BookTalk.org

Please use this thread to discuss the above listed chapter of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life" by Daniel Dennett.

Okay, this will probably be it, for me, having finished Dennett's book. I found him really quite good on the subject of morality, and his comparison to A.I. (left largely implicit) to be insightful. He sees a challenging "real time" problem of making real decisions, and our limited rationality (as well as limited time and limited devotion to moral ends, in Ch. 18) leading to "heuristic" pruning of the decision trees. He doesn't really present a good framework for thinking about morality (his attempt in Ch. 18 is charming but nearly useless) but he rightly (IMO) discards most of the attempts to be systematic, including Bentham and consequentialism as well as Kant and deontology (a word he never uses). His observations about them in a "real time" thought framework are spot on, I would say.

However, he seems to be totally unaware of existentialism, or uninterested in it, which is rather strange as a philosopher. As a result, his discarding of religion as either quaint cultural artifact or dangerous fundamentalism or empty relic of a worldview is philosophically indefensible, though it may be sociologically justified. Like Dawkins, whom he obviously admires, he seems oblivious to modern theology and the sense it makes of the framework he cannot make sense of.

For me he makes the incredible error of concluding that morality is "essentially arbitrary" (even though he is happy to declare a number of particular moral choices to be "beyond the pale" in the next chapter) on the grounds (apparently - he is less than explicit, as usual) that it cannot be systematically derived, like mathematics, or systematically verified, like science. Another victim of the incompleteness of systems of moral derivation, unwilling to look at it for its own properties and see that incompleteness does not imply arbitrariness.

Sure, we cannot in real time sort out every moral issue, nor even very many of the interesting ones that we focus on for their ambiguity. Nevertheless there are a tremendous number of choices we do make, with confidence, based at least in part on moral considerations, and society would be much more of a mess than it is were this not so. For someone so willing to skip straight to asserting what is beyond the pale despite lack of objective verification, he is surprisingly unwilling to engage in disentangling the moral sense from the complications with which people do actually wrestle.

Sigh. Looks like for Dennett, any actual moral guidance is a skyhook. And we can't have that, no matter what else the interpretation might lead to.

One last note. I am shocked, perhaps even dumbfounded, by his lack of engagement with evidence of moral sense in animals. At one point he comes close to asserting that our morality is part biological (since, in an interesting example, it was found that people can do logic about enforcing social rules much better than about any other kind of problem) but never explores the implication that logic is involved in cultural use of these biological processes. The same rush to erroneous judgment that I suspect Haidt of.