morality ⁽⁹⁾

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. Well let’s start with those two first sentences… I know this is an abstract but… So, not sure if you can leap from co-ordination, nor even from unnegotiated co-operation, to “a moral structure inevitably develops.” Chicken/egg? I’ll keep reading with…

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. So this is from 1993. I was in my late twenties. Never read any of this stuff back then. This is before primatologists and paleo-anthropologists came up with the idea of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic among Homo species.

Michael Vlerick's “Better Than Our Nature? Evolution and Moral Realism, Justification and Progress.” in Ruse, Michael, and Robert J. Richards, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 9781107132955. Cambridge Handbooks in Philosophy. [via academia.edu] Puts forward an “innate ‘moral compass’ ” or “ ‘moral sense’ ”as a way to allow an evolutionist to…

This is an organiser page for reading the following papers and chapters and ideas regarded morality in relation to evolution. It's a gap I am trying to fill. As reactions I won't dig to scholarly into to the intertextual background of the papers, and just say where I differ and why. When I get bored or repetitive I stop the…

My use of worldbuilding draws directly on its use in fiction, both in doing it in my failed attempts at SF/F novel writing, and in genre and literary criticism’s listing of examples. I cover that as an introduction in Worldbuilding 101. This building of worlds has been greatly commercialised in all movie 'franchises' since the 1970s. More recently in computer…

The Origins of Virtue came out 25 years ago when I was 32, and I have a dim memory of it. Dim and thin, compared to a memorable reading I had of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which I borrowed from the State Library of Tasmania’s Hobart shelves. I can visualise where it was on the shelf, on a bay…