I love this comment by Phil Rimmer, from this thread, especially the final sentence:
This (Jonathan’s take) comes closer to my view.
I think the “mental supervenes on the physical” mis-identifies the mental. The mental is the brain states that compose it and is physical too. It is a special class of the physical called mind.
Moral is a convenience of thought and behaviour, enabling mutual acts and ceases to exist in the absence of two or more distinct minds. Morality is a non useful term once minds are automatic and consonant one with another. The essential feature, the need for such a term indeed, vanishes with consonance but becomes increasingly critical with diversity of cognitions. Just as Ramachndran suggests our aesthetic senses are the second order effects of evolved (and automatic) detectors of specific characteristics in agents, humans and animals and non-agents, objects and landscapes. That curve of a woman (must woo), those wide set eyes in a small face (must protect), the smoothed hand-fitting shape of a stone (must hold), the open green sward dotted with shade (must inhabit). So too must we realise that our moral predispositions are another set of aesthetics and depend upon simple pre-articulated heuristics, some evolved genetically, many evolved culturally but wired with almost equivalent permanence in the over-imitating first decade of life.
It is essential in understanding morality as per Jonathan Haidt that cognitive differentiators between folk can be profound. Harms and fairness on the left and diluted then super-added, obedience to a leader, the group and its institutions on the right. These modes are differently convenient depending on times of plenty (when sharing makes more sharers and enhances individual effectiveness) and times of threat and scarcity (when circling the wagons and acting in concert saves at least your group).
It is perhaps our great trick as a species to find a flexibility of moral behaviour that allows an increasing number of cognitively diverse folk to co-operate, requiring our innate moral detectors to evolve modifying cultural overlays, where culture itself is the evolving organism.
Morality viewed with this perspective is not realist or idealist, though nominalist is in with a shout. I claim that a better term, and one where all religious legacies are shaken off, is Constructivism. There is, of course, an evolved moral component, inaccessible to culture in say the suite of mammal mutualities that underwrite pair bonding, infant bonding, emotion sharing,and training, but every petty god, the science fiction writer, knows that their creatures have moralities dependent on their physiognomies and their environments. It is a disgrace not to eat your own, still living, feathery raptor father on the protein starved world of Ultima Thule. One day this may have a cultural overlay after the discovery of meal worm cultivation on the guano strewn lava fields, but a father valued as if at nought may remain to signal the hand on…
Morality, abstracted, is morality gutted, lifeless, and risks all the dangers of moral dogma. If a discussion on morality doesn’t terminate in a discussion on politics, it has ended in a cul de sac.
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