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Lumifer comments on [Link] A Darwinian Response to Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge - Less Wrong
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Err... no.
Organisms do not act according to ethical fitnessism -- you define fitnessism as whatever behaviour was picked by natural selection. Accordingly, there is no "strong argument", it's just the definition of your neologism.
No, because if you're looking backwards in time, conditions change and what used to be adaptive might be counterproductive now. And if you're looking forward in time, you have to make guesses about what will be selected for in the future and I don't know why would your guesses be correct.
It is true that “organisms do not act according to ethical fitnessism”, but that is not what I stated. What is true is that organisms tend to act according to ethical fitnessism, which is what I stated. It is true by definition. I believe that a strong argument for a moral theory is that it is being practiced more than other moral theories.
As a consequentialist it is hard to predict which actions in fact will maximize the intrinsic value and in retrospect a behaviour that might have been seen as favourable at the time can have been a huge mistake in the long run and such behaviour will not be favoured by natural selection. Natural selection might seem short-sighted but it is not.
This might be a language issue, but no, this is not true because it flips the causation.
Saying that A (organisms) tend to act according to B (ethical fitnessism) implies that B came first and is the cause of A's behaviour. This is not true in this case. Here A's behaviour came first and you just stuck a label on it which says "B".
The sentence:
does not imply any causation.
Natural selection favours certain behaviour, and ethical fitnessism is simply defined as:
Which behaviour that is is an open scientific question. There is no claim that ethical fitnessism causes organisms to perform any behaviour; natural selection is the cause.