So why did you bring in the example of the predator?
The example of the predator and the quarry illustrates the nature and origin of self-interest and of conflict between incompatible moral values. Above all, it illustrates the indexicality of ethics.
Well, you can [certainly] get a more widely practiced morality out of defining mugging as moral...but the cost is defining mugging as moral
We are certainly not defining mugging as moral. The idea is not to make your morals as practised as possible, but to make morals realistic, adapted and possible to practice. Ethical fitnessism is well practiced and gives guidance in all situations. Hedonistic utilitarianism, for instance, suffers greatly from being practically impossible to practice.
And other animals?
Since humans share behavioural genes with other animals they are also taken into consideration in fitnessist contractarianism, unlike the case in traditional contractarianism.
The issue of “ethics per se” is by no means especially complicated nor unimportant. There flourishes a common misunderstanding that the function of ethics is to make people behave better, that ethics serves a purpose. On the contrary, the case is that ethics gives you the meaning of ‘better’. Ethics gives the purpose. When you have worked out what the purpose is, and what better means, you can work out how you want people to behave. This distinction is crucial because many people never seem to have actually understood the normative ethical problem. How ought I to behave? How ought I to behave when I am all alone? How ought I to behave if I so am the last human alive? Not “What may I do?”, but what ought I to do? Instead they think that ethics only is concerned with which rules society should enforce and which moral indoctrination people should be subjected to. This reconnects to Sam Harris and his Moral Landscape Challenge. Harris does not see the intrinsic, only the instrumental. But please, everything is not the decision method; the rightness criterion is also to be considered. In this discussion thread contributors seem to take ethics in itself for granted and to be focused on the social and universalizable function of ethics. But please, hold your horses! How did we just get passed the first and central problem? Not only Sam Harris writes as if ethics per se is to be neglected and by-passed.
The example of the predator and the quarry illustrates the nature and origin of self-interest and of conflict between incompatible moral values. Above all, it illustrates the indexicality of ethics
The indexicality of ethics isnt an ucontentious fact: rather, its a contentious implication of fitnessism, which is itself contentious. Indeed, some would reject fitnessism over the indexicality issue.
We are certainly not defining mugging as moral.
Although it is fitness-enhancing enough...
...The idea is not to make your morals as practised as possible, but
I noticed that there has been some earlier discussion about Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge here at LW. As a writer on the Swedish politico-philosophical blog The Inverted Fable of Reality, I would like to share a response to the challenge, written by our main contributor, which I believe is interesting to read even if you are not familiar with The Moral Landscape or its content. See this link for the response and a short explanation of the challenge.
The response takes a different approach to most responses to the challenge. It is divided into four parts and starts by asking which ethic is most compatible with science and reality and finally tries to answer this question.