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Human Collective Agreement I: The Heart of Human Nature

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  If we could  better understand  what is at the heart of human nature than agreement about how to collectively move forward as a species becomes a possibility.  I believe that the heart of what makes us human is very simple, in fact, so simple that it is mostly taken for granted and ignored. We can talk about the  superior intelligence of humans, compared to other animals,  but we don’t really know how or why that intelligence developed.  Was it because we had to cope with bigger group size, as British Anthropologist  Robin Dunbar argues?   Was the development of language the driver in brain size? It appears from evidence of ancient skulls that the evolutionary rate of growth in the size of the hominin brain started accelerating  around the time that stone tools and weapons were first developed, approximately two and a half million years ago, well before humans are said to have developed language. Skeletal evidence reveals that anatomically modern humans, that is, humans that were
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Human Collective Agreement II

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  I’m fascinated with the image of the wizard from JRR Tolkien's   Lord of the Rings.   In this exceptional work of fantasy the fictional characters Gandalf and Saruman are members of an ancient order of wizards having the magical power to create new realities by casting spells.   We like to imagine that this power would reside in individuals, but in fact, words do have the power to create reality, but only if they are uttered  within a background of collective human agreement. That’s what is missing from the wonderful image of the wizard - the background.  And that is as it should be in a mythical or poetic account, because what forms the background is not commonly noticed, and besides, magic is fun and mysterious. Everything humans do is done against  a cultural background.  This background was created by successive agreements among and between many many groups of people.  That does not mean that when I decide to do something new, that I have to consult everybody including
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Against Meta-Ethics - Ethics as First Philosophy

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  Where to start? What keeps philosophers up at night worrying?  I can assure you it isn’t meta-ethics, which I will discuss after I’ve  introduced the real villain in this story.  What keeps philosophers up at night is something called “ethical naturalism”.  That’s the notion that there can be a science of morality, a way of explaining what morality does that is non-subjective and avoids the notions of moral freedom, responsibility, and purpose. Historically, past forms of ethical naturalism have morphed into Eugenics and Social Darwinism, practices which, in their crudest forms have led to the death camps. So, yes, it has kept me up at night.  But don’t worry, because there is a philosophical antidote to this horrible disease!  It is called “meta-ethics”; and, although I heartily agree that it does help me to get a good night’s rest, I think it actually makes it harder for all of us to understand how ethics works, and it almost seems as if it is designed that way on purpose.  Was it?
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Human Nature

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  When humans first domesticated plants and animals they overrode natural selection in order to favour certain physical and behavioural features over others. Most domesticates don’t do well in the absence of humans, because the characteristics that were selected by humans, such as tameness and docility, are not advantageous in the natural world. It’s fair to say that at least a part of their nature is determined by human choice and not natural selection.  Analogously, most humans wouldn’t survive in a natural environment without other humans to cooperate with.  A mountain lion or a bear doesn’t need to be around others of their species to survive, and they are not socializers, except when it comes to mating time.  Humans are a social species but a social species that is unlike any other.  Just as we’ve prospered by selecting and maintaining certain advantageous features in domesticated plants and animals,  we prospered even more by collectively selecting certain human moral character
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