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.
I think these considerations are a main part of the sequences, and arrive to rather different conclusions:
Most imporrtant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/
I think your view is that animals are fitness maximizers, the essay argues that the process of evolution itself is what is a fitness maximizer, animals themselves are adaptation-executers. The programmer is goal-oriented, not the program.
Another issue is (this is my own opinion, not sequences based) while evolution is clearly about the survival, or more like the spreading of genes, the term survival is too closely linked, connotationally, to the survival of the individual. This would be clearly a wrong view. You aren't a survival machine, you are a gene spreader machine. Any mutation that makes you have 100 kids before you are 20 and then die a horrible death in a fire is an adaptive mutation and spreads. Survival of the individual is merely one of the helping tools in gene-spreading and not even the biggest tools AFAIK if I look at rabbits, fecundity can matter more. What is worse than for humans sexual selection seems to play a rather big role. A lot of the traits your male ancestors got selected for can be described as "Pick Up Artist-machine". And some HG behavior is far worse. And the selective traits of your female ancestors could be described as "baby cannons". And all this does not look like something that makes a good ethic. Most importantly, survival of the individual as such is lost amongst all these considerations.
Back to sequences. I think you need to consider how stupid, inefficent and just sheer wrong-headedly engineering evolution can be:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l5/evolving_to_extinction/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/ This one seems to deal rather directly with your idea:
Then:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw/the_tragedy_of_group_selectionism/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kt/evolutions_are_stupid_but_work_anyway/
The definition of ethical fitnessism can be found in “Ethical Fitnessism. The Ethic of the Fittest Behaviour”, which is mainly in Swedish but there is an English abstract. In the abstract you find the definition:
Exactly which behaviour that is is a scientific question. Dawkins's central theorem of the extended phenotype:
... (read more)