ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 2018
consumed by it. I do not mean that science cannot undermine the validity of particular such explanations – science could show that knight G1 to F3 was the wrong move. Science can also contextualize such explanations – evolution makes sense of why we play games like chess at all. But science cannot replace or eliminate the sort of explanation that an agent’ s mind provides for its own decisions.
To extend the logic of levels of explanation even further, questions of ultimate purpose, such as those that occupy the authors of Dr. Shoppa’ s more preferred citations( Schelling, Newman, and Schönborn) are likewise inappropriate targets of evolutionary elimination in general. Nobody would argue for the ultimate purpose of a chess game – in that game we are creating( or in Tolkien’ s words subcreating) our own cosmos for fun; and our purposes are ultimate and inexorably imposed by us upon the pieces. But the possibility remains – decreasing in popularity today perhaps, but remaining nevertheless – that there are right or wrong moves for us humans in life, regardless of our own decisions on the matter and distinct from the sorts of explanations evolution or any other science provides. Again, the evolutionary and other sciences will illuminate circumstances and context, but will be silent on the big questions. Darwin knew this, as does Dawkins.
Evolutionary explanation pokes at metaphysics more than any other sort of scientific explanation – not because it is eliminativist, but because it is illuminating. It hacks away certain crude ideas. If a belief in God rests at all on a great chain of being among organic living things, special creation of human beings apart from other animals, or the immunity of our psychology from any ancestral influences, evolution will shake that metaphysic, that religion. However, evolution cannot tell us what metaphysic or religion to embrace. Evolutionary biologists worth their salt do not claim that whatever exists, is good. They do not claim that our motivations, even if products of natural selection, ought to be lauded for that reason. Or, if they do claim such things, they are not acting as evolutionary biologists when they do so, but acting as certain sorts of religious individuals, somewhat akin to Gnostics. Most of us, however, look at evolutionary explanations even of human behavior as( potentially) factual tidbits, of no more direct normative weight( no more good or bad) than factual tidbits about grasses and grapes, although of course of greater indirect relevance for our decision-making because of the subject matter.
If evolutionary biology were to teach me that humans tend to do X, or even that humans tend to think X is morally right, and why this is so, this would neither replace nor eliminate my own moral discernment. I do accept the premise of the evolutionary social sciences: my faculty of morality does not operate independently of my evolutionary history nor of the evolutionary functions of my behaviors and thoughts. Evolutionary biology even indicates and explains empirical tendencies or trendlines in human attitudes and behavior. Such explanations are exciting and tremendously useful. But they are limited in scope. In chess, few would think of a common tendency as an overwhelming reason for action;“ most players move X in this situation” or“ most people think that move X is best in this situation” is not useless but is not the best sort of advice either. Anyone who strives to win will attempt to be excellent, a point off the trendline. Likewise, if there is any such thing as excellence or arete in human life, then there is no saying that the final arbiter of that is any sort of historical, evolution-
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