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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Psychological altruism does not entail biological altruism.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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