morality ⁽¹⁰⁾

To be a moral person requires empathy. It does not require a morality. Narcissists use moral principles to game their local system all the time. Why does being moral not require morality? Becasue reality does not care about reality. It has no bones to pick. It does not care what we do with reality, or don’t. Caring about reality is…

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 or to-do linkpost page for reading and reacting to the following books, papers, and ideas regarded morality-in-broad-terms in relation to evolution. It's a gap I am trying to fill. As reactions I won't dig too scholarly into to the intertextual background, and just say where I differ and why. When I get bored or repetitive I…

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…