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time_and_again t1_iruz720 wrote

Reply to comment by Ma3Ke4Li3 in Patricia Churchland argues that morality is rooted in our Darwinian biology. She links morality to warm-bloodedness, which required an adaptation to care for others (originally, infants). This is the biological basis for unselfish concern, and later, moral intuitions. by Ma3Ke4Li3

Intuitively, I like the sound of this. Morality always struck me as something emergent from the framework we inhabit. My brain always goes in a sort of game-theoretical direction, where once you account for all the inputs, the moral output becomes almost a foregone conclusion... kind of. Obviously, there's a lot of fogginess in that, which itself is probably its own looping input. But I think it accounts for the apparent directionality of moral development.

It's not all that different from how the structure of plants follow certain understandable patterns that emerge from their needs and place in the biosphere.

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Ma3Ke4Li3 OP t1_irvm73h wrote

One of my favourite books in this regard is Tomasello's Natural History of Human Morality. It's a great read, and despite being by a scientist, it gives very high value to philosophers.

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