Yes, I’d want to give a naturalistic account of morality’s origin. If you want to talk about epistemology, I take a pragmatic, neo-Kantian view of that. So, the layered view of nature is a metaphysical model that organizes knowledge and is meant to be consistent with science. Things emerge in nature because nature throws up many possibilities at the quantum level, and over much time and across much space and perhaps many dimensions, a constructive equilibrium develops. After the big bang, molecules formed in a soup of energy that eventually cooled, and gravitational instabilities in nebulas formed clusters of proto stars that further cooled, forming solar systems. On at least one planet, life evolved, including mind, personhood, and culture.
That’s a lot to work with if you want to understand how atheists can talk about morality without contradicting themselves. I talk about epistemology, consciousness, and morality in lots of other articles. In that article on Holdsworth, there was no need to complicate matters because his blunders are so simple.
To say that we can’t get beyond consciousness entails the kind of hyper-skepticism you find in positivists (austere empiricists). Again, I take a pragmatic view of knowledge, so it’s a question of whether a certain model is best. Consciousness is certainly involved in every personal presentation of a model, but that doesn’t mean consciousness is included in every model’s content. That’s a confusion between content and the symbol’s vehicle or vessel. Just because a writer always uses a computer to type stories or articles, doesn’t mean this author is always writing about computers.
You strawman my view of how morality emerges, portraying me as an evolutionary psychologist. I don’t go into much detail in that article about exactly how morality emerges, but you quote me as adding sociology, political science, and philosophical ethics to cognitive science, so obviously I don’t think it’s a matter of just evolutionary biology. I also don’t say those disciplines exhaust all the relevant resources. Indeed, I’d add aesthetics and the arts to account for the seeming profundity of moral judgments. We’re as disgusted by evil as we are by other things we deem extremely distasteful.
Now, you might ask whether an aesthetic view of morality entails that moral judgments are as arbitrary as the taste in art. On the contrary, you’d want to say, moral properties are objective and transcendent, like Plato’s forms. The real question here is whether there was any morality in the universe prior to life’s evolution. On the contrary, I’d say nature is fundamentally amoral, relative to human intuitions about morality. Still, we could be generous in speaking of the early universe’s potential to develop morality as a way of handling the eventual evolution of social organisms. In any case, once complex life develops, morality emerges along with people’s minds and social interactions.
On neo-Kantian grounds, I’d say moral judgments are partly subjective and partly objective since they must satisfy us in making sense of data that ultimately has an inhuman origin. Taste in art may seem arbitrary because it’s personal and thus it widely varies. By contrast, moral judgments are largely universal since they spring from the existential condition of our species. We may differ in some interpretations and applications, but all civilized people develop a conscience or a sense of right and wrong.
Is evil out there in nature, untethered to the existential condition of higher organisms? We’re not as far apart as you may imagine here since on pantheistic and aesthetic grounds, I’ve argued that the value of creativity falls out of science’s objectification of nature. And I suspect that we can derive morality from aesthetics. That’s not to say, though, that human morality is grounded in nature’s foundations. Perhaps transhuman (fully enlightened) morality would be so grounded, but our standard sense of morality is parochial and unrelated to cosmic problems.
Indeed, the moral/aesthetic judgments that are adequate to nature rather than just to human societies may well seem inhuman and evil to us. The question is whether our moral judgments are based on intuition or a cosmic perspective.
