[Nettime-bold] Donald Cameron: Evolution, memes and values (publication)

[geert <geert@xs4all.nl>]

From: "Donald Cameron" <Dcameron1@btopenworld.com>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 4:44 AM
Subject: Evolution, memes and values

> I thought you might find some interest in my recent book which explores
the
> implications of evolution for the prospects of a scientific theory of
values
> and ethics.
> Details are on the MSWord document attached or on
> www.woodhillpublishing.co.uk
>
> Best Regards
>
> Donald Cameron

Woodhill Publishing
3 The Knoll, Portishead, Bristol,  BS20 7NU



                             NEW BOOK NEWS


The Purpose of Life by Donald Cameron (2001)


The Purpose of Life is a non-mystical approach to the problem of moral
philosophy derived with the aid of current ideas in biology and mathematical
decision theory. Dr Cameron makes the ambitious claim to give a solution,
which appears, for the first time, to provide objective answers to questions
of value and ethics.



Statements about value, purpose or morality are fundamentally different from
statements about fact and scientific attempts to prove them from premises of
fact must fail. The philosophers' principle that you cannot derive an
 "ought" from an "is" is valid. A value conclusion cannot be drawn from
premises consisting only of facts: there must be at least one value premise.



This result has been used by philosophers as a licence to pull complex value
statements out of their culturally conditioned feelings before applying
reasoning to them. The author uses a different approach. That is to seek the
most basic, self-evident axioms of value. He chooses (a) to wish not to hold
contradictory beliefs about values, (b) to reject nihilism (the idea that
nothing matters at all) and (c) to wish one's values not to be a result of
random accidental events, but to have some source of information.



The only source of non-random information, which has created human values,
including the human instinct to build an ethical culture, is the force of
natural selection. The fact of evolution and, in particular, the modern
analyses of the evolution of altruism and social behaviour are essential to
understand any philosophy of values. It is astonishing that so many
investigators of ethics have felt able to ignore them.



>From these simple starting points, every question of value and ethics can be
answered without making any further value assumptions. The results are
elegantly free of  "fuzzy edges" and surprisingly close to traditional
common sense, yet they indicate a few exceptions which are food for thought.
The claim is so ambitious that many will seek to refute it and the layout is
designed to make it convenient to attempt this. All that is necessary to do
so is set out in the Summary of the Main Argument (pages 9 to 17 of the
book) which is reproduced, with other information, in our web site at
www.woodhillpublishing.co.uk  Comment is invited.