However, the science of the matter actually supports a much stronger hypothesis than Kitcher's "morality evolved to overcome altruism failures".That stronger hypothesis may have different meta-ethical implications.

Relevant criteria for scientific truth regarding morality as an evolutionary adaptation Include explanatory power for descriptive facts and puzzles, no contradiction with known facts, simplicity, and integration with the rest of science. By these criteria, a superior hypothesis can be stated as "morality overcomes a universal cooperation-exploitation dilemma by motivating or advocating altruistic cooperation strategies". That is, morality is composed of assemblies of biolog ... (read more)

Suppose that I am sentenced to death in three years' time and presently held in solitary confinement. One day the jailor makes me an offer. On the day of the execution, he will see that my sentence is commuted to exile to Siberia. For the rest of my life, I will work twelve hours a day on hard benches in a chilly sweatshop. I have no relatives or dependents, and nobody else's well-being will be significantly affected by whether I live or die.

It seems to me that, given this choice, I might marginally prefer the sweatshop to death, but only marginally. At first it seems there are no strings attached to the offer, but now the jailor demands to torture me for fifteen minutes each day for the next three years (he is a sadist and gets his kicks from it). Since my preference for the sweatshop over death is only marginal, I refuse the deal. The jailor, disappointed by my refusal, decides to sweeten the deal. He offers to ensure that the sweatshop has heating, padded chairs and a radio. I do no ... (read more)

I believe that that equality can be demonstrated, at least in the specific case of the equality of person's interests.

We begin with a technical restriction.  We can distinguish "other-regarding" interests as interests in someone's interests; e.g., a lover can be interested in a partner's well-being, a sympathetic nurse might be interested in reducing a patient's suffering, a sadist could be interested in causing or increasing somebody's pain, etc.  The equality to be demonstrated only concerns non-other-regarding interests, or what can be called "self-restricted" interests.  This is bec ... (read more)

The paper we discussed this week is here and my (very short) handout is here.

Schroeder is offering more of a general structure for an expressivist account than a fully-worked out one, and one of the points he’s fairly vague on is what descriptive predicate should typically follow the ‘is for’ attitude. For the purposes of the paper, he adopts a proposal of Gibbard’s, which analyses disapproval (a technical term for the expressivist) in terms of being for blaming for; so the idea is that ‘Jon thinks murder is wrong’ should be rendered as ‘Jon is for blaming for murdering’.

(Note that we can’t just adopt the ‘is for’ proposal without any descriptive predicate: ‘is for the non-occurrence of’ because this collapses two readings we want to keep distinct; the non-occurrence of not-murdering is the same as the occurrence of murdering, while not blaming for not murdering is not the same as blaming for murdering.)

Taken literally, it looks like ... (read more)

The Sadistic Conclusion: In some circumstances, it would be better with respect to utility to add some unhappy people to the world (people with negative utility), rather than creating a larger number of happy people (people with positive utility).