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TheSurvivalMachine comments on [Link] A Darwinian Response to Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.