is no reason to associate complexity with moral progress.
Sure. The evidence for moral progress is rather different - e.g. see:
"Richard Dawkins - The Shifting Moral Zeitgeist"
Wait a minute. This entire conversation begins with you conflating moral progress and directional evolution.
Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?
Then I say: what you call good biological changes other organisms would experience as negative changes and vice versa.
You throw out the thesis about evolution having a direction because life fills more and more niches and is more and more complex. If those are things that are important to you, great. But that doesn't mean any particular organism should be excited about evolution or that there is a fact of the matter about things getting better. If you have the adaptations to survive in a complex, niche-saturated environment good for your DNA! If you don't, you're dead. If you like complexity things are getting better. If you don't things are getting worse. But the 'getting better' or 'getting worse' is in your head. All that is really happening is that things are getting more complex.
And this is the point about the 'shifting moral Zeitgeist' (which is a perfectly fine turn of phrase btw, because it doesn't imply the current moral Zeitgeist is any truer than the last one). Maybe you can identify trends in how values change but that doesn't make the new values better. But since the moral Zeitgeist is defined by the moral beliefs most people hold, most people will always see moral history up to that point in time as progressive. Similarly, most young people will experience moral progress the rest of their lives as the old die out.
I think there is some kind of muddle occurring here.
I cited the material about directional evolution in response to the claim that: "Evolution does not have a direction."
It was not to do with morality, it was to do with whether evolution is directional. I thought I made that pretty clear by quoting the specific point I was responding to.
Evolution is a gigantic optimization mechanism, a fitness maximizer. It operates in a relatively benign environment that permits cumulative evolution - thus the rather obvious evolutionary arrow.
Re: "Is the relationship between biological and ethical evolution just an analogy or something more for you?"
Ethics is part of biology, so there is at least some link. Beyond that, I am not sure what sort of analogy you are suggesting. Maybe in some evil parallel universe, morality gets progressively nastier over time. However, I am more concerned with the situation in the world we observe.
The section you quoted is out of context. I was actually explaining how the idea that "moral progress cannot fail to occur" was not a logical consequence of moral evolution - because of the possibility of moral devolution. It really is possible to look back and conclude that your ancestors had better moral standards.
We have already discussed the issue of whether organisms can be expected to see history as moral progress on this thread, starting with:
"If drift were a good hypothesis, steps "forwards" (from our POV) would be about as common as steps "backwards"."
Re: "If your environment is insufficiently hostile there will be no natural selection at all."
See Malthus on resource limitation, though.