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TimS comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Agreed. (Nor is it written quite as clearly as it could be.) It was just the first thing that came to mind - I've been reading about Japan's current population problems. Hopefully it's adequate to convince readers that maladaptive isn't obviously equivalent to immoral, though.
For those who think that morality is the godshatter of evolution, maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral. For me, maladaptive-ness is the explanation for why certain possible moral memes (insert society-wide incest-marriage example) don't exist in recorded history, even though I should otherwise expect them to exist given my belief in moral anti-realism.
Disagree? What do you mean by this?
Edit: If I believe that morality, either descriptively or prescriptively, consists of the values imparted to humans by the evolutionary process, I have no need to adhere to the process roughly used to select these values rather than the values themselves when they are maladaptive.
If one is committed to a theory that says morality is objective (aka moral realism), one needs to point at what it is that make morality objectively true. Obvious candidates include God and the laws of physics. But those two candidates have been disproved by the empiricism (aka the scientific method).
At this point, some detritus of evolution starts to look like a good candidate for the source of morality. There isn't an Evolution Fairy who commanded the humans evolve to be moral, but evolution has created drives and preferences within us all (like hunger or desire for sex). More on this point here - the source of my reference to godshatter.
It might be that there is an optimal way of bringing these various drives into balance, and the correct choices to all moral decisions can be derived from this optimal path. As far as I can tell, those who are trying to derive morality from evo. psych endorse this position.
In short, if morality is the product of human drives created by evolution, then behavior that is maladaptive (i.e. counter to what is selected for by evolution) is by essentially correlated with immoral behavior.
That said, my summary of the position may be a bit thin, because I'm a moral anti-realist and don't believe the evo. psych -> morality story.
Ah, I see what you mean. I don't think one has to believe in objective morality as such to agree that "morality is the godshatter of evolution". Moreover, I think it's pretty key to the "godshatter" notion that our values have diverged from evolution's "value", and we now value things "for their own sake" rather than for their benefit to fitness. As such, I would say that the "godshatter" notion opposes the idea that "maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral", even if there is something of a correlation between evolutionarily-selectable adaptive ideas and morality.