Non-superconductivity means that moving electrons through it will result in the atoms moving unpredictably. It is a product of how electrons and atoms interact. It is less emergent than how, if they interact a different way, the atoms will not start moving unpredictably.

It's made up of non-superconductive subsystems in that if you take a little piece of it, that will be non-superconductive, but the same applies to a superconductor. You can't just take one atom and say whether or not it's superconductive. A current can't flow through one atom in a relevant sense.

Right - but there are surely also ultimate values.

Those are the ones that are expected to be resistant to change.

It can't be instrumental values all the way down.

It is not necessarily bad for a teen-age subculture if their aesthetic values (on makeup, piercing, and hair) drift. As long as they don't drift too fast so that nobody knows what to aim for.

Those are instrumental values. Nobody cares very much if those change, because they were just a means to an end in the first place.

The trouble is that there are multiple meanings of "moral values" here. There is the human instantiation, and the ideal decision agent instantiation. The ideal decision agent instantiation is used in 5. and a bit in 4. The human instantiation is used elsewhere.

Though usually these are pretty close and the approximation is useful, it can also run into trouble when you're talking specifically about things humans do that ideal decision agents don't do, and this is one of those things.

Specifically, 5. doesn't necessarily work for human values, since we're so inconsistent. People can go into isolation and just think and come out with different human values. How weird is that?!

I think the argument is interesting and partly valid. Explaining which part I like will take some explanation.

Many of our problems thinking about morality, I think, arise from a failure to make a distinction between two different things.

• Morality in daily life
• Morality as an ideal

Morality of daily life is a social convention. It serves its societal and personal (egoistically prudent) function precisely because it is a (mostly) shared convention. Almost any reasonable moral code, if common knowledge, is better than no common code.

Morality as an ideal is the morality-of-daily-life toward which moral reformers should be trying to slowly shift their societies. A wise person will interpolate their behavior between the local morality-of-daily-life and their own morality-as-an-ideal. And probably closer to the local norm than to the personal ideal.

So, with that said, I think that your Christian friend's argument is right-on wrt morality-of-daily-life. But it is inapplicable, IMHO, to morality-as-an-ideal.

ETA: I notice, after writing, that Manfred said something very similar.

Well, he could credibly make that claim if he could credibly assert that the ancestral environment was remarkably favorable for group selection.

Not group, surely: kin. He quoted you as saying: "welfare (fitness) of kin".

I would taboo and translate that use to yield something like "To make sense of rationality in an agent, one needs to accept/assume/stipulate that the agent sometimes acts with a purpose in mind. We need to understand 'purpose', in that sense, to understand rationality."

Thanks, yes. This is very clear. I can buy this.

But I think I understand this kind of purpose, identifying it as the cognitive version of something like "being instrumental to survival and reproduction". That is, it is possible for an outside observer to point to behaviors or features of a virus that are instrumental to viral survival and reproduction.

Sorry if I'm slow to be getting it, but my understanding of your view is that the sort of purpose that a bacterium has, on the one hand, and the purpose required to be a candidate for rationality, on the other, are, so to speak, different in degree but not in kind. They're the same thing, just orders of magnitude more sophisticated in the latter case (involving cognitive systems). This is the idea I want to oppose. I have tried to suggest that bacterial purposes are 'merely' teleonomic -to borrow the useful term suggested by timtyler- but that human purposes must be of a different order.

Here's one more crack at trying to motivate this, using very evidently non-scientific terms. On the one hand, I submit that you cannot make sense of a thing (human, animal, AI, whatever) as rational unless there is something that it cares about. Unless that is, there is something which matters or is important to it (this something can be as simple as survival or reproduction). You may not like to see a respectable concept like rationality consorting with such waffly notions, but there you have it. Please object to this if you think it's false.

On the other hand, nothing in nature implies that anything matters (etc) to a thing. You can show me all of the behavioural/cognitive correlates of X's mattering to a thing, or of a thing's caring about X, and provide me detailed evolutionary explanations of the behavioural correlates' presence, but these correlates simply do not add up to the thing's actually caring about X. X's being important to a thing, X's mattering, is more than a question of mere behaviour or computation. Again, if this seems false, please say.

If both hands seem false, I'd be interested to hear that, too.

At the level of a bacterium, there are second-messenger chemicals that symbolize or represent situations that are instrumental to survival and reproduction. At the level of the nematode, there are neuron firings serving as symbols. At the level of a human the symbols can be vocalizations: "I'm horny; how about you?". I don't see anything transcendently new at any stage in this progression, nor in the developmental progression that I offered as a substitute.

As soon as we start to talk about symbols and representation, I'm concerned that a whole new set of very thorny issues get introduced. I will shy away from these.

Let me try putting that in different words: "Norms are in the eye of the beholder. Natural science tries to be objective - to avoid observer effects. But that is not possible when studying rationality. It requires a different, non-reductionist and observer dependent way of looking at the subject matter." If that is what you are saying, I may come close to agreeing with you. But somehow, I don't think that is what you are saying.

"It requires a different, non-reductionist ... way of looking at the subject matter." -I can agree with you completely on this. (I do want however to resist the subjective, "observer dependent" part )

I don't think you mentioned "nobility" before. What you wrote was just:

Evolution has instilled in me the instinct of valuing the welfare (fitness) of kin at a significant fraction of the value of my own personal welfare.

which seemed to me to be a kind of claim that a utilitarian could make with equal credibility. If you're now saying that you feel noble and proud that your values come from biological instead of cultural evolution... well I've never seen that expressed anywhere else before, so I'm going to guess that most people do not have that kind of feeling.

I think this is right, except possibly for the part about no prior metaphysical meaning. The later explanation of that part didn't clarify it for me. Instead, I'll just indicate what prior meaning I find attached to the idea that "the virus replicated wrongly."

In biology, the idea that organs and behaviors and so on have functions is quite common and useful. The novice medical student can make many correct inferences about the heart by supposing that its function is to pump blood, for example. The idea preceded Darwin, but post-Darwin, we can give a proper naturalistic reduction for it. Roughly speaking, an organ's function is F iff in the ancestral environment, the organ's performance of F is what it was selected for. Various RNA features in a virus might have functions in this sense, and if so, that gives the meaning of saying that in a particular case, the viral reproduction mechanism failed to operate correctly.

That's not a moral norm. It's not even the kind of norm relating to an agent's interests, in my view. But it is a norm.

There was a pre-existing meaning of "biological function" before Darwin came around. So, a Darwinian definition of biological function was not a purely stipulative one. It succeeded only because it captured enough of the tentatively or firmly accepted notions about "biological function" to make reasonably good sense of all that.

I appreciate your efforts to spell things out. I have to say I'm getting confused, though

You started by making an argument that listed a series of stages (virus, bacterium, nematode, man) and claimed that at no stage along the way (before the last) were any kind of normative concepts applicable.

I meant to say that at no stage -including the last!- does the addition of merely naturalistic properties turn a thing into something subject to norms -something of which it is right to say it ought, for its own sake, to do this or that.

I also said that the sense of right and wrong and of purpose which biology provides is merely metaphorical. When you talk about "the illusion of teleology in nature", that's exactly what I was getting at (or so it seems to me). That is, teleology in nature is merely illusory, but the kind of teleology needed to make sense of rationality is not - it's real. Can you live with this? I think a lot of people are apt to think that illusory teleology sort of fades into the real thing with increasing physical complexity. I see the pull of this idea, but I think it's mistaken, and I hope I've at least suggested that adherents of the view have some burden to try to defend it.

Do you believe it is possible to tell a teenager what she "ought" to do?

Now that is a whole other can of worms...

At what stage in development do normative judgements become applicable.

This is a fair and a difficult question. Roughly, another individual becomes suitable for normative appraisal when and to the extent that s/he becomes a recognizably rational agent -ie, capable of thinking and acting for her/himself and contributing to society (again, very roughly). All kinds of interesting moral issues lurk here, but I don't think we have to jump to any conclusions about them.

In case I'm giving the wrong impression, I don't mean to be implying that people are bound by norms in virtue of possessing some special aura or other spookiness. I'm not giving a theory of the nature of norms - that's just too hard. All I'm saying for the moment is that if you stick to purely natural science, you won't find a place for them.