Imagine a society of sentient ant-like beings on a distant world in a galaxy beyond our reach. Evolutionarily, they developed the sense that the only ethical way to kill their food, is for the organism they captured to be facing to the left, while two of the insectoids stab it in the most “merciful” key places. Imagine another society of these creatures of a slightly different variation who believe they exact same places should be stabbed, however, the organism must be placed to the right instead. These two cultures of insectoids have debates on the moral ethical practices of his best to prepare their food, based on the moral intuitions they developed over millions of years.
At one point in their past, a common ancestor decided to split pathways, one going to the left of a river and the other to the right and found a food source that tended to gravitate towards the side of the river. As a result, brain mechanisms developed that compelled these organisms to stay towards a particular bend of the river and a sense of danger for departing too far to the opposite direction. Eventually, as structures of planning and future reasoning developed, dads that decided to venture too far off from the side of the river were considered immoral for not providing a stable future for their children by staying close to the river.
Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.…Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race.
Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse (New York: Macmillan, 198
Consider now serial killers such as Albert Fish who would kill children and eat their body parts.
If you are anything like I am, your moral intuitions revolt at such an individual and seek nothing more than to put a man as evil as this behind bars due to the injustice and cruelty he afflicted on innocent children, but this begs the question in the first premise.
Is our moral aversion based on biologically ingrained adaptations alone? My intuition tells me that such acts are unspeakable and objectively evil, that some things must never been done, where there are no justifications for such a behavior, but is this simply because somewhere in my evolutionary past, it was ingrained that children equal survival which causes my sense to flare up?
What if however a different set of events directed the course of humanities evolutionary history and we all involved the instincts of Albert Fish?
Would it still be wrong?
If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience.
Charles Darwin Descent of Man
The question then becomes one of moral intuition and those moral intuitions could have been different, then how would it be possible to prove the atheists moral intuition in regards to God's character (that He is a moral monster) is correct, when if it were shaped differently, would praise Him as morally virtuous?
Thus it seems the Theist and Atheist debate is reduced to which side of the river your ancestors developed on like our imaginary insectoids. Ifour moral intuition then is a result of a series of evolutionary adaptations for survival, it can not be an objective ground for discerning the moral correctness of actions.
The point isn't to say there could not be an Objective morality, but rather that our subjective intuitions are not a viable grounds to judge moral actions as they were designed for survival and not detecting right or wrong.
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