Resolving the Debate

Utilitarianism is prevalent now, due to its being a modern historical artifact, rather than it simply being the most reasonable non-supernatural basis for a meta-ethos.

To put our civilization’s current ethical philosophical situation in context, please consider how attempts such as Harris’s to derive an ethical system via objective science falls in line with the enlightenment agenda. Then consider how “enlightened” thinking has evolved in the last couple hundred years:

- Champions of the enlightenment believe that by using reason, and a scientific understanding of the natural world, we can make the lot of humanity better.

-  Traditional enlightenment philosophers believed that by studying the natural world, we could derive “natural law” fundamental values from which to build our social contract.

-  Thus, as science progressed so did, or should, natural law enlightenment values. And, after Darwin, the older natural law values, such as “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”, were no longer understood or valued in their older teleological way as naturally derived rules for coming into accord with “God’s will” over nature, so much (post Darwin) as examples of archetypal values of the human psyche, that simply arose out of natural selection. From an evolutionary perspective, the consciousness’s desire for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, is merely a manifestation of natural selection that leads to survival. So, survival really took hold in the West’s zeitgeist as the top value of the enlightenment hierarchy. And survival of the “fittest”, after Darwin, was an assumed corollary value, that was then all too often mistakenly followed. This social “Darwinism” wasn’t always the explicitly worked out moral system of Herbert Spencer. Although it often was. Spencer is generally maligned today, during his lifetime he enjoyed unparalleled respect as a philosopher. Rather social Darwinism was/is an implicit fairly amorphous value that stood/stands behind a lot of disastrous 19^th and 20^th century moral philosophy, and the resulting zero sum game political and economic experiments:

Eugenics was paired with “meritocratic” capitalism,

Marxist systems where “reactionaries” were “rightfully” weeded out (murdered) in the dialectical inevitable “progress” of history towards socialist utopia, 

Fascist experiments where “superior” races worked to subjugate or exterminate “inferior” races.

So pursuing happiness (or well-being), because of the deeper value, that it is a biologically evolved mechanism that tends to lead to survival, has fallen out of fashion. Because in the zeitgeist “survival” is irrationally and unscientifically associated with the zero sum game biological evolutionary “survival-of-the-fittest” “scientific” social experiments of the 19th and 20th centuries. And so secular folk have assumed they been left with utilitarianism, kind of by default, even though it isn’t really in natural harmony with hard science.
And social Darwinism (which remains antithetical to civilization) still haunts us. Curiously, in it’s most explicit form it is found most often in some segments of the “environmental” movement. Where the various existential crises that humanity has recently created are met with the resigned or even gleeful belief that it is “natural”, and thus good, that nature will wipe us out. The idea being that we are destructive vermin, not fit to survive.

But, of course, what is truly natural and environmental for us, as life forms, is for us to work with all of our being, to creatively avoid the destruction of our biological niche, to benevolently fit in, not to nihilistic-ally resign ourselves to destroying our niche and thus ourselves.