Below I’m posting a conversation that took place over email in response to session 2. Please feel free to add more and continue the discussion.<\/p>\n
—-<\/p>\n
From Ed:<\/p>\n
I must admit that by the time Darcia, Robert and James had made their first round of comments on last Friday\u2019s topic, I was somewhat confused. I can\u2019t even remember what I was trying to say in response. My guess is that I was\/am not alone in that state.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what I wish I\u2019d said:<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s suppose that human egoistic\/selfish\/anti-social personalities vary along a continuum, with total inability to control egoistic impulses at the left end and various degrees of an ability to postpone immediate satisfaction of such impulses in the service of a larger egoistic purposes along the line to the right end.<\/p>\n
Leftist egoists don\u2019t obtain high school diplomas and many are convicted of felonies. Rightist egoists often make lists of the 20 wealthiest persons in the United States.<\/p>\n
Perhaps altruistic\/collaborative\/pro-social personalities vary in the same way.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s make the huge assumption that we can partition the relevant continua from left to right into subsets so that in each token of a subset type the typical moral trait supervenes on the same type of neural circuitry. I.e., everyone with exactly that type of egoism\/altruism has exactly that same type of neural circuitry (micro-wiring plus neurotransmitters).<\/p>\n
Evidence (?!): the type of neural circuitry upon which extreme leftist egoism supervenes is caused by pathological parenting in more than 50% of the cases.<\/p>\n
Hypothesis: Geoffrey Canada\u2019s \u201cbaby colleges\u201d for expectant parents in Harlem will prove to be a necessary element in a successful strategy for increasing the numbers of those students who will succeed in high school and college. (See, Paul Tough, \u201cWhatever It Takes, the quest to change Harlem and America,\u201d Houghton Mifflin, 2008).<\/p>\n
I want to propose that the way to avoid the naturalistic fallacy while practicing evolutionary ethics is to trim one\u2019s sails; i.e., to settle for projects likely to reduce leftist egoism in the world, and leave egoism, per se, whatever that might be, to the philosophers.\u201d : ) ???<\/p>\n
If that\u2019s not any better, please let me know. : ) !!!<\/p>\n
Best wishes,<\/p>\n
Ed Manier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Below I’m posting a conversation that took place over email in response to session 2. Please feel free to add more and continue the discussion. —- From Ed: I must admit that by the time Darcia, Robert and James had made their first round of comments on last Friday\u2019s topic, I was somewhat confused. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10367,10358,10354,10353,10355,10360,10356,10357],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-altruism","category-defensibility","category-egoism","category-intuition","category-naturalistic-fallacy","category-parenting","category-personality","category-success"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/iwmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}