Moral anthropology
One of the intriguing claims that I think you make is that abstract theorising about ethics is incapable of making progress, but that social norms do. I think that you can argue this fact persuasively in the case of our society. But I would want to see you argue it in the case of non-Western societies as well, i.e. world anthropology.
That would be a large task. You would first have to clarify what the current culture's norms were, and then show how those norms developed over history to come to where they are today. In the process, you would also have to show how they were falsified by observations, assuming that this is what changed them. That would be interesting, but it would require some kind of science of moral anthropology that seems to be pretty thin on the ground.
A search for the strong "'moral anthropology'" reveals little. A search for "'anthropology of morals'" reveals a page about the naturalistic fallacy as, provocatively, a conceptual basis for evolutionary ethics.
You don't think much of evolutionary ethics, do you?
I haven't seen much about it that impressed me, although evolutionary psychology does impress me as a powerful paradigm.
Unfortunately, all you have really studied about it has been the relations between the sexes.
That is already enough to show that our natural instincts, if they are moral, are not universalisable, hence providing a counterexample to Kant. Furthermore, they are not universalisable due to a distinct asymmetry in our empirical nature, in the way that men and women reproduce. If we both reproduced in exactly the same way, then sexual morality would become universalisable. Of course, the converse condition, that universalisability is a necessary condition for ethics, would constitute a counterexample to evolutionary ethics in this case, at least simpliciter.
That would be a large task. You would first have to clarify what the current culture's norms were, and then show how those norms developed over history to come to where they are today. In the process, you would also have to show how they were falsified by observations, assuming that this is what changed them. That would be interesting, but it would require some kind of science of moral anthropology that seems to be pretty thin on the ground.
A search for the strong "'moral anthropology'" reveals little. A search for "'anthropology of morals'" reveals a page about the naturalistic fallacy as, provocatively, a conceptual basis for evolutionary ethics.
You don't think much of evolutionary ethics, do you?
I haven't seen much about it that impressed me, although evolutionary psychology does impress me as a powerful paradigm.
Unfortunately, all you have really studied about it has been the relations between the sexes.
That is already enough to show that our natural instincts, if they are moral, are not universalisable, hence providing a counterexample to Kant. Furthermore, they are not universalisable due to a distinct asymmetry in our empirical nature, in the way that men and women reproduce. If we both reproduced in exactly the same way, then sexual morality would become universalisable. Of course, the converse condition, that universalisability is a necessary condition for ethics, would constitute a counterexample to evolutionary ethics in this case, at least simpliciter.
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