Angelus Novus wrote:
> The contemporary
> leftist aversion to evolutionary and biological
> explanations for human behavior, is, as Steven Pinker
> points out in his useful _The Blank Slate_, a result
> of the fact that many leftists are unable to separate
> "is" from "ought." Just because something is
> "natural" does not mean that it is socially desirable.
>
> I wish more lefties would take up the call in Pinker's
> book to integrate the insights of evolutionary
> psychology into progressive politics. Refusal to do
> so just allows the Right-wingers to benefit precisely
> from the above-mentioned is/ought fallacy, with
> specious comparisons between the competition of the
> "free market" (a socially constructed institution if
> ever there was one) and the process of natural
> selection.
This position involves mistakenly treating disputable ontological claims as self-evidently true.
The particular is/ought distinction you invoke, for instance, requires the ontological assumption that values aren't objective so that claims about objective reality can't be value claims.
The distinction also means there's no objective basis for any claim about what lefties ought to do.
Moreover, the ontology has no logical space for the ontological idea of self-determination so it's also self-contradictory to assume that lefties could change their ideas and behaviour through "choice". This has the additional implication that the characterization of evolutionary psychology as insightful is also self-contradictory since like all other ideas the ideas of evolutionary biology cannot without self-contradiction be treated as self-determined. This is true as well of the idea that they are insightful.
Finally, the conception of human experience to which the position leads implies that experience can't provide rational grounds for any belief other than "solipsism of the present moment".
It's self-contradictory to conclude from this that "truth" is a "totally subjective concept" so that whatever I choose to believe about say "art" is true simply because I choose to believe its' true. The only belief that can be a true belief is this solipsism. The belief that truth can be self-determined in this way also contradicts the assumptions that exclude any role for self- determination.
Ted