Sam Pawlett wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > 1. Humans are not worms & bees.
>
> Anyway and seriously, humans are part of nature and part of the same
> ecosystems that all other lifeforms are and are subject to the same
> laws, so why ignore it?
Yes. Stones, redwood trees, morel mushrooms, roaches, Angelfish, & black holes are all part of nature, but only at the highest level of abstraction (quantum mechanics and relativity physics) do they fall under the same laws. Granted, there has been a strong tendency in western marxism -- see Sebastiano Timpanaro, _On Materialism_ -- to ignore Sam's point. I don't think there is any danger of that here, and for purposes of the present topic the *differences* between humans and bees are far more important than what they share.
> Bees and other
> species are also social and have their own social relations.
No. The concept of bees and ants as "social" is a bad metaphor from (mostly) bad poetry and children's tales. To see them as social empties that concept of any meaning relevant to human affairs. As I have said before, there are very few people on this list (and I am not among them) who know enough about biology in general and evolution in particular to say much of interest on the topic. What we do claim to know something about are human social relations and human history. Thus we *are* in a position to describe what biologists need to explain -- but we are *not* in a position to do the biological explanation.
It is useful to remember that Marx (I paraphrase from memory) said that a knowledge of human labor illuminated the ape -- he did *not* say that a knowledge of the ape illuminated human labor. One of the two or three enabling myths of bourgeois thought is the genetic fallacy, the belief that by explaining the origin of something we have explained the thing. (Adam & Eve & the Apple.)
> > 2. Why seek a moral lesson in nature, be it an "egoistic" or
> > "altruistic" one? There is no shame in becoming extinct, as Stephen
> > Jay Gould says.
>
> There are no moral lessons in nature, only causal explanations of how
> nature works.
But it is not nature in the abstract that is of concern here -- it is an explanation of human social relations. And the explanation of social relations must be historical, not biological. (We are taking biology for granted here, but biology offers no direct explanations of social relations. Besides, you want to reword this, for you can't mean what you say. There are no causal explanations *in* nature, but only causal explanations *of* nature *in* human society.
> Gould is a dyed in the wool Darwinian which commits him to
> certain views. I don't think he would dispute what I've posted about
> group selection.
>
> >
> > 3. Since humans are creatures of social relations, there is no pure
> > "egoist." What looks like a problem of "egoism" to us may be
> > something else altogether whose essence & cause the term "egoism"
> > doesn't capture.
>
> What are you worried about? Women(and men who support them)being called
> egoists for having abortions?
What you *should* be worried about is *naming* accurately what is to be explained. I have argued before that both "altruism" and "egoism" are ideological illlusions -- generated by individualist metaphysics. By asking questions in terms of these myths you preempt any possible answer. What we are *given* are human social relations, existing prior to any given individual and constituting that individual's being. Wherever and whenever we (or the species) find ourselves we are always already constituted by an ensemble of social relations (which, in fact, are rather older than biologically modern humans).
> It is a moral dilemma that has to be
> worked through. J.J. Thompson's argument for abortion would solve it.
> Another person or foetus does not have the right to your body.
No. It is *not* a moral dilemma. No moral issue is raised by abortion. What we are faced with is the strictly political task of establishing the automatic right to an abortion for any reason (or no reason at all) without moral pressure. There are two separate questions here. First it must be understood *among* marxists that abortion raises no moral question. *Then* we can discuss the tactics and strategy of defending the right to abortion in a social order that wrongly classifies it as a moral issue. That may or may not involve making "moral" arguments ourselves, but if we do so we must understand that we do so for agitational reasons, not because there is any basis for making it a moral issue.
>
>
> You can hold that the human brain is a product of
> natural selection yet the mind is the product of social relations.
> Requires some fancy footwork though a la Wilfred Sellars.
You keep falling back on the abstract isolated human individual This was Rousseau's premise in the Discourse on Inequality, and despite the bizarreness of his premise he had fine things to say there -- but it ought not to be our premise.
Carrol
>
>
> Sam Pawlett