An analysis of the concept of good

 Some items serving as a rather chaotic mnenomic (not a systematic outline):

• multiple meanings of good 
• good vs. valuable; why value theory/axiology; ethics (not only)
• good artifact, good swimmer, good at swimming, good for X, good person; polymorphism
• reduction
• e.g. good artifact is one that serves well (goodly) its purpose
• e.g. good will is one that wills a good outcome
• e.g. good conduct is one that obeys good rules
• e.g. good rule is one whose universal adoption tends to lead to good outcomes
• e.g. good outcome is one that pleases a good person
• e.g. good person is one that is pleased with good outcomes (this, together with the above item, yields circularity) 
• e.g. good analysis is one that is true or valid (regardless of whether it is pleasing) 
• good horse
• good at work at a field
• good racing horse 
• good outcome, good state of the world
• X is a good swimmer; X has beeing a good swimmer; X has good being a swimmer
• good news
• good will
• self-reference: good analysis of the concept of good 
• good as desirable
• desirable vs. desired
• Aristotle speaks of good desired for its own sake (I think; beware of Greek-English translation)
• desirable by whom? 
• desirable by humans
• desirable by chimpanzees
• desirable by members of homo neanderthalis 
• desirable by Čapek's newts/salamanders
• desirable by human-like aliens/extraterrestrials
• desirable by artificial intellects
• desirable by Christian God
• desirable by Greek gods
• desirable by abstract universal cognitive and executive agents
• desirable by the creator of the universe, if any 
• situational concept of good; situation-relativism
• inversion
• missing a train seems bad but if the train derails, it may turn out good
• Three Miles Island was bad per se, but it was a good warning
• good as pleasing/pleasurable 

What follows is likely to be a rather poorly organized article, serving above all to capture ideas. The concept (or concepts) of good seems to be an outstanding philosophical challenge, a matter of disagreement.

A survivalist/existentialist account of good can be this: an agent considers some things good and others bad. The agent seeks what is good (by his assessment) and avoids what is not good (by his assessment). The combination (agent, good-assignment) survives or it does not survive. If the agent is a biological individual, the good-assignment depends in part on the genes. Not only does the agent survive or not survive but also the genes get copied into future generations or they do not. Not only do the genes get copied or not but also the good-assignment, when put into words, gets copied into future or not. This account seems to have a subjectivist element, and focuses on the viability of a particular concept of good (but is it a concept? isn't it rather an operationalization?). For some uses of the word good, that seems uncompelling/unconvincing, e.g. a good swimmer or a good racing horse.

The concept vs. multiple concepts. The title speaks of the concept with a definite article but that is misleading; a dictionary entry typically gives multiple meanings. I hope that I will be able to ignore most of the meanings and obtain some interesting analysis anyway. In a self-referential bent, I hope to produce a good analysis, or at least half-good.

Good vs. valuable. See also my Wikiversity article An analysis of value, where I proposed to connect valuable and good thus: X is valuable iff X is good to have. And thus, even a relatively bad knife could be good to have. A relatively bad spouse could be good to have, from genetic perspective.

Good can be analyzed as polymorphic. By this I mean that the definition or technical definition may depends on the kind of entity of which good is predicated. And thus, a good artifact, e.g. a good knife, will have quite a different analysis from a good outcome (of an intervention).

Good and ethics and axiology/value theory. One might think the concept of good is studied by ethics. That is not clear. The words ethics and ethical are being used in a confusing manner. In the context of medicine, good treatment is one that is likely to lead to saved life or improved health at low risk of side effects, but that is not what medical ethics is concerned with. Perhaps medical ethics is concerned with a good conduct of the medical doctor in a sense that goes beyond these primary concern. And thus, medical ethics could require the medical doctor to treat the patient as a liberal subject capable of giving an informed consent or dissent, which requires that the doctor treat the patient as a subject rather than a passive object to be acted upon. I will therefore avoid the semi-plausible speculation that this article belongs to the field of ethics. As for value theory, I indicated that I see good and valuable as distinct, so I do not see why the designation value theory should apply to the analysis of good. If someone defines value theory as including an analysis of good, admitting the designation to be slightly misleading, then the article would belong to that field. To which field this article belongs I find rather insignificant; that is a job for a librarian or meta-philosopher. It is nonetheless an interesting consideration since it seems to bring in additional clarifying observations.

Good artifact. A good knife is one that can well serve its purpose. The purpose of the knife is presumably to allow cutting. Whether the knife can well serve as a weigh is insignificant. And thus, the being good does not really apply to the individual object (that is a knife); it applies to or relates to its being a knife. Even so, if we are given an individual object and we can determine that it is a knife (and thus, an artifact), we can determine the primary purpose for the individual object.

Good swimmer. Someone can be a good swimmer or be good at swimming. A human is not an artifact (or not obviously so; one might claim humans are self-domesticated animals and thus quasi-artifacts, like dogs). Given an individual human, we generally cannot unambiguously determine his primary purpose or function. Even when we can, that does not help: a good medical doctor can be a bad swimmer. And thus, being good applies here to being a swimmer rather than to the object that exhibits being a swimmer (and being a human).

Good human/person. A human can be a good swimmer yet be considered a bad human or a bad person. An example of a bad person could be one that is a dishonest liar, cheater and one that disregards causing harm to other people. That person's being a very good swimmer or painter would be beside the point. It is perhaps worth noting that it is other humans that are predicating the human to be good (or not good). And thus, it is the interests of other humans that get reflected in the person being described as good (or not good), much more than the interests of the human being described. One might think: it is not good (for one's interests) to be too good a person (good as considered by others). Moreover, if one considered a general standard of good  (perhaps decreed by God, if any), the predication of good assigned by other people may reflect their selfish interests. The best concept of a good person would perhaps be one that is predicated by God (or Martians?).

Good will. A good will could be one that aims at good outcome. Alternatively, a good will is one that aims to obey good rules. Good rules could be those whose obedience leads to good outcomes. It might seem that both takes are in reference to outcomes and are therefore equivalent. I don't think they are equivalent.

Good action. An action could be good if it leads to a good outcome. But we do not know which actions are guaranteed to lead to a good outcome. Actions are undertaken under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete knowledge.

Good outcome. From gene-selfish perspective, for a biological individual/agent, a good outcome is the genes being copied or states of affairs becoming more favorable toward that objective. From a tribe-selfish perspective, a good outcome is the tribe continuing existing or having its power expanded. There are many other perspectives, leading to different concepts of a good outcome (maybe not concepts but operationalizations; I don't know).

Good horse. A horse can be analyzed as an artifact (one might claim it is a semi-artifact, being a domestic animal, and the domestication could be analyzed as artificing). Thus, we may ask about the purpose of the horse or at least purpose for which the horse is being deployed. Some horses can be deployed for work in the field, other as racing horses. A good racing horse can be bad at work in the field. And thus, we cannot determine the goodness of the horse of the horse class level; we need to look closer.

Good as desirable. One general idea of good is as desirable. That could apply above all to good outcome. And thus, an outcome is good if it is desirable. Here, a contrast between desirable and desired is to be drawn. A deranged human can temporarily desire an outcome that is generally not desired. A deranged human in need of insulin could throw away the insulin, an undesirable outcome. A possible criticism may be that human desires are not to be trusted. That is, not only are the desires of individual humans to be trusted, also the aggregate desires of human collectives are not to be trusted. One might object that thing desirable to humans merely appear to be good and are not really good. Perhaps things desired by God, if any, are really good (I am an atheist).

Good as worthy of seeking. One generic definition of good could be as worthy of seeking (and bad as worthy of avoidance). The question what is good would not be a question about semantics of the word good but rather a question about ultimate objectives or the like. And thus, the following statement would be implausible: we considered three options; we evaluated the options using five criteria; the first option turned out to be the best using all five criteria; therefore, we picked option two. Here, we do not know what the criteria of goodness are, only that some were used. And we can reduce it to one dimension: we considered three options, our evaluation showed the first option to be the best and the second to be the worst, so we picked the second option and implemented it.

Good as pleasing. Hedonism indicates that (human) pleasure (and pain taken as negative pleasure) is the ultimate measure of good. However, one can well derive pleasure from aiming at the right concept of good, and if the concept of good is defined as pleasing, we get a cybernetic self-referential loop, which I propose is bad (meta). Mill seems to accept that his (in my view misnamed) utilitarianism is attacked as a philosophy for the pigs, to which he raises a defense. There is more, I hope, in my article on Hedonism in Wikiversity.

Good as fit for purpose. This applies pretty well to artifacts (knives, etc.) it seems. It may well apply to quasi-artifacts such as horses as well: here, horses are seen as subservient to human purposes and objectives, and are evaluated (good-predicated) from a human perspective. And thus, the purpose of a racing horse would be to win a horse race and the purpose of a horse for field work would be to last under load of the specific work, be obedient, etc. A medieval lord can good-predicate of the human serfs from the point of view of his objectives and purposes, e.g. for a serf, to be good entails being obedient and non-revolting. An ancient slave-owner can similarly good-predicate of his slaves in reference to purposes for which he keeps them, treating them on par with tools/instruments, cattle, etc. Whether a free human (non-enslaved, non-serf, etc.) can be analyzed as having a purpose in reference to which he is fit is unclear; my guess is that a free human, rather than being fit for a purpose, imposes purposes (and his will). (Maybe I am using the word purpose in multiple ways, which may lead to the fallacy of equivocation.) I vaguely remember that Aristotle might have been seeking such a purpose for humans, and that purpose would be to engage in an activity in accordance with rational rules, or something of the sort (verification pending).

Good as a partial order. Sort of obvious given the right educational background, e.g. set theory, economics, administration, optimization theory and decision theory. To be properly articulated later. Multiple dimensions. Prioritizing. Weighing. Incomparability. Better in one regard, worse in other regard. Better price but worse quality. Incomplete information. Risk aversion. Indecisivenes.

Good for (and good as). The form is "X is good for Y". And thus, artifacts are good or less good for their purpose. The key word is instrumentality.

Competing interests. In a business transation, obtaining a high price is good for the seller, but generally bad for the buyer.

Inversion of good. Bad events or outcomes can be good for something (covered by proverbs). Missing a train can look bad, but it may turn out fortunate if the train derails and many passengers get killed. The Three Mile Island accident was bad on its own, but it served as a good warning of dangers of nuclear energy.

Good painting. One could think that a good painting is beautiful. However, as long as painting serve as store of value assets, the matter may be much more complicated. Originality and inventiveness, even perverse one, can impact the perception of whether the painting is good. It can in any case lead to a high price.

Situational good. In reference to Popper, Wittgenstein and the poker, it may seem unconditionally good that a debater does not wield a poker and does not create an impression of a threat by it. This does not seem to lead to some universal concept of ultimate good. This merely leads to the idea that the situation of a debate calls for some things to be avoided. A debate is a joint enterprise. By contrast, if Wittgenstein wants to rob Popper (very unlikely), threatening him with a poker and requesting Popper to give him money would be instrumentally good (and be considered "ethically" bad). Therefore, Popper may seem to have won or scored with the poker, but Wittgenstein in fact did seem to have a solid case for his resistance to analysis of good.

Good and self-reference. When I set out to write this analysis, one of my aims was that it would be a good analysis or at least moderately good. I had a pre-theoretical concept of good. The pre-theoretical concept of good was guiding the analysis but was not binding. On the other hand, it would be quite suprising if the analysis would bring about a definition or clarification that would rather fit, say, the common use of the word heavy. More on this topic of pre-theoretical concepts, etc. can be found e.g. in the article on the definition of woman by an author whose name I forgot (I can find him in one of my articles in Wikiversity, I guess).

Common good and human-centeredness. In the age of the awareness of humans causing great harm to the natural environment, human-centered concepts of good may be not good enough (meta). Common good would be some aggregate of good of individual humans, perhaps Millian greatest happiness of greatest numbers of humans or aggregate human well-being. Perhaps if chimpanzees had nuclear weapons, they could be counted into the common good as well, or else. An agent capable of making credible effective threats, even without words, could quite possibly ensure being counted as part of common. Human-like Martians or aliens could quite possibly ensure their being counted into the aggregate well-being. They could as well discount humans. So could Čapek's salamanders from the War with Newts. The chief salamander could well prioritize salamander well-being over animal (human) well-being. In the age of increased debates about artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial intellects (artilects), perhaps the artilects could also want have their well-being counted or they could treat humans as mere animals to be kept in a zoo, and thus, common good in their understanding would be the common good of the artilects.

Good and Wilson and Ruse. I must have read an article on Ruse and Wilson (not by them, but on them) by which they are something like good-nihilists or absolute-good-nihilists, indicating that the genes deceives us about the existence of objective good. At the same time, Wilson speaks in favor of protecting the natural environment; keyword: biophilia. From what I recall, someone threw a glass of water at Wilson. Wilson is of Sociobiology fame; sociology would be in part a precursor to evolutionary psychology. Wilson would be a biologist or specifically ethologist (student of animal behavior); Ruse would be a philosopher.

Good and Pirsig's Quality. Pirsig's popular 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems to be about what is good, as per the initial question at the beginning of the novel. The subtitle is An inquiry into values. (The subtitle for his novel Lila is An inquiry into morals, I think.) Pirsig mostly does not use the word goodness but rather quality, which he capitalizes as Quality. The word quality is indeed often used as a synonym of goodness, or quality of being good; I find this to be an etymological trainwreck, but this is not Pirsig's fault. Pirsig proposes to keep Quality (goodness) undefined. He first investigates the concept in the context of text composition: what is Quality in thought and statement. He eventually proceeds to a spectacular statement that Quality is the continuing stimulus that forces us to create the world we are living in, every last bit of it. He also relates Quality to Kitto's (and thus Greek) arete (check spelling), something like immortal fame rather than virtue. My best assessment is that Pirsig's uses of the word Quality do not point to a single coherent concept. That's it as a brief note; more would be for a separate article on Pirsig's philosophy.

As I indicated, this is much less well organized than it would ideally be. I hope some of it was interesting or useful, although it may well look like platitutes.

Questions:

• Which good sources treat of the present topic? 
• Which good source treats of instrumental good or instrumental value? SEP value theory?
• Does SEP value theory cover this topic?
• Who defined the German word Axiologie? Did the definer and examiner proceeded in such a manner that the present analysis would come under his head?
• Do I want to analyze the lead sense in Merriam-Webster:good and compare it to my analysis? Other dictionaries, including Czech dictionaries?
• Should I link to Wittgenstein's article on ethics? (I link to it from Wikiversity, What is ethics).
• Should I turn the semi-sections into heading-sections?

Copyright/license: I am considering using a free-as-in-freedom license, e.g. CC-BY-SA (or perhaps CC-BY-SA-NC), but until I make that decision, this is a proprietary artifact, copyrighted by me.

On unhealthy trust of experts, the value of experthood, credentialism, etc.

Some items (not a one-to-one outline):

• American popular culture
• ZMM 1974, experts broke the motorycle
• COVID-19 experts
• We need experts
• Distrust vs. outright dismissal 
• Meta-experts? Meta-expertise? Becoming an expert on dealing with experts?
• Asking experts questions (including stupid questions) to uncover red flags pointing to likely incompetence?
• Experthood in psychiatry 

In American popular culture, there seems to be quite a bit of distrust of experts. One item substantiating the idea is the hugely popular American philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from 1974. There, the narator recounts how professional mechanics damaged his motorcycle instead of fixing it; he had to fix it himself. He indicates that there is a school of mechanical thought that says that you should not try to fix the motorcycle yourself. You should contact a professional mechanic. The narrator (Pirsig) says that it is this elitism that he would like to see wiped out, or the like.

In Programátorské poklesky (Programmer's failings or missteps, let's say) by Kučera and Kopeček, there is a quote to the effect that there are three things that can ruin a man: wine, women and an excessive trust of experts. I suspect they get this sentence from American culture (they both worked with computers and computer science, and computers are an American thing; the British with their ZX Spectrum and the seeds of what became ARM will pardon me), but I do not know that for sure.

In relation to the COVID-19 crisis, experts first worked out epidemiological plans that indicated that lockdowns were a bad idea, likely doing more harm than good. Then other experts published spectacularly badly failing mathematical models for COVID-19 (recall that certain strands of astrology are also mathematical: they are pseudo-random generators taking heavenly data as seeds). Expert articles started to pop up supporting the lockdown idea. Moreover, some media pointed to the institute doing the bad modelling being funded by Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Quite a bit seems astray here.

Richard Faynman recounted how medical doctors misdiagnosed his girlfriend Arlene. He wrote that the doctor was an idiot and did not know what he was doing. There was another doctor, asking the right questions about the diagnosis, but a nurse dismissed him as a troublemaker from a neighborhood. I have more notes on this in Wikiversity, full with Feynman quotes. 

Ben Goldacre (a British epidemiologist, I think, who had a TED presentation) reports how medical literature is skewed by widespread corruption, e.g. by unfavorable results being withheld and favorable published by the big phrama companies doing the medical trials.

In socialist Czechoslovakia, so-called "experts" in what they mistakenly called "social sciences" (under which head they filed philosophy as well) produced swaths of economical and philosophical analysis, most or lot of it arguably nonsense (or very bad) supporting the official doctrine of the state.

What, then, should one do as far as experthood? Should one do everything oneself? Should one never consult an expert? Should one pay no attention to who is and who is not an expert?

It is obvious that the concept of experthood is important and indispensable. Even Feynman depends on experts, that is to say, the people who wrote the medical literature that he studied. But here, a nice contrast can be made: a single diagnosis that is not a reviewed publication vs. a reviewed publication.

A healthy distrust of experts is not the same thing as dismissal of experthood on the whole. For instance, should one distrust medical doctors, one could order multiple independent diagnoses from different teams (if one can afford to pay for it), and then compare whether they agree. These kinds of procedures are standard in engineering, where in some settings an artifact or its change is required to be reviewed by independent reviewers/inspectors; when they disagree, they try to find out who, if anyone, is right (the disagreement may reveal that they have it all wrong).

In the field of law, one seems well advised to consult an expert, even if maintaing a healthy distance. A lawyer would have learned a lot of things about the statutory law and the common law that an amateur is unlikely learn with reasonable effort.

One general idea supporting experthood is this: an expert visits cases or items in his field again and again. He will have made a range of mistakes in his field and have learned from them. In short, he would have gained "experience". That is at least true of a real/true expert. What is key is to distinguish a true expert from all those all too abundant phony experts. Unfortunately, there is no simple way of doing so. Certification and credentials are items supporting expert identification, but they are not infallible/perfectly reliable. In medicine and aerospace, only certified professionals are allowed to practice, in many countries (for some professions; not a floor cleaner on the airport, I figure).

More on the note of credentials, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples of people without university-level education, and thus lacking the credentials. When Wozniak, the genius engineer behind Apple I and Apple II, co-founded Apple, he did not have a university degree. (Question: what are other notable people in management and engineering without university degree?) Einstein made his ground-breaking contribution while working in a patent office, but he did have a physics degree at that point. Richard Stallman gained a physics degree but achieved fame for results in software and its philosophy (GPL is not computer software, nor is GNU Manifesto; they are cultural software, if anything). Linus Torvalds started his work on Linux while he was a student, before he completed his master's thesis; he had a disagreement with an academic expert, Andrew Tanenbaum, concerning the best design for an operating system kernel, monolithic kernel vs. microkernel. Steven Wolfram has a PhD in physics, but his most notable work seems to be in computer programming and software design (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha). While Elon Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics (and economics), it is not clear he specifically studied rocketry, vital for Space X. In many of the cases, learning by doing is a key phrase. However, one should not be misled: there are many successful people with degrees in their relevant field and, in 20th and 21st centuries, it is quite possible that having a degree is rather typical for successful people (I don't know). It seems likely that many people benefit from attending a university. (There seems to be a modicum of truth in Charlie Kirk's statement that college is a scam, but the statement seems greatly overblown. Or maybe I do not know what "college" is exactly, other than a university. Since Charlie was in the U.S. before he was assasinated, the word "college" in his statement is to be interpreted in U.S. context.)

On how to tell whether someone is an expert, let me recall a conversation I had many years ago with a medical doctor in Brno, Czechia (the doctor shall remain unnamed). The conversation was approximately as follows (from memory):

• DP: What is the probability that the diagnosis you have determined is correct?
• Doc: I don't know.
• DP: Okay, is it least 5%?
• Doc: In medicine, just like in life, nothing is certain.
• DP: In life, some things are certain, such that you are sitting in this chair right now.
• Doc: Given quantum mechanics, something something. (I do not recall what the doctor said exactly, but the point was that that was not certain either.)
• DP: (Angrily) I think you have a major cognitive disturbance. (I should not have said that. It did not help anything.)

As fas as I am concerned, the above was a huge red flag concerning the validity of the diagnosis and the trustworthiness of the medical doctor. Poincaré's adage applies here, I think: to believe everything and to doubt everything are two equally convenient solutions: both dispense with reflection. On asking incisive questions to putative experts, let me remind the Czech audience of the inquiry by the TV personality Kraus into the meaning of biomasa, directed at the Czech politician Jacques[1]. This classic is a great reminder. (Young Kraus played a nasty/disruptive boy in the film Saxana. He seems to be fit for these kinds of irreverent endeavors.)

On psychiatry and experthood. Let me quote user thienvu812 from under a video on Study 329: "I know when I worked in the mental health field and questioned the side effects of the drugs; I was told I wasn't a team player and the Drs are experts. I am glad there are Drs like you exposing the corruption. Thank you". Let us recall some of the performance of the "experts": 1) on life unworthy of living (a German psychiatrist whose work contributed to killing and sterilizations of psychiatric patients in Nazi Germany); 2) insulin shock therapy (bogus); 3) lobotomy (bogus, leading to a Nobel price). Let us also recall that the concept of team player is at direct odds with the critical attitude, championed by Popper's critical rationalism. One should perhaps also think of the socialist member of the collective; in Czech discourse, the word for collective (kolektiv) was replaced with the word for team (tým) to much the same effect. Words change; structures remain. On this topic, there is more in my "A critical look at psychiatry" at Wikiversity, which includes some great further reading.

That's it for experthood for now, as a first quick take. I apologize for this being more rambling/disorganized than I would like it to be. I hope some of the ideas are useful to someone.

Questions:

• What are some of the best sources online covering the topic?
• What does Stephen Wolfram say on the topic, if anything?
• Are Kopeček and Kučera indicating the source of their memorable quote? 

The Czech Semi-Socialist Republic

I think of the present Czechia, the Czech Republic, as of Czech Semi-Socialist Republic. It is in reference to the name of Czechoslovakia, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, or, as Slovaks would like to have it, Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic. The Czech abbreviation was ČSSR.

The semi-socialist character

The key question of this little article is whether the present (2025) Czech Republic is in part or entirely socialist. If we take socialism to be the state ownership of all means of production, then it is not socialist. But it seems socialist in part, semi-socialist. 

The point of this designation, arguably an apt one, is to highlight some key facts:

• Socialized healthcare
• Socialized education; the public university-level education is tuition-free
• Socialized science and research
• Socialized old-age pensions and disability pensions
• Extensive support of and a dense network of mass transportation (city transport, railways, buses)
• The energy/utility giant ČEZ is 70% state-owned[1]
• There are other (in part or in full) state-owned companies, including Lesy České republiky (The Forests of the Czech Republic)[2], Budějovický Budvar (brewery), Czech Post, and Czech Railways.
• The Czech Television and Czech Radio are not private and are funded by something like a per-capita tax, a license fee

Sure enough, most European countries are mixed economies; even the U.S. is a mixed economy. The 19th century laissez-faire capitalism is gone. One would have to clarify whether Czechia is more semi-socialist than, say, Sweden or Germany. I do not have an answer at this point. One hint is that Czechia is a post-socialist country and there is quite a bit of inertia in history of countries. For instance, the commie blocks (paneláky) in large cities are hard to overlook and are not going away any time soon. At any rate, the degree of socialization of healthcare in Czechia seems quite unlike the U.S.

One objective of making this point is to remind the Czechs in how kind country they are living, in so far as the state-provided services are concerned. It is perhaps quite natural to bitterly complain about things (it is perhaps some kind of fun), but let us recall how well we have it.

Label rejected: semi-Slovak

I pondered whether I should add "semi-Slovak" to the designation. It would point to there being quite many Slovaks living and working in Czechia, owing in part to Czech and Slovak being relatively easily mutually intelligible. The politician Babiš is originally Slovak. I know directly some Slovaks I have worked with or have been in contact with. My Slovak university teachers included Ivana Černá and Jozef Gruska. Perhaps some of the most capable and adventurous Slovaks move to Czechia (I don't know; some move to Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.; better analysis is required).

The problem is that the percentage that self-reported Slovaks make on the Czechia population is only ca. 2%[3]. Even if one meets and registers non-trivial number of Slovaks (including Babiš), and not e.g. the Polish, Austrians, Germans, etc., it does not seem to warrant the "semi-Slovak" moniker.

A related designation

To incorporate more elements, we can get more playful: Czech-Moravian-Silesian Semi-Socialist Republic. It is Tolkien's Ents, I think, that replace labels with descriptions or something of the sort; a neat idea.

An aside: Peter Hitchens about privatization

Peter Hitchens, a brother of the eminent Christopher Hitchens and a conservative commentator, has interesting takes on the value of privatization, putting the unrestrained Thatcherian privatization into doubt[4][5].

Further questions 

• What portion of the GDP of Czechia is made by the state-owned sectors?
• How does the above indicator compare to other European countries? 
• What portion of the adult population owns real estate, whether a house or an apartment/flat? 
• What companies other than ČEZ are largely owned by the Czech state?

Potential improvement

• The above questions should ideally be answered in this article. 
• Much more detail could be provided, full with charts, concept/entity maps, etc. Someone should have done it already, I think. Someone should send me a link to a page that does much better job than this one, and I will add the link.
• Some references are to Wikipedia; they should ideally be replaced with better sources. They are a quick ersatz; these kinds of data points that Wikipedia provides are unlikely to be entirely wrong.

Further reading

• Economy of the Czech Republic#Public policy, wikipedia.org
• Economy of the Czech Republic, britannica.com

Last update: 28 Nov 2025.

A purpose of life: the power of living things over matter

This article investigates the following candidate purpose of life: "Maximize the power of living things over matter", or "the power of life" for short. It seems both inspiring and sinister.

The idea is not new. We can find nearly the same idea in the self-published 2003 book by David Hockey Developing A Universal Religion: "To my mind, the only viable option [for surrogate purpose] is to support life’s continual evolution and focus upon helping it to achieve an omnipotent ability." Arguably, life cannot be made omnipotent, but aiming at making all the living things as powerful as possible is a possible and realistic (in principle) ultimate or penultimate objective.

Let us have a closer look at the notion. When humans arrived at the Moon, it was an example not only of the power of humankind but also the power of all the living things. Humans can be seen as part of a larger aggregate entity, life. When humans can do something, so can the aggregate of all the living things. One can describe the Moon-landing as a story of life's achievement: life had to invent humans to get to the Moon. This purpose-colored story is an as-if story: there is no true purpose in biological evolution unlike in man-made things and one can find objections to there being a direction in evolutionary processes in literature. Nonetheless, even if it is an as-if story, there is something compelling about it. One can argue that the power of life is one of the implied purposes or directions of evolution of life. It is not a true purpose and only an implied one, but that is the only kind of purpose we can hope to find in nature. From the point of view of all the living things, humans and their technology are a mixed blessing: on one hand, they contribute to mass destruction of life's creations, on the other hand, they achieve unique outcomes for life such as proliferation of new forms, shapes and functional objects, flight to the Moon and may theoretically one day achieve life's spread to another planet.

In the following, I will use the term "life program" to refer to candidate purposes of human life and similar objects that in effect tell a person what to do in life. The term is in analogy to computer programs but also to management programs. Personal mission statements can serve as life programs, and so can life philosophies. A life program can be in an imperative form, "do X", in a statement-of-purpose form, "The purpose of life is to do X", in an ultimate-objective form "The ultimate objective of human life is to do X", and in other forms.

A charm of the power-of-life life program is that it assigns a larger purpose to one's life while not being speciesist, or humankind-chauvinistic. It does not arbitrarily pick humankind as the entity or species of focus; it allows any species to be the agent of the power of all the living things. Another charm may be that it provides an implied purpose of all life, not just human life.

Before we delve deeper into the power of life, let me introduce another evolution-related life program as a point of contrast. The life program is presented by Donald Cameron in his book The Purpose of Life: Human Purpose and Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective by Woodhill Publishing, 2001. The book takes a biological gene-centered perspective of human life. It introduces multiple axioms, and derives from them the following principle: "The correct set of values, in any evolved being, is the one that will give its holder's genes the maximum advantage in terms of natural selection." One means of maximizing the advantage is, according to Cameron, to have many children and thereby maximize the number of copies of one's genes. Next best guess is to help reproductive success of one's closest relatives. Even helping unrelated humans is better than nothing since they share some genes. One of the axioms indicates that biological evolution is the only source from which values originate in the universe, and the book dismisses cultural or memetic evolution as a possible source of values. Cameron calls the quoted principle the Evolutionary Value Principle. I criticize this principle in another article on both descriptive and ethical grounds: the dismissal of cultural evolution as a source of values is incorrect, and the principle does not lead to anything like sane ethics despite the book's claim to the contrary, invoking kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and display altruism: prohibition of slavery, extermination of weak tribes, experiments on prisoners and conservation of nature are nowhere close to being derived from the principle. The principle still serves to show what kind of purposes one may extract from biological evolution if one tries hard enough, and it is interesting and novel.

There are multiple regards in which the power-of-life life program is sinister and problematic. Let us now turn to the problems with it.

One problem with the power of life is that it knows no or very little kindness. There is no obvious way of deriving sane ethics from it. A supporter could support killing of the disabled, medical experiments on prisoners, slavery and extermination of competing tribes. One can admit that in this regard it fares no worse than the power of humankind. And pursue-one's-happiness life program does not guarantee ethics either: a person can be so born as to find pleasure and happiness in what others find objectionable and telling that person they should take their own happiness as the sole and ultimate measure of good is a recipe for producing objectionable behavior. Fullfill-your-potential life program fares no better: potential for what? Potential for becoming a mass murderer or a cruel emperor?

Another related problem with the power of life is that it is a collectivist life program, and these easily lend themselves as justifications for horrible mass crimes. History shows that people are capable of volumes of horrible crimes once they feel they are acting in the name of a larger collective purpose. That is the mixed blessing: once you pick a larger purpose that goes beyond one's individual existence, you get the considerable risk of abuse as part of the deal.

Another objection to the power of life is that, under certain interpretations of "life", it does not care about continued existence of humankind. If some part of life is better than humans in maximizing the power of life, what does the power of life care about humans? Under some analysis, some may even consider robots to be part of life, and be indifferent about whether robots take over the Earth and eliminate humanity. After all, definitions of life usually do not require that life be based on DNA. If one objects to that use of the word "life", modifications of the power-of-life life program are available: the power of life-like entities or power of cybernetic organisms, where cybernetic organisms include living things. These life programs can claim to avoid life-chauvinism: the broader the entity of focus, the better it avoids claims of chauvinism.

Another objection is that the power of life has no sense of preservation. It has no appreciation of biological diversity other than as a means to serve the power of life. The power of humankind fares no better. There is also no sense of preservation of non-biological nature: all it cares about is life, as if non-life's existence did not matter at all. For example, it does not seem to care about whether Jupiter's Great Red Spot or Earth's Grand Canyon could be destroyed.

Another objection is that, as long as we want to look at an implied purpose at all-the-living-things level, it is unclear why the power was chosen rather than something else. Rather than claiming that the power of life is the sole implied purpose of evolution, one can claim that the diversity of life is the implied purpose. Even though diversity does not increase monotonically over time, biological evolution is remarkable in its ability to produce diversity of form and function over time. Similarly, one may claim life created humans as a tool for multiplication of forms and patterns found in the universe, including musical patterns and literary patterns, to achieve even greater diversity of form than that produced by previous biological evolution. One may claim that the purpose is to reach and inhabit as many places and habitats as possible. One may pick the longevity of life as the ultimate purpose. One may creatively claim that life brought about humans specifically to produce music, bird song being an early attempt. One may claim the knowledge and representation capability of humans to be the purpose for which they were brought about. One may claim that problem solving is the ultimate objective of all life, implied in Karl Popper's book title All Life is Problem Solving.

Another objection may be that instead of looking at what is common to all the living things, we should look at what is unique to humans, that being more connected to the purpose of human life. Both humans and sentience fare better in this regard than all the living things as the entity of focus. A counter-objection may be that an implied purpose should better be extrapolative to some extent of what life was doing before humans and that a notion that only encompasses things unique to humans cannot be an implied purpose of the totality of all the living things. One may insist that all the living things are a better entity of focus than humankind only, in part since the processes that brought humans about were operational long before humans arrived.

Another objection is that the power of life knows no joy, fun, leisure, music, dance, theater, arts and sports, at least not directly and obviously. It does not seem to care about human well-being or flourishing; humans are mere instruments for it, slaves or robots as it were. It seems very arid and Spartan. It does not seem to value human freedom directly, although one may argue that human freedom tends to be instrumental to the power of humankind and thus of life.

A related objection may be that the true purpose is to be found in activities that are nominally useless, not subservient to the struggle for existence. Thus, art for art's sake, science for science's sake, sports and various hobbies are closer to the implied purpose than pursuits that are subservient to being here. One may argue that true ultimate purposes are not subservient to other purposes. A counter-argument may be that the only purposes that natural forces are guaranteed to bring into the world are those that are in some way subservient or conducive to the continued existence of the participants in those purposes since the requirement of the continued existence is the essence of the selective pressures by these forces. One may respond that these implied natural purposes are much less of true purposes than the artificial purposes that are not subservient. On a rhetorical note, pursuit of useless objectives to the exclusion of utilitarian aims may be scoffed at as decadent. Yet another angle is that the purpose of the nominally useless pursuits is to keep the population engaged in pursuits they find meaningful, preventing various undesirable things they could do otherwise out of despair or boredom. This does not explain how the tendency to engage in such pursuits came about but may help explain why various individuals and organizations including states support these pursuits. A related angle is that it is better for nations to try to compete and outperform each other in the arts, science and sports than to try to compete in destroying each other. Under these and similar angles, even things that appear nominally useless may turn out to be useful for something.

Another objection is that some forms of power are better not attained, for their destructive capabilities. A prohibition of nuclear tests is an attempt to limit the spread of certain capabilities and thus to limit power. A prohibition of certain dangerous virus experiments is also a limitation of power. One may want to accept such limitations of power and capability.

Another objection is that the phrase "power of life" implies that life is a single agent, which is rather dubious. Individual humans are agents, the collective humankind less so, all the living things even less. It appears to be a desperate attempt of runaway human cognitive faculties to misapply the notion of purpose, and in the process of doing so try to identify the agent that created humankind, which would enable the identification of the purpose of humankind with the purpose the agent had in mind when creating humankind. The misapplication results in a story in which the agent called life or evolution created humans to get to the Moon. The cognitive faculties desperately try to use the only tools at their disposal to solve the problem at hand, refusing to accept the fundamental indeterminacy of human purpose. As a response, there is no denying of the apparent open-endedness of human purpose. But even if we grant that evolution of humans has no true purpose and even if we grant that there is no single direction of evolution, there certainly are evolutionary paths that lead to complete functional objects such as human eyes or insect wings. The claim that evolution has no direction seems much less plausible than that it has multiple directions. The evolution produced humans, and evolution of humans favors maximization of power of humans in so far as it provides better defenses against other humans; thus, increases in power and capabilities in humans tend to form at least a partial evolutionary direction. One may counter that the power so evolved is so destructive as to be liable to erase any temporary progress achieved along the direction, but that does not seem necessary. The notion that the evolutionary processes are random is misleading; they do involve chance in the multiple available variation mechanisms, but they also involve what is termed natural selection, which has the power to form such organs as eyes, even if different kinds of eyes are discovered or invented along different evolutionary pathways and many paths do without eyes or wings altogether. Evolution does not resemble a generic random walk in the design space; it is a forking walk that includes randomness but also progress along various paths in the design space. Even if the resulting designs could more properly be called designoid (Dawkins), their striking design-like appearance is hard to deny. One may point out multiple directions or tendencies of evolution such as the propensity to create functional objects grouped to form larger functional subsystems and systems, and the propensity to form increasingly more deeply branching trees of taxa of life. The evolution seems to have an unfailing tendency to discover or invent ever-more-complex functional designs or designoids such as nervous systems. It seems to have a tendency to maximize various characteristics and capabilities along various axes such as the height of trees up to a point and the speed of antelopes up to a point. One may refuse to consider the designoid and purposoid tendencies of evolution in search for a life program, but to claim there are no such tendencies does not seem valid. And it seems implausible that the notions of function and purpose are wholly misapplied in reference to biological objects such as organs. To describe the function of human heart as to maximize the genetic success of the organism is to fail to provide adequate functional description that differentiates heart from lungs; an adequate functional description is that the function of the heart is to pump blood along the body. While we may accept that we should better differentiate purposes of human artifacts from purposoids of biological objects, the cognitive tool at our disposal, the notion of purpose, seems not wholly unfit to describe biological objects. If we refer not only to living things but also to all life processes using the shorthand of "life", we may point out the increasing capability of life to force shape on matter and make it do various feats: life forces matter into the shapes of biological bodies and makes them perform various feats such as jumping or flight. One may still argue that the only purpose in all this is the copying of the genes, but one may counter that this is not a purpose but a purposoid and perhaps not even that: it is debatable whether the differential replication of genes is an implied purpose or whether it is much more of a mechanism for search in the design space. The gene-copying implied purpose does not describe the functionally creative tendency of evolution. A response to that may be that on the whole-body level, the adequate functional description is to maximize genetic success and that no other adequate functional description exists; it is on the level of particular organs and organ systems that more specific functions or purposes can be identified, subservient to the overall purpose of gene-copy-maximization. However, we can still note the tendency of the implied overall purpose to support the creation of part-purposes embodied in organs and organ systems, and to support the feats organisms can perform. One may thus come up with the implied meta-purpose of the overall purpose being to bring about the variety of part-purposes we can observe. One may object that purpose-production is merely what the implied overall body-level purpose does, and that it is not its purpose, not even an implied one. But one may similarly claim that making gene copies is merely what bodies do, and that this is not their purpose, not even an implied one. To repeat a point already made, we must stay in the realm of implied purposes or quasi-purposes rather than true ones, but that is what we have to accept if we are to extract anything resembling purpose at all. These disagreements could possibly be resolved by inquiring into what exactly do we mean when we say "implied" or "quasi" in relation to purpose. That seems like a challenging task.

Another objection may be that the preferable life program should better be accessible to a human mind before the advent of modern evolutionary theory and modern feats of human technology. Prehistorical humans did almost nothing to contribute to the power of life and would probably have a hard time coming up with the power of life as a philosophy of purpose. By contrast, they did contribute to their own genetic reproductive success, which is why we are here. As a response to that, it does not seem necessary that the preferable purpose be accessible to prehistoric humans; purposes would not be accessible to non-human ancestors of humans without sufficient reflective cognitive capability. As an aside, as for prehistoric humans, they would at least be able to note the power of cultural elements to exterminate a tribe or keep it alive and prosperous: it is easy to note that a successfully enforced prohibition on having children would lead to a cessation of a tribe, and almost no biological knowledge is required for the observation. Thus, the minimum requirement of viability of cultural elements and life programs seems easy to discover. What may be harder to discover is the combination of variation and elimination of cultural elements as a creative force. One may note that the descriptive portion of cultural elements does not need to be true to support the continuing existence of the host population. Paradoxically, switching from a false to true account could have a detrimental effect on the host tribe viability: the belief in afterlife rewards for behaviors that benefit the tribe more than the individual's close family could contribute to the tribe viability. This seems also fairly easy to discover by prehistoric humans.

Another objection is that the promise of human power helping life live on another planet may be impossible to realize. That is a fair point, but the prospect of some forms of earthly life living on Mars are not entirely hopeless. Life forms flourishing in extreme conditions can be the case in point. These life forms would need humans to get to Mars.

Another objection is that in fact the contribution of humans to the aggregate of all living things is not all that significant. As a counter-objection, one may hardly deny the contribution of humankind to the increase of diversity of form and function in some directions, at the cost of considerable loss of previously achieved diversity of life. Arts and technology have brought a variety of form and function far beyond what was previously produced by all the living things. Even if humans will be unable to inhabit other planets, setting a foot on the Moon was a significant expansion of what all the living things were previously able to do. Even if one admits that the feats of biological evolution are more fundamental and grandiose than the feats of humankind, that does not diminish humankind's contribution to the aggregate creative performance. Humans have created the ultimate form-creation machine: the computer. One may combine the desire to create with the desire to limit destruction.

Another objection is that the power of humankind in service of the power of life is achieved by creative feats, which is a mere appeal to an evolved desire in some to show off. A response is that, well yes, all appeals to something as being intuitively worthwhile (power, longevity, creation, non-destruction, diversity, love, ethics) must hope to attach themselves to some evolved receptivity to such appeals; that in itself is no devastating criticism of such appeals. An alternative is to try to reject all appeals and return to the original purpose of making gene copies, except that this may be objected to on similar grounds as a rhetorical appeal to originality and purity, again trying to attach to evolved receptivities to some appeals. A value-neutral analysis of life programs may be hard to execute. The invocation of "value-neutral" itself can be scoffed at as a mere appeal to an evolved receptivity. One may wonder whether there are any value words and value assumptions that would not be scoffed at by one or the other; even the good old search for truth has been ridiculed. One has to find some value-laden words and the corresponding notions appealing.

Another objection is that all life will eventually be destroyed and that therefore all ultimate aims are futile, whether of humans or all the living things. I find it unconvincing: an ultimate aim can be pursued in a time frame, and pursuits of aims in time frames are all the pursuits that we find in the world. An aim that is attainable in a time frame is by definition not futile.

Let us now examine how several alternative life programs fare.

What about the power or continued existence of sentience? This life program fares no better than the power of life in most of the criticism raised, and is more chauvinistic since it does not care about non-sentient living things. It is less chauvinistic and more general than the power of humankind: there can be other forms of sentience. Depending on the definition of sentience, it could lead to handing over the Earth to robots and extermination of humankind.

What about the pursuit of knowledge by humankind? When unconstrained, this life program leads to medical experiments on prisoners and other horrors, as a consequence of knowledge acquisition at any and all costs. It seems to be a part of power of humankind (power to know and model) and power of life.

What about the pursuit of one's happiness? This one can be immoral as has been pointed out, but more can be said against it. It is unanalyzed. It does not reflect on the origin of the sense of pleasure, pain, happiness and unhappiness. These originate in the brain, and the brain is a product of biological evolution. The implied purpose of the bodily organs producing the sensations of pleasure and pain including the brain is to be part of a body that is a survival vehicle for the genes. Upon such reflection, one may realize that pursuit of one's happiness is the copy-one's-genes life program in disguise, but distorted by the variation part of evolutionary processes, by various by-products of selected-for features and by the slow adaptation of human genetic and biological makeup to newly appearing civilization circumstances. One may ask why one would voluntarily submit oneself to a distorted version of the original rather than to the original itself. If the original is found wanting, it is not clear that a distortion of it makes it any better. On the other hand, one may not readily give up one's moral sensibilities including rejection of slavery as mere distortions or aberrations from the underlying purpose implied in the origination process, all the more so that the purpose is merely implied. One may want to emancipate oneself from the origins rather than falling back on them entirely, and refuse to reject the emancipation as a mere aberration.

What about the greatest happiness of greatest numbers? Apart from the problems discussed in literature, there is a problem similar to one's happiness: the sense of happiness of the greatest numbers is produced by bodily organs corresponding to a distorted version of the copy-one's-genes life program. On a specific note, killing severely disabled people might increase the aggregate happiness if these people live in misery and thus contribute negatively to the aggregate happiness. The negative version that focuses on eliminating suffering and pain rather than bringing about pleasure and happiness seems to suffer from the same ailment: eliminating people that suffer would eliminate suffering and improve the aggregate suffering score. Furthermore, greatest happiness of greatest numbers of humans does not seem to have much concern for non-human living things and non-living nature.

From looking at various examples of putative life programs, it seems that simple life programs are liable to be sinister upon closer analysis and open to abuse. If one wants to have sound ethics, one has to codify it explicitly rather than derive it from a simple specification of a life program. Part of such ethics are individual freedom and autonomy, and refusal to actively sacrifice other individuals in the name of a larger aim. The need of ethical constraint is especially there in relation to various forms of power, whether of tribes, nations, humankind, sentience or all the living things.

A life program that may escape some of the criticism raised is "Rebel against all life programs", reminiscent of the Richard Dawkins quote about us, alone on Earth, being able to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. It is also reminiscent of a quote by Robert Pirsig, slightly modified as, we aren't going to get stuck on any set of fancy doctrinaire ideas. A problem is that while allowing flexibility, the life program says almost nothing about actual behavior and aims. It leaves everything open, including objectionable behavior. Even such a minimal moral requirement as "avoid any arbitrary killing of a human", as weak as it is, can be overridden as too inflexible. After all the horrors of other life programs, there may be some appeal in this life program's lack of commitment; the horrors, if any, are hidden and left unstated. Let me add that while we may rebel against the tyranny of replicators, we may hardly rebel against all replicators and stay alive. Replicators include our genes that replicate with each cell division and words that replicate whenever uttered or written down. Some argue that persons are made of replicators. In defense of the rebellion, one may tentatively accept a life program while being ready to revise it when new arguments or facts are discovered. The objective does not need to be rebellion per se but rather flexibility, humility and unwillingness to dogmatically stick to something that was accepted on incomplete information and deliberation.

There is a special kind of hedonism that deserves a mention. An ultimate hedonist card may be played as follows. At the moment of accepting a life program, the person must feel content or pleasure with the life program. In the final analysis, pleasure decides, and everyone is a pleasure-seeker no matter what they profess to be. My response is that this may be true, but is not hedonism proper since the life program so accepted does not necessarily specify in terms of pleasure. A hedonism proper would be a life program like "maximize one's pleasure" or "maximize one's pleasure and minimize one's pain". Interestingly enough, contemplating to accept a life program that is hedonism proper may produce not much pleasure in many people, a phenomenon known as the paradox of hedonism. The hedonistic card played does not inform us about the life program proper: the pleasure can be felt in reference to all sorts of life programs, depending on the person in question. One may counter that it is still hedonism even if in the form "choose a life program that is going to maximize your pleasure at the point of acceptance", although the argument made was that this is what everyone does at the moment of choice of the life program whether they want it or not, so the function of the imperative form is unclear. Somewhat paradoxically, the life program that produced pleasure at the moment of its acceptance may produce much less pleasure during the life program execution; this is almost necessary unless the life program that produced the most pleasure at the point of acceptance was "maximize one's pleasure".

One has to find some inspiration for what to do in life. One often experiences a choice, a lack of determination, and this sense of choice originated through biological evolution of humans. This may be part of the variation in the variation-and-elimination process of cultural evolution of life programs. The variation part is as essential to the evolution as the elimination part; it is part of the bet the genes made on transmission and variation of cultural elements. In a sense, an attempt to identify one true life program seems like an attempt to eliminate a key element of the evolutionary process that brings life programs about. On the other hand, a search for true sentences involves arrival at a set of sentences that are in no need of further variation or modification, yet this does not seem to serve as an acceptable objection to the enterprise. While all theories of empirical science are tentative to some extent and subject to potential future revision, the aim is to produce theories with as little need of revision as possible.

One is hardly ever entirely at a loss at what to value. At a minimum, one should value finding true sentences and valid arguments during a search for values and purposes; a complete disregard of truth and validity seems like an unconvincing option. And hardly anyone is completely void of moral sensibilities.

One may also argue that the objectively existing processes of variation and elimination of genes and cultural elements will take care of themselves and that they do not need anyone's individual help. Paradoxically, it is the elements that are not clear winners that need some conscious help. One can celebrate the diversity of life programs rather than trying to find the one sole objectively correct life program derived from genetic or cultural evolution. There is not one best plant or best animal; rather, the requirement of viability that drives the elimination-part of biological evolution allows for a huge diversity of biological entities originating through evolutionary processes. Similarly, there does not need to be one best life program resulting from cultural evolution.

One certitude remains: those who decide to follow the kill-yourself-as-soon-as-possible life program will not join the discussion about life programs. The discussion of life programs is biased in favor of those life programs that are compatible with the continued existence of the discussion participants. One is able to propose such a wholly parasitic life program but only as long as one does not immediately carry it out. The viability of life programs is an indisputable requirement that nature puts on them. On a similar note, one can only be puzzled about one's purpose as long as one exists.

What, then, is the recommended life program? It is hard to make any honest recommendation. The choice of a life program is a personal matter, not an engineering problem. What I am certain about is that I am inflexible about certain ethical requirements. Some may find some of the mentioned life programs when ethically constrained inspiring, but I recoil in horror at the crimes and destruction that could be committed in their name. Whenever I considered a life program that appeared inspiring, I found objections to it that I found convincing; I found I valued things that were not part of the life program. The objections raised indicate things we may find worthwhile. We need to make challenging choices about what to do with our lives with the use of our innate senses of right and wrong, true and false, valid and invalid, and meaningful and meaningless at our disposal, all while knowing that they originated through evolution, a process of variation and elimination. This knowledge of evolutionary origins of humans and their life programs does not force any particular life program on us.

If the power of all the living things over matter has so many faults, both conceptual and ethical, why bother and discuss it at all? It seems to be a dangerous idea, combining a certain appeal with a huge potential for abuse. Is the idea more like the knife, having many good uses and bad uses, or like the atomic bomb, for which the bad uses loom large? Would the world be better off without such an idea? If taken as the ultimate purpose with no constraints, the idea is atrociously unethical and criminal. Nonetheless, it seems better to document the idea together with objections to serve as a reference. The idea may be acceptable as an inspiration since some objections can be accommodated by adding ethical constraints to it. Furthermore, it is a modification of the power of humankind, a larger objective which seems largely accepted as worthwhile, if not in words, then at least in practice. The two life programs are subject to significantly overlapping lists of objections. Therefore, the discussion may be of larger interest. The objections are at least as informative as the life programs objected to and may contribute to forming alternative life programs.

The idea is not new. In the book Developing A Universal Religion by David Hockey, 2003, available online in Wikibooks, we read the following: "Given that there is no detectable purpose pre-designed into life or the universe, then, if we must have one, we must adopt a surrogate. To my mind, the only viable option is to support life’s continual evolution and focus upon helping it to achieve an omnipotent ability. Such a purpose is universal and rational; it is a purpose that will last as long as life itself lasts. It accommodates the whole of life, and shows that we care about more than just our own well-being. It declares that we value life for its own sake and think little about the death that must follow, taking it simply as the price to be paid for living." David Hockey does not seem to be aware of the grave ethical objections raised in this article. Similar ideas are discussed in the article Is this the meaning of life? by John Stewart, 2010, guardian.com. The article discusses a trajectory of evolution, including evolution of ever larger cooperating groups. It says "Extrapolating the trajectory further would see the continued expansion of the scale of cooperative organisation out into the solar system and beyond." and further "If the trajectory continued in this way, the scale of cooperative organisation would expand throughout the universe, comprised of living processes and intelligence from multiple origins. As it increased in intelligence and scale, its command over matter, energy and other resources would also expand, as would its power to achieve whatever objectives it chose." That sounds very much like the power of life. As an aside, the alleged expansion beyond the solar system and throughout the universe is unattainable science fiction given our current state of knowledge; we may well be effectively confined to our planet, and we would do well to keep it habitable for humans. The article comment section has some interesting responses.

A further word of warning may be in order. I do not know with certainty which presented arguments are correct and which are incorrect; plausibility and apparent persuasiveness do not suffice for true knowledge. If the text broadened the perspective on part of some readers, one of the objectives has been met. Further reading and discussion are very much required. Reading topics include evolutionary ethics, evolution and meaning of life, direction of evolution, and cultural evolution. The reader should make a sincere attempt at criticism and refutation beyond what I have attempted myself.

Review of Donald Cameron's The Purpose of Life: Human Purpose and Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective

There is an interesting book by Donald Cameron called The Purpose of Life: Human Purpose and Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective, Woodhill Publishing, 2001. A review follows. Another review can be found at Amazon. A summary of the main argument of the book may still be available in Wayback Machine.

The book is an attempt to derive objective ethics from evolutionary biology to guide our ethical dilemmas and to provide an overall direction in life. An earlier similar undertaking was by Wilson and Ruse, Moral Philosophy as Applied Science, 1986. The subject matter is normative evolutionary ethics or prescriptive evolutionary ethics.

To achieve his objective, Cameron sets up the following axioms:

• Non-random source: The values must have a non-random source.
• Something matters: Normative nihilism is rejected.
• Consistency: Values must be consistent; in particular, if A is preferable to B, and B is preferable to C, then A must be preferable to C.
• Real-world values: The values or objectives need to be specified in terms of the world outside of the mind rather than of internal states.
• Evolution: The values of animals including humans originate solely from biological evolution by natural selection.

Cameron dismisses the possibility that values could originate from culture. He dismisses that values could originate through memetic evolution, which amounts to the same, the dismissal of cultural evolution as a process by which values originate.

From the axioms, Cameron claims to derive the following principle, which he calls Evolutionary Value Principle (EVP):

The correct set of values in any evolved being is the one which will give its holder's genes the maximum advantage in terms of natural selection.

In practical terms, it means to have many children and descendants in general or at least descendants of one's relatives. Cameron addresses the is-ought problem by pointing out that he has some normative or "ought" axioms and that therefore he is not in the error of deriving an "ought" solely from "is". The claim Cameron makes is that this derivation and system of ethics is compelling, not based on mere moral feelings but rather reason, and that certain principles such as kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and display altruism make it possible to derive from the principle specific normative rules limiting human behavior, moral principles. He offers to abandon centuries of allegedly barren philosophical ethics that uses excessive polysyllabic hard words in favor of something that is very much like engineering or mathematics. He offers investigation of some ethical test cases in the light of the principle such as abortion and eugenics. He mentions the possibility that his ethical theory will become dominant in the pool of ethical theories held by humans as a result of being most conducive to the genetic reproductive success of those who hold the theory.

Cameron considers some previous attempts to derive ethics from Darwinian biological evolution, including Herbert Spencer and Adolf Hitler, arguing that the attempts of these two do not match EVP. Cameron provides interesting quotes about the relation of Darwinian evolution to ethics and values from Daniel Dennett, Edward O. Wilson, J. D. Rockefeller, Julian Huxley, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Susan Blackmore. Most of these indicate we can rise above our genes, with which Cameron seems to disagree. However, by Cameron's own account, people often do misalign themselves with their EVP genetic interests and therefore are capable of doing so; that is a state of affairs, not an "ought". And culture plays a role in that misalignment. Cameron engages in a cultural activity to bring people back to the alignment, which many people will reject, and therefore are in fact capable of doing so.

Let me now turn to evaluation and criticism. I see multiple problems with his ethical theory:

• The dismissal of cultural evolution by variation and elimination of cultural elements as a source of values is factually incorrect.
• There is no way acceptable private ethics can be derived from reciprocal altruism and display altruism, that is, ethics restricting behavior when no one is looking and one cannot be found out. Only when the actions are traced by other agents can reciprocal altruism take force.
• There can be some success in deriving some public ethics and politics via reciprocal altruism and display altruism. For instance, it is quite possible to imagine how people holding EVP could agree to make a publicly enforced law to prohibit murder. But multiple ethical test cases are not obviously derivable to our taste, such as infanticide, slavery, aggressive war against a technologically weak nation and destruction of natural heritage; this may well apply to a host of other ethical test cases.

Let me consider these objections in turn in greater detail.

Cultural evolution: If by values we mean values people hold and corresponding behaviors they show, values do originate in part from cultural or memetic evolution, that is, variation and elimination of cultural elements such as descriptive beliefs and normative beliefs. In its most abstract form, the process is analogous to Darwinian natural selection: there is some variation of cultural elements and there is some ensuing elimination of some varieties. For instance, if a cult of suicide arises and the cult leader calls upon all his followers to commit suicide, the result is a significant elimination of the particular normative belief from humans, together with the humans. There are less harmful forms of elimination of cultural elements, which do not depend on the elimination of humans. Cameron's EVP itself is not a result of genetic evolution alone but a cultural evolution, and incorporates descriptive theories brought about by cultural evolution. In particular, it incorporates the modern notion of gene and differential genetic replication that were unknown to Darwin, from which he can obtain kin altruism. And his notion of reciprocal altruism referring to tit-for-tat algorithms dates to 20th century. Various cultures have varying prohibitions and different people in those cultures take different moral stances on controversial issues, and these are not driven purely genetically but rather often by cultural affiliation and various in part random circumstances. One may counter that cultural evolution is in part random and the source was supposed to be non-random, but the variation part in the biological evolution is in part random as well, and it is the elimination part of the process that is non-random, eliminating outright parasitical cultural elements from the pool as well as some other elements. Cameron seems to realize most of this: there is a whole chapter Cultural evolution in the book. However, in the chapter, I found nothing to show that values do not originate in part from cultural evolution. Cameron could argue values do originate from cultural evolution, but not "correct" values. By the same token, values do originate from biological evolution, but not "correct" values, yet his EVP speaks of "correct" values. Should Cameron have to accept cultural evolution as a source of values, he might have to adopt the following Cultural Evolutionary Value Principle:

The correct set of values in any evolved being capable of cultural transmission of values is the one which will give the set of values itself the maximum advantage in terms of the number of its followers.

Another similar formulation, in the form of an imperative, is "maximize the number of followers of this imperative". Such a principle, a cultural replicator, is quite different from the biological EVP: it does not prefer the biological reproduction of one of the followers over that of another. This is not to say that this is a morally palatable principle, but it is a principle that seems to follow from Cameron's axioms if one accepts that cultural evolution is able to produce values and therefore serve as a not entirely random source of values; the axiom requiring non-random source is met and the only axiom that is rejected is the one that claims that the only source of values is biological evolution. Since Cameron indicates his EVP could become dominant in the pool of ethical theories held by humans by being most conducive to their genetic success and since the cultural EVP maximizes that dominance by its formulation, the two principles appear to be set up to compete for the domination of the pool. A minor note is that the derivation from cultural evolution is still "evolutionary", and would therefore fit Cameron's book title well. Disregarding cultural evolution as a source of values structurally similar to biological evolution on the most abstract level is a descriptive problem with his theory.

Private ethics: To derive ethical principles from EVP, Cameron relies on reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat. This does not work when someone is about to do a misdeed in a way that no one ever learns about it. Tit-for-tat works by agents reciprocating in kind for good or bad behavior toward them. But if one steals from someone else without the other person even learning about it or learning who it was, there is no threat of response in kind or retaliation and tit-for-tat does not work. If the person is to maximize their genetic success, they are in fact compelled to transgress whenever they can get away with it and can benefit their family. This is not to say that the person would publicly announce their intention to make such transgressions. Since reciprocal and display altruism can be used to derive public ethics, we could try to obtain from it private ethics by adding an axiom or imperative. The imperative could be similar to Kant's categorical imperative, and could be phrased as follows:

 

Whether acting in public or in private, only transgress public ethical principles if you could wish to advocate and enforce a public change to those principles that would make your proposed action no longer a transgression.

Thus, you must not murder even if no one is looking since you would not possibly advocate for relaxation of murder prohibitions that would apply not only to you but also to others. There may be some problems with the principle, such as that the relaxation of the public ethical prohibition considered could be very narrow, such that it would allow the transgression to you but effectively to no one else, but this is against the spirit of the principle. A more precise formulation of the principle is lacking. In any case, this principle is not derived from EVP. But it is the private ethics that is arguably the genuine ethics, not merely a display for others to achieve personal objectives. Therefore, the claim that Cameron's philosophy has finally given us an objective derivation of ethics fails; for private ethics, rather than deriving prohibitions, it requires their violation whenever it benefits genetic reproductive success of the violator. The added principle is akin to Kant's categorical imperative, suggesting that Kant's work has produced an interesting philosophical result rather than being part of an entirely barren part of philosophy known as ethics. Whether the formulation given by Kant is easy to apply and whether his application is convincing is another question: to me, Kant's derivation of unconditional prohibition of lying is unconvincing. One may take Kant's idea as a starting point and improve upon it. Be it as it may, EVP does not provide for private ethics and another solution or addition is required.

Derivation of public ethics and policies: It is quite imaginable how one could derive prohibition of some forms of murder as an act of reciprocal altruism: I am forbidden from murder but so are others, and the prohibition is enforced. But what about infanticide, slavery, aggressive wars against technologically weak nations, and destruction of nature?

Infanticide: Cameron considers the subject of abortion and notes that from the genetic perspective and reciprocal altruism, the cut-off date for life protection is rather arbitrary and can be conventionally set to the date of birth. His discussion of infanticide is that it is not obviously prohibited but that holding human life sacred is an important factor for cooperation, and that human birth is a natural cut-off point after which the life is protected. He notes that for abortion derivation from EVP, discussion of personhood does not enter the deliberation. Now consider the possibility that doing without the baby would be genetically beneficial, for instance to prevent exhaustion of resources that would be missing for other children and their descendants. In the past, abortion was dangerous for mothers. If we applied Cameron's principle of the cut-off point being rather arbitrary, we might have wanted to allow mothers to kill the unwanted child after birth, to eliminate risks of mother's death resulting from the previously dangerous abortions. We can still maintain the position that murder in general is prohibited but we may grant mothers' an exception that they can kill their child in the first month after birth. This does not seem to inhibit cooperation of the coldly calculating rational agents performing calculations from EVP and looking at their moral feelings with distrust. Infanticide is not a particularly socially dangerous behavior, unlike general murder; those making the laws do not need to fear for themselves and for almost all of their subjects that they may be killed as a consequence of legal infanticide. The notion that infanticide is immoral stems from the simple idea that any intentional killing of an innocent human is a murder and should be disallowed; any complication of this simple idea needs a special justification and a more challenging ethical reasoning than the subjects of ethics may be able of. Once we start arguing in terms of what is socially dangerous and what not, we are on the slippery slope to collectivist totalitarianism, in which humans can be dispensed with when it is collectively useful. Since Cameron urges that we may not like some of the consequences of EVP but that we are compelled by the strength of the argument to accept them anyway, Cameron may not use his moral sense to assess various cases, and he is probably not supposed to engage in philosophical deliberations such as when does personhood start; by his own selling point, he is supposed to engage in moral calculation and derivation from the discovered first principle of EVP. If we reject infanticide, we must reject EVP, or we must supplement it by our moral sensibilities, thus being in part "irrational" by deferring to ethical feelings.

Racial slavery: It is not obvious how its prohibition can be derived from reciprocal altruism. The master race could reciprocate among themselves while barring rights from the slave race. By doing so, the master race could derive genetic benefit in terms of copies of the genes, and would have no reason to abandon slavery. The benefit would be derived by having it easier to amass resources and use them to support their descendants. The book does not have "slavery" in its index, and I have not found slavery covered there.

Aggressive war against a technologically weak nation: It is not obvious how reciprocal altruism can prevent attackers from attacking: they would have all the natural resources to gain to support their children and grandchildren, at the cost of loss of human life that, from their genetic perspective, has not much of value for them. In chapter War, I found no discussion of this ethical test case.

Destruction of natural heritage: the only preservation of natural heritage that follows from EVP is that which is conducive to reproduction of human genes. Thus, humans could desire to preserve some ecosystems for the pharmaceutical utility they provide. If humans consider to destroy large parts of biological or non-biological nature (species, landmarks) to increase their population, there seems to be not much in EVP to prevent them from doing so. The book index does not contain "conservation" or "preservation".

Lying: EVP does not seem to give an easy answer for when lying is allowed. Pursuit of truth is indispensable for many endeavors but lying, including joint lying, is of quite some collaborative utility in some settings, and does not need to run a significant risk of being found out, thus not being exposed to reciprocal altruism. The book index does not contain "lying".

Altruism in self-sacrifice: Cameron states: "We can now understand why the Evolutionary Value Principle is not a simple recipe for selfishness. In fact, it supports all of the altruism that we see around us." While EVP is not a recipe for pure selfishness, the second sentence is untrue: not all altruism observed is supported by EVP. In so far as EVP is about to change human behavior, it is incompatible with at least some forms of altruism that we have seen in the world. Some people have been known to sacrifice themselves to save strangers, and neither kin altruism, reciprocal altruism nor display altruism seem to make such a sacrifice rationally derived from EVP. There could be some non-obvious derivation of some self-sacrifice, but it would be odd to find that each self-sacrifice that a person ever engaged in happened to match what would be rationally derived from EVP. The book index does not contain "self-sacrifice" or "selflessness". On the other hand, unrestrained selflessness is not required by many mainstream ethical theories.

Asking people to have many children: In the argument summary, Cameron highlights having many children as a noteworthy consequence of his moral philosophy. Later in the book, Cameron admits that it could be genetically preferable if it can be enforced for the people of a nation to have no more than a limit of children, which was done in China, to provide a better level of overall development of the nation. This makes sense since Cameron's descendant maximization naturally leads to resource exhaustion and while each person on their own refraining from having many children does not solve the problem since others may not follow, a universally enforced limit does. Such a state enforcement may be unnecessary if people forego having many children without state coercion. Paradoxically, coldly calculating EVP follower seems commanded to have many children unless the limit is mutually enforced whereas a non-EVP pleasure-seeker may forego having many children for convenience, engaging in what appears to be ethical behavior if we want to avoid running out of resources without state coercion. Since having many children is on public display, there could hypothetically be a derivation of child limit from reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat without law, but Cameron does not make this point, and it is not clear such a derivation is possible. Cameron points out his discovery of EVP lead him to have 9 children instead of 2. To encourage people to have some children rather than being childless seems fine, and can be done without reference to EVP, but to encourage them to have that many children seems unwise or outright unethical and reckless.

Animal rights: In covering this subject, Cameron points out that people who show unnecessary cruelty to animals are likely to be cruel to people as well and that avoiding cruelty is very useful for cooperation. He explains how a dislike of cruelty towards animals could have evolved without indicating clearly what a cold rational calculation from EVP prescribes. One consequence of EVP seems to be that any use of animals in medical research and in scientific experiments including what amounts to torture is fine since the genetic interests of humans are not at stake. Cameron does not clearly indicate that unnecessary cruelty is forbidden by EVP; a dislike has evolved, but it could be one of the things evolved that a rational agent would reject based on cold calculation. If we accept that unnecessary cruelty is to be avoided, does meat eating count as unnecessary cruelty? Vegetarianism is practicable, and therefore meat eating is not strictly necessary. Does at least keeping animals for meat tightly confined in what for them must be uncomfortable conditions count as unnecessary cruelty? About sport fox hunters Cameron says that they may be less ideal for cooperation but that there is no reason to spend effort to persuade them to stop hunting; thus, hunting being unnecessary does not make it unethical to Cameron. Cameron rightly points out that we cannot protect all animal life as if it were human life since the life of predators is in conflict with the life of their prey.

More test cases could be covered such as beauty, leisure, sports, arts and the sciences that are not so useful, but for the normative ethical assessment, the cases covered should give a fairy good idea.

Ambiguity of EVP: It is not entirely clear what is meant by "give its holder's genes the maximum advantage in terms of natural selection". Would it be ideal for an EVP follower to invent cloning so that all the genes get best copying chance? Or is it actually desirable that the usual recombination takes place so that the genes can still evolve? By going for recombination, only some of the genes are being copied so it does not maximize the copying success of all the genes in the short run.

Moral realism or a value realism: Cameron says: 'To believe a value is quite different [from believing a fact]. There is no external reality which "exists" somewhere.' He further says that to believe a value is to wish to enter into a multi-person agreement to uphold the value and enforce it. At the same time, he indicates the reader has learned the "truth of what your own values ought to be". In the EVP statement, he speaks of "correct" set of values. In his axioms, he says that "Nihilism is the opinion that there are no values: that nothing matters at all. It is hard to disprove, but does not seem to be a practical choice for any living organism." This seems like a contradiction: on one hand, there is no reality of values, on the other hand, some "oughts" are "true", some sets of values are "correct" and "nihilism" is rejected. And he is incorrect: The belief that "there are no [objective/correct] values" is not impractical for a living organism: what is impractical is to hold no values and have no goals. A person may hold and profess values without believing they are "true", "correct", "out there" or "part of objective morality". A person would readily say we ought not murder without delving into their philosophical position of what that sentence means, that is, whether some "oughts" are true or correct, whether by uttering the sentence the person proposes to enter into a multi-person agreement, or whether the sentence is an imperative and an associated threat in disguise. A person may not even have reflected on the available positions. For comparison, Wilson and Ruse who also try to extract ethics from biological evolution indicate that we are deceived by our genes to believe there exists objective morality to support cooperation. This makes them definitionally moral nihilists who nonetheless support certain values including nature conservation ethics, going beyond EVP.

Implied value assumptions: the phrasing used in Cameron's text reveals some implied value assumptions that are not explicitly stated as axioms:

• The clarity and precision of engineering and mathematics is better than the muddle and indeterminacy of philosophy.
• To have an algorithm to answer all questions of a field is good.
  
• To have a definite answer is better than having multiple competing incompatible answers and arguments.
• Public discussion of the purpose of life is better than keeping the deliberation to oneself.
• All people aligning themselves with the same purpose of life is good.
• To avoid believing false descriptive claims is good, and this is true for all classes of false descriptive claims.
• Being completely rational as regards the purpose of life and ethical action is better than being in part emotional or irrational.
  

Descriptive ethics related to EVP: there is a descriptive project to engage in serious and qualified attempts to understand the implications and consequences of EVP. This is not a project to endorse EVP but rather to assess it fairly; one can make a mistake in assessing its consequences. Since EVP seems to be a candidate overarching principle of normative evolutionary ethics, it is of broader interest than to just one book. One reason why the question of what would an EVP-rational agent do and thus what is EVP-ethical and EVP-unethical is interesting is that it would be expected to much closer track actual human behavior than modern cultural normative ethical principles: the deviation of EVP-ethics from moral instincts would be caused by moral instincts having evolved in an ancestral environment different from the modern one, and by limited rationality of humans. The project of deriving consequences of EVP would be part of descriptive evolutionary ethics in so far as the investigator would not endorse any set of values, merely descriptively investigate what principles follow from the foundational EVP principle. That is to say, the investigator does not need to accept A to investigate what B follows from A. Comparing EVP to actual laws, one may for instance note that inheritance laws usually approximate EVP by setting relatives of the deceased as the default heirs rather than the state as a collectivist law could do.

Is EVP any good? It does provide an overall direction in life, but it alone does not derive private ethics at all and in the realm of public ethics and policy making, it leaves infanticide, slavery, aggressive wars against weak nations and destruction of nature unresolved in a matter that our sensibilities find palatable, along with other likely problematic test cases. It rejects cultural evolution of values as a source of value information, their variation and elimination. I don't know whether the same criticism applies to all variants of normative evolutionary ethics. Nonetheless, we may find EVP informative to a limited extent. When EVP allows something we find unacceptable, we may check whether there is a near-unanimity or rather a philosophical debate. Infanticide is a case in point: some philosophers argue in favor of its permissibility. But we do not need EVP to pick infanticide as a topic for ethical deliberation and debate. EVP can be seen as one additional philosophical voice in the discussion. On the other hand, it is questionable what value can be put on a principle that is problematic on so many counts, even for the purpose of broadening the discussion. EVP may succeed in highlighting a principle available even without EVP: if you think you are any good and have some good qualities such as regard for others or considerable talent, you should consider not going childless or else the genes that encode these good qualities do not get replicated and passed into future generations.

As an alternative to EVP, some form of philosophical ethics is required, engaging in some of the forms of deliberation that Cameron finds fruitless, engaging our moral sensibilities, which can be decried as mere feelings. While a lot of ethical writing is needlessly obscurantist, not all of it. Deliberations about personhood in fetuses are not obscurantist and do not need to rely on difficult words such as deontology and consequentialism. In our ethical dealings, we integrate our moral sensibilities with reasoning so we are not dealing with raw feelings changing inconsistently from moment to moment. We can acknowledge that the specific content of our ethical reasoning depends both on evolved biological propensities and on the kinds of facts, arguments and reasoning that are part of our cultural heritage. Our values are of both biological and cultural origins and our public attempts at ethical reasoning are cultural activities. To quote Richard Dawkins: "We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." There, selfish replicators are genes and cultural replicating elements known as memes. The proposal of Cameron is to be guided by the interests of the genes only, and yet it is memes such as the theory of natural selection and the modern synthesis which incorporates genetics that inform his actual ethical theory. His theory is of cultural origin, and thus, his holding values espoused by the theory is of cultural origin. We can make allies with both biology and culture, and not disregard our ethical sensibilities and related attempts at ethical deliberation. We may sometimes find a debate on an ethical issue to be inconclusive or hard to decide on since compelling arguments are raised by both sides; Cameron's proposed ethical engineering, even if we assume it gives unequivocal answers, fails to produce palatable results and sides with genetic evolution over cultural evolution for no clear reason.

Cameron has a new book called Scientific Philosophy: Evidence-based philosophy in plain words, published by Woodhill Publishing in 2020. I have not read the book.

As an addendum, let us consider whether the Cultural EVP introduced by me as an analogue of EVP is palatable. It says that the correct set of values is one that maximally benefits itself in terms of the number of followers. A quick look into history suggests its capacity for being unpalatable: we only need to find a religion or ideology that a large number of people followed and that produced or still produces results that we find objectionable, especially reckless sacrifice of individuals for a larger aim. While EVP is gene-selfish, Cultural EVP seems to be excessively collectivist with no clear regard for human freedom and autonomy, for the rights of individuals. One may argue that sets of values that respect individual rights will eventually outperform competing sets of values, but that is not obvious. When one sides with individual rights, it is not because one believes they are destined to win. The notion that the most powerful ideology or set of values is per definition the best one seems hard to accept. If a set of values is going to win anyway because of a historical or evolutionary law, why fight for it or argue in its favor? It will do fine on its own. The notion that one ought to adopt the set of values that is likely to prevail in future or is likely to bring about the future is criticized by Karl Popper under the head of "moral futurism".

Links:

• The Purpose of Life: Human Purpose and Morality from an Evolutionary Perspectiveble - a summary of the main argument at Wayback Machine
• Morality and Evolutionary Biology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  
• Evolutionary Ethics, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  
• The Evolutionary Ethics of E. O. Wilson, 2013, thenewatlantis.com
  

Keywords: Cameron, Donald. Evolutionary ethics. Meaning of life.