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

1 Post author: TheSurvivalMachine 20 May 2015 01:44PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 21 May 2015 12:00:40AM 1 point [-]

What is true is that organisms tend to act according to ethical fitnessism, which is what I stated. It is true by definition.

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".

Comment author: TheSurvivalMachine 21 May 2015 05:31:49AM 2 points [-]

The sentence:

What is true is that organisms tend to act according to ethical fitnessism, which is what I stated.

does not imply any causation.

Natural selection favours certain behaviour, and ethical fitnessism is simply defined as:

…the ethic whose behaviour tends to be maximized as a consequence of natural selection.

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.

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