...so saying “bad things will happen” raises the question of what makes these things “bad”. Peterson always takes this as self-evident. But he must know that the crisis of religion means that what is right and wrong is not self-evident.
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The science he talks about undermines this. The closer we look at rats or lobsters and see the relation to us the most we can say is that aspects of their nature contain moral impulses, e.g. strong rats let weak rats win when they play 30% of the time (Peterson’s example).
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He takes this as emergent moral behaviour. This is similar to C. Hitchens saying that the reasons we are good is just because “we evolved this way”. The problem is that nature produces quite diverse behaviour and it’s not clear in tech society...
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...diverged from nature what is good or not (should we be more like lobsters in the sea or in the restaurant tank?). And these “moral” instincts in animals are jut part of a bundle of instincts. It’s hard to see how we get from there to the concept of “ideas” being paramount.
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The instinctive desire to protect your kind is as primal and as moral. Anyway, Peterson—like Hitchens—seems content to think that evolution has favour liberal moral instincts in humans as normal. Maybe so, but I think this is unlikely.
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And it’s no good finger wagging and saying “bad things will happen” if you do “X” if can’t very clearly dilenate why certain things are bad. What evolution tells us is too ambiguous and general to draw these conclusions.
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