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Here’s the riff (developed from the paper I delivered at the recent AAP conference): because the success* of behavioural strategies – including moral strategies – depends on the environmental conditions in which the agent is situated, and because that environment includes the strategies employed by other agents, it pays to Mix It Up A Bit in terms of the strategies employed by the population.

As a result, you’d expect to see a diversity – or a ‘pluralism’ or ‘polymorphism’ – of strategies employed in a population. Some will be ‘nice’, some will be ‘suspicious’. That’s what I call Lesser Moral Diversity. Some will be ‘nice’, some ‘suspicious’, some ‘nasty’. That’s what I call Greater Moral Diversity. Details below:

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Once again, Michael Ruse plunges into the unfriendly country and ruffles the feathers of the natives with his rational and measured invective against the notion that morality is somehow not of this Earth. I couldn’t agree with him more. His argument is strikingly similar to my own – although that’s Read more…

Brian Leiter reminds us that there are no ‘Darwinists’, and ‘Darwinism’ is not a theory in biology. This is a point that needs making and making again, whether to lay enthusiasts or members of the academy. As we know only too well now, framing an issue does a lot of Read more…

Russell Blackford has a nice discussion of the problem with the natural/supernatural distinction over on his blog (which I recommend), the Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. He talks mainly about the difficulty in fielding a definition of ‘supernatural’ as ‘things beyond the powers of science to explain.’ However, as I Read more…