Karuna

Hi,

Simon Payton,

The book by Michael Tomasello you refer to.

The same author has written a summary of his findings. In this short free access article.

It maybe helpful for people on this discussion to read it.

Maybe it might make your arguments more clear?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2018.1486605

The book you…[Read more]

I read, about it when you attack the person instead of the person’s argument.

I think it’s called argumentum ad hominem,

That’s what poor politicians do not what you do in moral philosophy.

Anyway Michael Tomasello’s life work is  evolutionary anthropology.

His book which Simon Payton is describing a natural history of human morality.

It’s…[Read more]

In summary of this discussion? pretty much sums up the frustration of modern atheists!

In my opinion

Appeal to Nature is an argument and informal fallacy where something is believed to be good because it is natural, or bad because it is unnatural.

Evolution and biology  are non-moral.

( It’s not in the same category as morals)

It’s a category mistake to equate the two.

In this current universe cooperation in humans  exist b…[Read more]

I think Simon you are using the correspondence theory of truth. In a basic way it means what you believe is true can be proven by finding out the corresponding empirical fact in the world.

For example if you think that the Pyramids are in Egypt. Then if you go there and see them then what you believe corresponds to truth.

However there are…[Read more]

You could say that It’s useful to have morality. Also we all experience morality every day. It’s one of the things which keeps societies stable. Mackie is asking an ontological question about moral facts.

In my opinion he’s not saying that there are no  human morals.

For example take the human construct of money. Say an American dollar. It…[Read more]

I read some stuff by JL Mackie, about this. The question he puts  is if moral facts do exist. That if they are real, if they exist independent of human minds? What are they like?

For example we know that gravity exists as a fact in the physical world.

Even if there were no minds the fact and properties of gravitational force would still be…[Read more]

I think what Simon Payton is saying is that each culture has forms. Like platonic forms or archetypes. There is such a thing as Spartan, and Quaker helping as a structure. Or there is such a thing as law.
Is it the form which is universal, compared to the specific content.

The relative part is the contents of the structure so Spartan laws would…[Read more]

I was thinking, if humans went through a Hunter gatherer stage and later formed complex societies. Then when they were in small groups they needed cooperation to survive.
That cooperation requires group norms like don’t kill don’t steal stuff like that.
This cooperative behaviour would actually be adaptive.
Culture would aid in the transmission of…[Read more]

Noam Chomsky on moral relativism and postmodernism