https://www.facebook.com/drjordanpeterson/videos/1829905584014979/
TP:
You don't need the doctrine of the "divinity of the individual" in order to condemn slavery. The thing Peterson gets wrong is that he thinks religion is the deepest substrate of morality and of it is disturbed, all of society will go to hell in a handbasket. But this is patently false. The deepest substrate of our morality comes from evolution, not religion. If you pull up the rug of religion, humans revert to their evolutionary moral instincts, which are actually quite good. Humans ascended due to our niche strategy of intelligent cooperation. Our entire existence as a species is based on cooperation - which means that prosocial behavior is good, antisocial behavior is bad. Slavery fundamentally goes against our evolutionary proclivity for cooperation and is hence immoral at the evolutionary layer of moral analysis.
INTERLOCUTOR:
You say morality comes from evolution. So who decides what is moral. Evolution is a process, not a person so how do you know what evolution has decided is moral and what not? How can we follow evolutions morality. What if my evolutionary moral instinct tells me to kill the disabled who are a drain on society, kill the aged who can’t contribute to the human race, kill babies that are born deformed . Is that evolutionary morality?
TP:
No one is an authority who decides what is moral. That is an appeal to authority fallacy that comes from Abrahamic religion. Each individual has moral intuitions and the collective moral intuitions become societal morality. If you have psychopathic moral defects in your moral gene code, then other people will have game theoretic strategies to control you and stop you from committing harm. The prevailing moral paradigm comes from the collective moral intuitions that build successful societies. Evolution creates the mutations in morality and natural selection decides which intuitions are good.
INTERLOCUTOR QUESTIONS:
1) Does God exist?
The Abrahamic definition of God absolutely does not exist, as his existence would be a logical contradiction, and the doctrines attached to his existence have all been debunked by science.
2) Are “collective moral intuitions“ global, or sectional, I.e. national, tribal etc?
Collective moral intuitions are the summation of all individual moral intuitions within any scope of analysis desired. Since individuals group themselves into societies, societal morality is the summation of the moral intuitions of just the individuals within that society. Societies can have many shapes and sizes, based on the ability of the individuals to cooperate under scopes of legal power.
3) What is the definition of a “successful society”?
Evolution measures success by the ability to persist in existence. Things that fail to continue to exist are unsuccessful. A successful society is hence a society that is able to continue its existence.
4) Is a “successful society” relative to whatever “societal morality” says it is?
A successful society is able to exist often by virtue of having an optimal societal morality. Societies that have self-destructive moral intuitions will not continue their existence, and hence become unsuccessful societies.
5) What is an example of a mutation in morality?
A mutation in morality would be a change in a moral instinct. We might have moral instincts to save small children from danger. If someone were to have a genetic code alteration that gave them a moral instinct to not care about small children in danger, that would be a mutation.
6) Are “collective moral intuitions” an absolute standard for good “societal morality”?
No.
7) Are some things like torturing babies for fun morally wrong independent of “social morality”?
Torturing babies is morally wrong for the baby – they experience harm to their wellbeing. This is an objective fact of moral wrongness that exists in the harm experienced. Whether or not society cares about this objective harm depends on if the societal morality is empathetic or not.
8) Is “societal morality” better than any other type of morality?
Societal morality varies by society. Each society has a different summation of moral instincts/intuitions. The societies that persist in their existence better than other societies have objectively better standards of morality, as judged by evolution by natural selection.
9) Is there such a thing as individual rights and were the authors of the Constitution wrong by appealing to authority regarding a Creator who endows people with certain individual rights?
There is no such thing as a concrete object that is known as “individual rights”. Individual rights don’t exist as objects, but rather as ideas, intuitions, and instincts. An individual right to ‘X’ is equivalent to the statement “I care so much about ‘X’, so much so that if you threaten ‘X’ I am willing to take action against you, perhaps even violence if necessary.” So, societies evolve to respect rights, because violence isn’t good for a society’s ability to persist in its existence.