EECS%20690

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EECS 690

• April 18

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Evolutionary approaches to morality-building

• The authors in this chapter provide us with two
  types of bottom-up approaches one of them
  being analogous to evolution as studied by
  biologists and another being analogous to child
  development as studied by psychologists.
• These notes cover the first of those approaches.

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The Evolutionary Approach

• Through study of digital simulations of
  environments and organisms, involving the
  paradigm elements of evolutionary biology
  (selection, random mutation, and environmental
  change) we are to gain some insight into what
  morality is, or even to witness the evolution of
  moral agents.
• Common misconception Evolution entails progress.
  
• Further caveat One must approach the study of
  how ethics arises with a theory of ethics in mind
  already. This means that though it sounds like
  researchers are scientifically discovering
  morality, they arent.

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Merits of the approach

• When viewed as microcosms of larger and more
  complicated situations, these simulations and
  studies can shed light on the operation of some
  of the component aspects of morality, and how
  they might have arisen.

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Game Theory

• Insofar as cooperation is a major element of
  morality, game theory as a study of cooperation
  is very interesting.
• The chief contribution of game theory to the
  study of cooperation is in the prisoners dilemma
  and the iterated prisoners dilemma.

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The Prisoners Dilemma

• In this situation, cooperation is the most
  mutually beneficial action, while mutual
  defection is the least mutually beneficial
  action, yet from the perspective of either party,
  the most rational decision is defection.

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The Iterated Prisoners Dilemma and the Tragedy
of the Commons

• An iterated prisoners dilemma is one in which the
  situation is repeated with the same players.
• The tragedy of the commons is a concept in
  environmental ethics that relies on the concept
  of the iterated prisoners dilemma. In short,
  the tragedy of the commons is that any communally
  held resource gets trashed because every
  individual has incentive to use (and over-use)
  the resource, but has no stronger incentive to
  maintain and sustain the resource.
• In some very real sense, ethics is (partially)
  the study of how and why to get out of the
  prisoners dilemma

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The Naturalistic Fallacy

• This term is owed to G.E. Moore. The
  naturalistic fallacy is applied to any attempt to
  straightforwardly reduce value questions
  (normative questions) to naturalistic (positive)
  questions.
• Certainly, the kind of beings we are and the
  environment in which we operate have some
  relationship to ethics, but that relationship is
  not one of straightforward reduction. (dependence
  does not entail reduction)

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The Limits of the Evolutionary Approach

• Ignores cultural diversity Genetics is not
  enough to explain or account for cultural moral
  diversity, and cultural moral diversity does not
  even loosely map onto genetic diversity.
• Is at best a Just So Story
• At its worst, evolutionary ethics is racism,
  eugenics, and social darwinism.