Can Morality be explained through Psychological Evolution?

[QED]

In the topic titled Can mutations be random? we side-tracked to the question of morality. Here 4gold stated that morality is outside the laws of physics, and therefore outside the scientific method. Goat and I disagreed citing Evolutionary Psychology and the application of Game Theory as providing satisfactory explanations for the origin of morality. To pick up the debate here I will quote 4gold's response:

To goat and QED:

I must respectfully disagree. I believe that you are confusing psychology for morality. While it is true that you can observe behavior X, measure its results, and determine whether it is destructive or not, I believe this falls under the category of sociology or psychology.

In QED's link, it states, "Game theory consequently is relevant to ethics, and it is used in moral and political philosophy in a variety of ways." I reject this premise.

The assumptions beneath this sentence are:

(1) Human behavior can be evaluated as positive or negative (a true statement)

(2) The outcome of actions is interdependent on several outside agents (true)

(3) Choices are dependent upon others' actions (true)

(4) Therefore, game theory applies to morality (false, IMO)

This assumes that good and bad can be intrinsically established within human behavior.

Suppose, as Christians do, that there are angels and demons that also influence good and bad within the world. How would this be covered by Game Theory, or psychology, or even science? Science is only able to observe those things within the physical world.

Now, let's suppose that there is a world with no angels or demons. I would still argue that Game Theory would only apply to human behavior, but not to morality.

As an example, let's take the example of bravery. Bravery is universally recognized as moral. No matter which culture, time period, religion, or geographical location, humans of all kinds have upheld bravery as moral.

Let's suppose you encounter a burning house with screams for help coming from inside. Your brain will instantaneously provide two simultaneous instincts: one is an instinct for self-preservation and the other is an instinct to help your fellow man. Without going through the thought process of weighing the two possibilities, you decide to rush into the building to help your fellow man. This decision has nearly equal potential for either positive or negative results, but either way, you will be acknowledged by your fellow peers as "doing the right thing".

This seems to overlook the potential for bravery to be recognized as a positive attribute by potential sexual partners. If our brave souls act in ways that help to preserve the family or society that supports their family then theirs will be the "blueprint" that will prevail in future generations. This is precisely why we would expect something like bravery to be universally recognized as moral... no matter which culture, time period, religion, or geographical location. This "universality" arises because the potentials and the mechanisms of evolutionary psychology that gives rise to the morals are also universal. Of course it could be confused with a mysterious, absolute code, imprinted on all men -- but in the presence of the mechanism described I think it would be a redundant explanation at best.

[QED]

I think I see what you're getting at Cathar. When I talk about the optimum strategies in "games" as being examples of "universals" this only applies in the same "game space" that all players inhabit. I guess I should have made that clear from the start. The way I put it earlier was to say "So long as the rules remain the same, there can be an optimum strategy that always delivers the best results."

If we wonder why there seems to be a universal called "good" then I would say that it's defined by the fact that we all share the same "game space" and are subject to the same rules (physical law).

[Cathar1950]

I think I see what you're getting at Cathar. When I talk about the optimum strategies in "games" as being examples of "universals" this only applies in the same "game space" that all players inhabit. I guess I should have made that clear from the start. The way I put it earlier was to say "So long as the rules remain the same, there can be an optimum strategy that always delivers the best results."

If we wonder why there seems to be a universal called "good" then I would say that it's defined by the fact that we all share the same "game space" and are subject to the same rules (physical law).

Me in Random:

That would fit well with my sorry attempt to place primacy on effect rather then cause where cause and effect are reversed in causality. The effect or the present would contain something not in the cause or the past.
Cause and effect are abstraction of what we call causality, which maybe nothing more then an event as it is related to other events.
I am trying to say something here and I am not sure I am doing so well.
Rather it be "mutations occur at random when they are caused by a specific chemical agent" or "The probabilistic effect of radioactivity" any idea of cause is not simple and even more complex are the ideas of random occurrences that for all apparent purposes at the lowest levels of description and analysis are unpredictable. As the complexities increase and with more organization of occurrences or occasions are actualized they do not appear random but related. At the bottom level or whatever, it seems random and as things happen they open new possibilities while also creating new limits do to the relatedness of occasions.
I realize I am trivializing many areas but I am trying to make some simple point that is hard to express clearly. I did take my meds.

Thank you I think that is about as close as I can get..lol
I was getting confused because we are discussing related ideas in two threads this one and the one on random. I repeated the above because it relates to you analogy “game space”. Life forms have evolved for roughly a billion years on our planet maybe more.
But it has evolved in a universe that is creating the board for the “game space”. Our experiences are also grounded in it. This is enough to make the universe appear rational.
Our mathematics is a powerful useful tool yet it has limits. There is not a one to one correspondence to reality. Mathematicians such as Whitehead and Godel have pointed out, it is a human construct. When you consider geometry was the parent of logic and you can see why reason seems so natural and the universe seems so ordered because as you explain, we are on the same game space.
I think we are hitting on something important.
Juts to add some fun, I recall an experiment where they put goggles on people that caused the world to be seen upside down. After time and as the person experienced feed back the mind/brain turned it right side up to match the feedback. When the goggles were removed they again saw everything up side down again until they adjusted.

[Bugmaster]

Every human on the planet is able to adhere to the same moral code. The example I gave earlier was bravery. Bravery is considered to be moral by all cultures, religions, geographical locations, and periods of time in history. This tells me that there is a universal moral law to which we all adhere.

Well, either that, or perhaps bravery is a very useful evolutionary adapatation. Since all of us live in the same environment (i.e., The Earth), and all of us are evolutionarily related, and morality is at least partially genetic in nature -- it makes sense that we'd all have similar moral codes, in the same way that we have similar muscles, metabolisms, etc. I agree that your explanation is consistent with the data, but so is mine, and mine is more parsimonius since it doesn't posit the existence of an additional entity (the absolute moral law).

Some argue yes, some argue no. This tells me that the universal morality is not clearly defined.

Ok, this does not seem consistent to me. If morality was a law of nature, just as gravity is a law of nature, it would be difficult to argue with it.

The very fact that we each appeal to each other on our moral arguments is enough to prove to me that morality is not just the view of the individual. We honestly believe that the other person has the exact same capacity to evaluate the universal moral law, or else the argument itself would be vain.

Actually, in many cases, the argument is in vain. Consider the debate over gay marriage: Christians say (I'm simplifying, obviously), "gay marriage is immoral because the Bible says so"; other Christians say, "no, the Bible doesn't say so"; and atheists say, "we do not accept the Bible as a moral authority". It seems that all of us have different capacities to evaluate morality.

My thesis on morality also explains why Game Theory works. We all play games with this moral force that others can identify as "good" or "bad". What happens if I tell a white lie? Virtually nothing. What happens if I tell multiple white lies? It catches up to me...

Actually, game theory has nothing to do with morality; it's just a branch of mathematics, utilizing probability to determine the optimal course of action. While it is true that game theory can be applied to moral decisions, it by no means has to be. In fact, the famous poster-child for game theory -- The Prisoner's Dilemma -- is completely devoid of any moral backing.

(1) Why would people argue morality? If morality is wholly contained within the human brain, then if one person views an action as moral, and another person views it as immoral, the discussion must end right there.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying, "morality is wholly contained within the human brain". After all, philosophy is also "wholly contained within the human brain", and yet we are discussing it here. It is a fallacy to assume that, if there exists no absolute moral authority, then morality is completely arbitrary. Since we are all human, and we all live on the same planet, it makes sense to design (or evolve, or a bit of both) a moral code that maximizes our chances of survival, and our quality of life. This moral code doesn't have to be immutable or absolute; it just has to serve one particular species on one particular planet reasonably well.

(2) When you make humans as equals to the gods, there is no more need for desire.

Well, I don't believe that gods exists, so this statement sounds a bit hollow to me.

Rather, the desire would be for me to choose those courses of actions that most benefit me or my family (we usually call that selfishness, which is ironically an immoral trait).

True; however, a species that evolved a morality based on pure selfishness would, inevitably, fall prey to a species that evolved a moral code with a healthy measure of cooperation. Again, cooperation makes good evolutionary sense, so it makes sense that we'd have it.

But is that true? While it is true that sometimes selfishness comes back to bite you, sometimes constant acts of selfishness ends in success.

I would argue that, on the average, a purely selfish species would not be nearly as effective as a cooperating species. There are a lot of things people can accomplish together that they cannot accomplish alone; agriculture or achitecture are good examples.

Can there be an ontology for a human-contained morality that is not circular? "The reason we call Action X good and Action Y bad is because Action X has good consequences and Action Y has bad consequences."

I think you're confusing "good", as in, "morally good", with "good", as in "desirable to an individual".

[QED]

Actually, game theory has nothing to do with morality; it's just a branch of mathematics, utilizing probability to determine the optimal course of action. While it is true that game theory can be applied to moral decisions, it by no means has to be. In fact, the famous poster-child for game theory -- The Prisoner's Dilemma -- is completely devoid of any moral backing.

I don't agree. I think the connection between game theory and the instantiation of morality is quite well established:

In 1954 the British philosopher Richard Braithwaite gave his inaugural lecture entitled Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher (Braithwaite 1955). In his lecture Braithwaite argued that many questions about distributive justice have the same structure as “the bargaining problem”. This problem had been analyzed some years before by John Nash, the later Nobel Prize winner, using game theory (Nash 1950). Braithwaite predicted that game theory would fundamentally change moral philosophy. His prediction came less than ten years after the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour — a book that started a completely new branch of social science and applied mathematics (Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944).

The introduction of game theory in ethics was not entirely a new development. Game-theoretic ideas can be found, for instance, in the work of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume (see Gauthier 1969; Vanderschraaf 1998)). Nevertheless, Braithwaite's prediction has not come true. Game theory has not (yet) fundamentally changed ethics. Ten years after Braithwaite, Brian Barry published Political Argument, and a few years later David Lewis' seminal work Convention came out (Barry 1965; Lewis 1969). In the late 60's, the first of a series of publications by David Gauthier appeared. In these he used game theory to develop his moral theory (Gauthier 1967). However, until recently, the influence of game theory in ethics has not been anywhere as great as in the social sciences in general. Notwithstanding this faltering start, the introduction of game theory in moral philosophy has produced a steadily increasing flow of important publications.

I see examples such as the Prisoners dilemma demonstrating how "morals" can emerge from a given game. I would suggest that rather than there being a "moral backing" as an input to the game, morality is actually an output.

[Bugmaster]

I see examples such as the Prisoners dilemma demonstrating how "morals" can emerge from a given game. I would suggest that rather than there being a "moral backing" as an input to the game, morality is actually an output.

This is kind of what I meant, actually. Game theory does not rest on any particular moral assumptions; instead, it shows us how moral assumptions can emerge through "enlightened self-interest".