Many thinkers in history, philosophers and others, have imagined they could deal with moral issues by conjecturing a small set of sharply formed assumptions, perhaps a set of virtues which were said to be the building blocks of human moral character. Christians should have known better because the fundamental doctrine of moderate realism, similar to an empirical version of Aristotelian common-sense, tells us that any valid abstractions are drawn from what exists, thing-like being and its various immaterial aspects such as relationships between multiple things.
In line with some earlier thinkers, including Augustine of Hippo, I’ve claimed that virtues and vices can be useful but problems arise such as the unfortunate fact that virtues and vices are differently shaped versions of the same human traits. For example, lust — even of the type leading to rape, is a deformed version of the sexual attraction which is natural and good, which is a foundation of marital relationships and the forming of families.
We need to seriously examine our towering piles of modern empirical knowledge about human beings and other creatures, especially other social creatures, and to figure out a better way to describe and analyze our moral characters. I would expect a good deal of overlap with the descriptions and analyses of virtues and vices to be found in traditional works of moral philosophy and moral theology and political science and so forth. I would also expect some surprises as profound as those which came with the realization that Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetism didn’t obey the principles of Galilean/Newtonian relativity. That led to Einstein’s proposals which were fully developed into Special Relativity by his subsequent efforts as well as those of a few other mathematicians and physicists. Mass and velocity and acceleration remained as valid descriptive elements but there were some important changes in our understanding of these elements, especially under extreme conditions which Galileo and Newton couldn’t have explored. In a similar way, modern life with its technology as well as the sheer mass and variety of human life, has produced extreme social and political and economic conditions. I would expect these profound surprises about human moral nature to produce understandings which simplify to substantially the earlier understandings under simpler conditions but to produce the true surprises under the extreme conditions which are quite common in our time.
In a recent article, we learn of some work showing that Not All Altruism Is Alike, Says New Study.
Not all acts of altruism are alike, says a new study. From bees and wasps that die defending their nests, to elephants that cooperate to care for young, a new mathematical model pinpoints the environmental conditions that favor one form of altruism over another.
The model predicts that creatures will help each other in different ways depending on whether key resources such as food and habitat are scarce or abundant, say researchers from Indiana University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.
There is one complication which seems obvious in retrospect:
For example, some creatures cooperate for the sake of defense, others to find food, and others to care for young, [Michael Wade, a professor at Indiana University and a visiting scholar at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center] explained.
There are some interesting ideas to be explored in this field, some of which may have practical implications for politics, charity work, family life, and who knows what else.
Often do I quote the historian Carrol Quigley:
The truth emerges in time through a communal process.
This is true of truths manifested in purely empirical ways and also of the allegedly grander truths of metaphysics. In fact, a truer and more humble metaphysics would recognize the truths which emerge as men explore empirical reality. A grand and absolute truth may not be so grand nor so absolute if it conflicts with a humble fact drawn from study of creaturely nature.