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    Psychological altruism does not entail biological altruism. — Carmelics
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    Home/Moral Responsibility
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    Psychological altruism does not entail biological altruism.

    Moral ResponsibilityVirtue Ethics
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Natural selection might equip humans with ultimate desires to foster the welfare of their offspring.
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    • 2.Organisms with such ultimate desires would qualify as psychological altruists.
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    • 3.However, helping offspring typically increases the helper's own fitness, which means the behavior would not qualify as evolutionarily altruistic.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Evolutionary fitness and psychological motivation share a common functional architecture: organisms are disposed to desire what historically promoted reproductive success.
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    • 2.If ultimate desires reliably track fitness-enhancing behaviors across generations, the distinction between their psychological and biological classifications collapses into a difference of descriptive vocabulary, not ontology.
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    • 3.Sober and Wilson's own multilevel selection framework implies that psychological states are proximate mechanisms of biological strategies, making sharp conceptual separation arbitrary.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Ruth Millikan's teleosemantic theory entails that the proper function of a mental state is fixed by its evolutionary history, not its proximate causal role.
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    • 2.If a desire's content is constituted by its biological proper function, then a desire directed at offspring welfare just is, at the level of content-individuation, a fitness-promoting state.
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    • 3.Therefore psychological altruism toward kin cannot be cleanly separated from biological altruism because the biological function partially constitutes what the psychological state is a desire for.
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    Moral ResponsibilityVirtue Ethics

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    Consciousness & Mind1 linked

    Related

    Evolutionary fitness and psychological motivation share a common functional arch...However, helping offspring typically increases the helper's own fitness, which m...If a desire's content is constituted by its biological proper function, then a d...If ultimate desires reliably track fitness-enhancing behaviors across generation...
    +5 moreShow less
    Natural selection might equip humans with ultimate desires to foster the welfare...Organisms with such ultimate desires would qualify as psychological altruists.Ruth Millikan's teleosemantic theory entails that the proper function of a menta...Sober and Wilson's own multilevel selection framework implies that psychological...Therefore psychological altruism toward kin cannot be cleanly separated from bio...

    Similar

    Therefore, the presence of biological altruism is compatible with the ...91%Biological altruism does not entail psychological altruism.89%The philosophical debate between egoism and altruism concerns psycholo...84%Biological altruism is defined in terms of fitness consequences, not m...83%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: altruism-empirical
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    But as Sober and Wilson (1998) have argued with great clarity, there is no simple connection between evolutionary theory and the philosophical debate between egoism and altruism. This is because the concept of altruism that is important in evolutionary theory is quite different from the standard concept of altruism invoked in the philosophical debate. For biologists, an organism behaves altruistically if and only if the behavior in question reduces its own fitness while increasing the fitness of
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit