From: Mark Walker (mark@permanentend.org)
Date: Fri Jun 13 2003 - 15:47:21 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Zero Powers" <zero_powers@hotmail.com>
with each other.
>
> Depends what you mean by "natural law." If by natural law you mean moral
> laws legislated by "nature" (which may as well be "God"), obviously there
is
> no such thing. However, as Greg suggests, humans have a nature (a "human
> nature") that influences how we interract. Yes of course, to a certain
> extent we have free will. But even our "free will" choices are determined
> entirely by our phenotype and environment. Given this shared "human
nature"
> there are certain "laws" that "naturally" follow.
>
> For instance, as Greg also suggests, our moral laws derive indirectly from
> game theory. They reinforce our cooperation instincts and counter our
> cheating instincts. Human societies universally have laws against, say,
> stealing because it is human nature to maximize ones own success, even if
it
> means minimizing the success of another human. The nature of the honey
bee,
> on the other hand, is to maximize the fitness of the group and the queen,
> even at the expense of the individual drone. So there's no need for a
honey
> bee "law" against stealing nectar. It is not in the honey bee's nature to
> do so.
>
> So, to that extent, I firmly believe in "natural law."
>
If such laws fall from our human nature then yes they are provisionally
interesting, so long as we have a human nature. Of course in most other fora
the appeal to human nature is bedrock although presumably not here.
However, what is interesting is that Greg said something a little different.
Greg wrote:
"In a limited sense, I do. (As usual) without the time to be complete in
explaining myself, I think that some elements of social interactions are
universal and derive from the very nature of (thus, "natural")
intentional beings interacting with each other. Almost all of what I
would call "natural law" I ascribe to the logic discernable in game
theory, especially the prisoners' dilemma, most especially the iterated
prisoners' dilemma. Beyond this (perhaps more correctly, "beneath"
this, in the sense of more fundamentally), I think there may well be
some moral content in the very nature of knowing and intending beings,
although I'm not as sure about that as I am about the social rules
derivable from game theory."
If I understand him the laws here do not follow from something contingent
like human nature but are constitutive of the very nature of intending and
knowing beings qua intending and knowing beings. This raises interesting
epistemological questions like how we could know this about all knowing
beings: does Greg have some transcendental argument to prove this up his
sleeve? And don't transcendental arguments sin against (methodological)
naturalism? If it is an inductive claim about every knowing creature isn't
our sample size seems a tad small? How many different knowing and intending
types of beings do we know? Finally, if we somehow know that such laws are
necessarily connected with knowing and intending then this raises Kantian
question of where knowing and intending themselves fit in the cognitive
hierarchy. Somewhere in our phylogeny presumably we evolved from mere
proto-knowers to full-blown knowers. Will we become hyper-knowers (with
perhaps a hyperlanguage) in the future and then be able to outgrow these
laws?
Mark
Mark Walker, PhD
Research Associate, Philosophy, Trinity College
University of Toronto
Room 214 Gerald Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place
Toronto
M5S 1H8
www.permanentend.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jun 13 2003 - 15:56:47 MDT