"..Being nice wasn’t an option; it was the only way for the species to survive...But there’s a second unspoken lesson here—that the existence of altruism, compassion, generosity, kinship, and compassion can be explained very well by natural selection.
So is it morally incumbent upon the bats to survive?
See 2,543 Attempts such as this to explain or account for morality from an a priori assumption of naturalism commit a fundamental category error. The foregoing, even if it were an accurate account of what has happened in the past, does not constitute or offer any explanation at all of morality because mere descriptive accounts of the past are not prescriptive. Morality entails what ought to be done, not merely what is. As Hume showed, you cannot logically derive an ought from an is.
Cordially,
Thanks, Diamond!
When you mention ‘ought’, what do you really mean? How would you make a moral decision in a dilemma - say, for example, in a mother and child scenario where you have the option of intervening to save only one of the two. What decision processes would you undergo to decide what you ought to do?