I intrinsically value my experience of life, and to the extent that it causes others to have life experiences that they similarly value, I find that my fitness has instrumental value. (Though I tend to value memetic fitness over genetic fitness.)
People instinctively have values that promote genetic fitness (though most don’t value genetic fitness itself). One should consider if a loss of genetic fitness reflects a loss to one of these values.
The modified quote does not Appeal to Nature (or if it does, Appealing to Nature is not always wrong). That a behavioral restriction reduces fitness is a reasonable red flag that it may be reducing the person’s actual utility, and I don’t think it is controversial that you should not do arbitrarily. The compelling reason may be that the loss of fitness has nothing to do with anything the person values, but it does promote something else that really is valued. But it is not wrong to desire an explicit reason for changing one’s behavior. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.
I think that both the modified and original quote are really a side point to the issue Phil was discussing. What might be more pertinent is that a moral system, whether it is good or not, that causes its followers to decrease their fitness, will be “punished” in that it will become less common than moral systems that promote fitness. This nicely supports the idea that we could promote a good moral system, if we identified one, if we could fix certain parameters so that morality does increase fitness.
And no, we should not dismiss an article because its author made a mistake in answering a question about it. If no one is able to address an objection to a critical part of the article, then we should consider dismissing it.
I intrinsically value my experience of life, and to the extent that it causes others to have life experiences that they similarly value, I find that my fitness has instrumental value. (Though I tend to value memetic fitness over genetic fitness.)
People instinctively have values that promote genetic fitness (though most don’t value genetic fitness itself). One should consider if a loss of genetic fitness reflects a loss to one of these values.
The modified quote does not Appeal to Nature (or if it does, Appealing to Nature is not always wrong). That a behavioral restriction reduces fitness is a reasonable red flag that it may be reducing the person’s actual utility, and I don’t think it is controversial that you should not do arbitrarily. The compelling reason may be that the loss of fitness has nothing to do with anything the person values, but it does promote something else that really is valued. But it is not wrong to desire an explicit reason for changing one’s behavior. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.
I think that both the modified and original quote are really a side point to the issue Phil was discussing. What might be more pertinent is that a moral system, whether it is good or not, that causes its followers to decrease their fitness, will be “punished” in that it will become less common than moral systems that promote fitness. This nicely supports the idea that we could promote a good moral system, if we identified one, if we could fix certain parameters so that morality does increase fitness.
And no, we should not dismiss an article because its author made a mistake in answering a question about it. If no one is able to address an objection to a critical part of the article, then we should consider dismissing it.