“Most of them certainly act as though they do. Kick someone in the testicles [...]”
Getting kicked in the testicles hurts. The explanation for why it hurts invokes selection pressures, but if you already know that it hurts, any general principles of evolutionary biology are screened off and irrelevant to explaining the organism’s behavior. Likewise the other things.
“Of course people don’t always profess to caring about their own fitness. Rather many profess to be altruists.”
This is a non-sequitur. Psychological selfishness is a distinct concept from the metaphorical genetic “selfishness” of, e.g., selfish genes. Someone who spends a lot of time caring for her sick child may be behaving in a way that is psychologically altruistic, but genetically “selfish.” Likewise, someone who refrains from having children because raising children is a burden may be psychologically selfish, but genetically “altruistic.”
“So don’t expect to be able to access your actual motives through introspection.”
These “actual motives” are epiphenominal. We can say that sugar tastes good, and bodily damage feels bad, and self-deception is easy, &c., and that there are evolutionary explanations for all of these things, without positing any mysterious, unobservable secret motives.
Although at this point I suspect we are just talking past each other …
“Most of them certainly act as though they do. Kick someone in the testicles [...]”
Getting kicked in the testicles hurts. The explanation for why it hurts invokes selection pressures, but if you already know that it hurts, any general principles of evolutionary biology are screened off and irrelevant to explaining the organism’s behavior. Likewise the other things.
“Of course people don’t always profess to caring about their own fitness. Rather many profess to be altruists.”
This is a non-sequitur. Psychological selfishness is a distinct concept from the metaphorical genetic “selfishness” of, e.g., selfish genes. Someone who spends a lot of time caring for her sick child may be behaving in a way that is psychologically altruistic, but genetically “selfish.” Likewise, someone who refrains from having children because raising children is a burden may be psychologically selfish, but genetically “altruistic.”
“So don’t expect to be able to access your actual motives through introspection.”
These “actual motives” are epiphenominal. We can say that sugar tastes good, and bodily damage feels bad, and self-deception is easy, &c., and that there are evolutionary explanations for all of these things, without positing any mysterious, unobservable secret motives.
Although at this point I suspect we are just talking past each other …