I presume you mean evolutionary fitness - ability to attract a fertile, healthy mate, and then to breed and raise fertile, healthy offspring (or at least breed them such as to ensure they’ll be raised well)?
I’m not sure how this translates to any universal conception of good, as it’s familiar to most people. A general guide (which strains a little in unusual situations) is the golden rule, to do as you would be done by. On the contrary; since reproduction is competitive, there’s no particular evolutionary motive for universality. Polygyny is good for every male, but for each one it’s bad for every other male. Am I understanding you correctly?
I’m moreso saying that we can’t accept that happiness and suffering are the bases of any universal conception of the good, without at the same time admitting that fitness is the real basis. Happiness and suffering are evolved and instrumental, they encourage actions that increase individual fitness: avoiding injury, seeking sex and nutrients and allies. If we take as a given that other people’s happiness and suffering matter (as utilitarianism and the golden rule do), we must conclude that their fitness matters, since their happiness and suffering are merely instrumental in furthering their fitness.
I do think there’s a strong case that, on purely selfish grounds, supporting others’ fitness is beneficial to ones own fitness (polygyny destabilizes the social order as well, and an unstable society is bad for me and my offspring), but I don’t think we even need to get there. I’m not trying to justify utilitarianism, but to start there: if utility-for-all is good, then fitness-for-all must be a more fundamental good.
[Note: the first part of this post, before the double colon, was written in a heightened state.]
“While it [English utilitarianism] recognizes the fundamental character of egoism, it does not realize the fact that egoism is will to power and hence includes cruelty which, as cruelty directed toward oneself, is effective in intellectual probity, in ‘the intellectual conscience’.” (Strauss 1973 pp. 188-89.)
So it recognizes that egoism (the individual’s concern with its own suffering and pleasure) is fundamental to human affairs, yet it does not realize the fundamental fact or phenomenon of that egoism; it does not actualize the cutting tone with which that mouth continues to mould the mask. The creator, the poet among men is acutely aware at the same time of his conflict with his precursors–his both feeding off them and
What we have to determine upon, Carleas, is what makes the propagation of our species good. And indeed, we can come up with no better answer than our pleasure in our picture of those who have inscribed their names and the question marks behind those names most intriguingly into the annals of history.
The body of knowledge a philosopher or “mind” leaves behind is the blueprint or mugshot (side and cross sections, as in architecture) of the memorabilities, the mindworthies, of his actualization or breasted idea of possibility, the hope of the potential entrusted in him. This is the drying poll of grass from which he hangs, the precipice on which he stands, the flowers he finds on his plateau, where he has retired well on the outskirts. The other side, the land he sees on the depths is none other than the high standard he forces his eyes open to behold–to be able to hold those giants, if only on the horizon.
What is the survival of the race worth if it evolves into something more akin to, say, chickens (the ugly example from my previous post) than to gods? If our ideal of man no longer contrasts with his reality, if we no longer conceive that reality as at least divided between monkey and angel? A monkey cannot fall in our estimation, we always know we can expect monkey business from him; it would be unfair to him to demand any different from him, unless it be like a dog we discipline with simple conditioning. And even toward dogs we like to act mock-offended by their falling short of the image we hold dear of them.
Here is the paradox. If we could be sufficiently cruel to ourselves to see man’s actual reality, that could steel us for forcing our ideal on him, like a bed of Procustes. We would be hardened by the horror, the ugliness and boredom of that reality. Only this cycle, of forcing ourselves to be sufficiently strong, can justify that reality to us. In fact, we are not free to choose a life of comfort–not without at least having this “voluntary” discomfort, these thought experiments so uncomfortable to others.
Our task today, we philosophers, as I understand it, is to will our own power precisely by embracing the creation of weak men:
We must will that creation in order to “see man’s actual reality”. But
::
I think I was intending to say something like, “But of the essence of man’s actual reality is his idealism.” But if man’s idealism, his wishfulness, is understood as will to power, we can still divine something great even in weak men, even if they blind themselves to themselves.
However that may be, Strauss immediately continues:
“To recognize the crucial importance of cruelty is indispensable if ‘the terrible basic text homo natura’, ‘that eternal basic text’ is again to be seen, if man is to be ‘re-translated into nature’.”
Can we find the will to power even in weak men, in soft men, in wishy-washy men? This alone would suffice for us to affirm them.
Then we will want them to recur in the next cycle, even if they seek, blindly or not, to break out of the cycle.
What’s intrinsically valuable is strong men, not good times. Indeed, all strength, even that of weak men!
Hard times are simply times that are stronger than weak men. Same for hard men.
Good times are simply times adapted by strong men.
Human kind are the custodians of the Earth and the care givers for one another. Whatever times we are in (good, hard, etc.), we are failing in both those noblest aforementioned endeavors. Will to power does not exist without the will to self-control. Mankind will not master squat until he learns to master himself, man will remain the petulant monkey up to its monkey business that harms all in the long run by chasing this will to power outside of himself.
You said that utility only matters to the degree that it maximises fitness. So, happiness from being kept in a semi-comatose drug-induced high doesn’t count, I think most people would agree there.
What about happiness from excelling at chess? If you know a similar chess scene to the one I know, there are a lot of people especially at the top end who are not overly prone to reproducing, and whose time might be better spent exercising, eating well and socialising than studying openings and endgames, if that is your criteria. What about pick-up artist types whose aim is to have as much sex with attractive women as possible? Is it then better for them to stealthily remove their condom (if they wear one at all) mid-coitus? Lifestyle “bad habits” that generally only kill one after reproduction and parenting age are morally neutral?
The difficulty in extrapolating historical evolutionary success to moral value is that the end justifies the means. Evolutionary success is an amoral fact, rather than a guide to behaviour that requires any empathy - various populations with various mating strategies will have a given percentage of infidelity, dishonesty, violence and coercion woven into its history.
Stability often comes at the expense of freedom. Is there room for freedom as a good, if reproductive fitness is what counts? Wouldn’t we be better off assigned to a partner with an optimum genetic match and fertility?
If happiness and suffering are instrumental to fitness at all, they aren’t merely so. The lived experience of human life, the fulfillment and suffering therein, seems much more fundamental to my sense of morality than yesteryear’s fitness markers.
One could conceive of an environment where to be fit is to be a slave, to suffer indignities, and misfortune by design. What then is the value of fitness?
Also, evolutionary fitness is a goodenoughness for the present environment. Fitness is not optimization at all. And I should hope there is more to goodness than just whatever would lead to biological immortality and self-reproduction.
Sauwelios, your objection seems to be utilitarianism itself, simply rejecting the idea that it is happiness and suffering which form the basis of morality, and instead presenting the ‘will to power’ or some other form of individual strength as the proper basis. Is that right?
If so, whatever validity that argument has, I think it’s beside the point of my argument here. My argument here is that, given that utilitarianism is correct and we should value utility as a good, the next logical step is to look at the sources of utility, and when we do we find fitness etc. as their aim. While I think my argument does somewhat undermine utilitarianism (since it relies in part on the places where utilitarians have always nuanced around pure utility in favor of e.g. high and low pleasures etc.), I really do mean to make the case that it flows from utilitarianism itself, rather than to challenge the utilitarian premises.
I’m not sure what relation fitness and will to power have. Arguably they are the same, although above I described my conclusion as being that utilitarianism requires that we value “fitness-for-all”, and that seems incompatible with an individualistic notion like what I think you’re getting at. Maybe you have in mind a reductio argument that would require us to be Straussian individualists, even starting from utilitarianism’s premises? If so, I’d be interested to see it. It doesn’t seem obvious to me from here.
I think that’s right. But my point here is to place happiness and suffering, as subjective experiences (as well as the empathetic experience of the happiness and suffering of others) into the amoral evolutionary context. At some point in human evolutionary history, maximizing utility would be synonymous with maximizing fitness, because utility as a subjective experience evolved because it improved the fitness of our ancestors.
But now, the alignment is a bit off. We eat to much sugar, we do too many drugs, we live in a world of abundance with a subjective experience evolved for a world of scarcity. Utilitarianism takes this into account; Mill rejects hedonism because it’s the wrong kind of happiness, and modern utilitarians will refer to the discount rate to justify long-term planning over short term experience. But those asterisks are really just to bring utility back in line with its original aim, i.e. fitness.
For those purposes, I think we can remain agnostic about the situations you present. Whether chess playing is good depends on whether it’s a high or low pleasure, right? Is a pickup artist getting more pleasure than they’re causing pain to attractive women? How much value do we give to the future subjective happiness of the products of stealthing, relative to the pain incurred by an unwanted pregnancy? These are hard questions for utilitarianism, so it’s not a defeater if they’re also hard to resolve on the grounds of fitness.
Again, I’ll plead agnostic. Fitness is often a hard question. If someone is dying, preventing them from dying is going to improve their fitness, ceteris paribus. But whether freedom will improve happiness or fitness is not an easy question. I’d think (though this may owe more to my political biases than to any cogent reasoning) that the human evolutionary niche is one in which civil liberties, mutual respect, cooperation, and other liberal values are the most likely to increase the net fitness-for-all. But there are other evolutionary strategies, and certain forms of authoritarianism might be better (but then, arranged marriages seem by some metrics to be happier than freely chosen pairings).
Excellent hook.
Doesn’t this apply equality to utility, though? Or is the Brave New World a utopia, where to be a happy epsilon-minus is to be a slave, to suffer indignities and misfortune (literally) by design?
But my point here is just that in the thing utilitarians are using as the hallmark of goodness just is something that “would lead to biological immortality and self-reproduction”. It’s just that utilitarianism picks one or two of the the things, rather than everything.
No, I certainly don’t think that is simply right. So for the sake of argument, I will just say “No, that’s not right.”
I agree with this, but don’t think it goes far enough. I think there is also an even further logical step.
I don’t think the term “Straussian individualist” hits the mark. For me it’s about the species:
“What we have to determine upon, Carleas, is what makes the propagation of our species good.”
But what makes the species good, in my (“our”) view, is a choice of its individuals:
“And indeed, we can come up with no better answer than our pleasure in our picture of those who have inscribed their names and the question marks behind those names most intriguingly into the annals of history.”
Morality, the true morality, human morality, is the imposition of the ideal (εἶδος, speciēs) of man these individuals represent.
Unless such imposition is not a matter of choice. I’m Your own words, it predates such. Who can make such a distinction? Is that a question of the will? The power to will? The will to power
Is further down the line and as suxh, withstands analysis.
Sorry about that; I’m not sure what role I intended the word “simply” to play in my response, but it now reads as unnecessary at best, and condescending at worst.
I agree. I now think that talking about fitness at all was a mistake on my part, since it’s clearly been a distraction from the point I wanted to make here, which is just that utility is a demonstrably instrumental good, and that that poses problems for utilitarianism on its own terms. What utility is instrumentally achieving is besides the point.
And while fitness is easiest to show, I agree that we can go further, though I think we disagree on the next step. I read your description of true morality to still be a form of challenge to the premises of utilitarianism. My next step would be to continue in the same way, still basically accepting utility and even fitness, but looking for the more general concept of which evolutionary fitness is an instance.
I answer it only by pointing out that the question is a challenge to utilitarianism, not to my ‘ends of utility’ argument. That’s a bit of a cop-out, but I think it’s legitimate for my purposes. Utilitarianism can be criticized for leading to absurd results (like that epsilon-minuses are a net good), and anywhere that that’s the case I would expect that whatever system follows from my argument here could be criticized in the same way.
So, if you aren’t convinced by utilitarianism, you aren’t likely to find my argument convincing. But if you take utilitarianism to be true, my argument should still work because it assumes that truth of utilitarianism. And there should be some critiques of utilitarianism that are resolved in systems that follow from my argument here, e.g. that high and low pleasures is an ad hoc distinction that is better justified by fitness than utility.
I agree, but I don’t find that to be a compelling criticism. Our demand for a nervous system and consciousness in order to recognize moral worth is anthropocentric.
I didn’t feel condescended to, so no apology necessary.
Not sure what such a concept would look like, but I think that would be even worse. I can bear with utilitarianism to an extent, as I too think happiness and suffering must form the basis of morality–though I may be thinking of a different kind of happiness and suffering than utilitarians tend to. In fact, it’s by filling in–in case it’s left open–or changing–in case it’s not–the kind of happiness that I wish to correct utilitarianism.
My problem with utilitarianism is that it would be fine with man’s evolving into something non-human–devolving into something sub-human, if we dare make a value judgment. And now you seem to suggest it would, or should, even be fine with man’s changing into something inorganic (“the more general concept of which evolutionary fitness is an instance”), as long as it or its type persists (a type of stone, for instance).
Utilitarianism is not that simple and I think you add more premises with your new proposal that utilitarians can reasonably object to. I also don’t see how a case like epsilon minuses are necessarily resolved by the fitness proposal, which seems to me to broaden even more the domain of that which is “moral,” and what’s more I don’t imagine it would be very difficult for a utilitarian to argue that epsilon minuses have a lower quality of happiness - had they not been stunted by design, they would contribute to more high quality happiness. How can the fitness argument resolve the epsilon minus absurdity?
The comment was not about moral worth, but moral agency and the capacity to care at all - to have a “moral life.” What would you say is required to be a moral agent? Must moral agents be aware of themselves or their environment? Or must they merely react to stimuli?
Finally, do you argue that fitness is an intrinsic good? If not, then fitness for the sake of life, and life for the sake of what? What is it about life that justifies its continuance in any possible form?
I think this question is going to be forced in the not-too-distant future: are super-intelligent machines more morally worthy than humans? If we assume (and I think it’s a reasonable assumption) that any human quality we prize can be instantiated ‘in silico’, is it possible to create an artificial life or mind that has more moral value than a human? Or must some kind of loyalty to our genes be baked into our conception of moral worth?
This seems particularly interesting to me as we approach a time when humans may be generally less able than machines for the most important tasks. But since you mention that a moral project that produces sub-humans might be rejected, I wonder what you think of one that would value super-humans, especially when created rather than evolved.
To start, do you agree that utility in humans is instrumental, i.e. we experience it because it is useful? If not, why not? If so, do you think we can draw any conclusions from that about the role of utility in moral reasoning? My argument here is just that 1) utility is instrumental, 2) it’s instrumental to fitness, and therefore 3) fitness must supersede utility in moral reasoning (or put another way, that arguments in favor of utility are actually arguments in favor of fitness).
To your question, I think going to fitness changes, but doesn’t resolve, the epsilon-minus problem. I agree there are ways of avoiding the epsilon-minus problem for utilitarianism, although they have some problematic consequences (see Singer on the mentally disabled). Fitness admits of similar moves, and they are similarly problematic.
Isn’t this a separate question? Children are at best partial moral agents, and most animals aren’t moral agents at all, even though we have every reason to believe they are conscious and have subjective experiences of pleasure and pain. The question of who is a moral agent does not seem to track (and probably shouldn’t track) the question of what gives something moral worth. This again is as much a problem for a system centered on utility as for one centered on fitness.
No, I wouldn’t say fitness is an intrinsic good. As I suggested in my response to Sauwelios earlier, I would use a similar line to argue that fitness, like utility, is instrumental to some other end. And I don’t think that’s a problem for my position: if it’s instrumental towards something else, that other thing must be where we should look for the intrinsic good.
Only if super-human qualities can be instantiated “in silico”–that is, if it’s possible to evolve (“sursumvolve”, evolve upward) beyond the human in the essential respects. Otherwise, it would at most be possible to create an artificial life or mind that has as much moral value as a human.
Not to our genes, I think, no; to our “phenes” (appearance, shape, build), perhaps.
What do you mean by “the most important tasks”? I think the most important task is grappling with the most important questions–i.e., philosophy.
Anyway, I think what’s crucial is the value judgment that distinguishes between human and sub-human, and thereby also, potentially, between human and super-human. A moral project that would value super-humans already distinguishes between human and non-human in a way that ranks the former above the latter. A super-human being would simply be a being that’s even more human than “a human being”.
In my view, the all-important question is: What is human, in the positive sense (i.e., not in the sense of “only human” or “human, all-too-human”)?
