Prescriptive Instinctivism

Abstract

It does seem reasonable to conceive of both human instinct and human rationality as distinct faculties, even though they may not be so easily distinguished in terms of experience or physiology: we do have a capacity to gather complicated types and amounts of information, and to interpret and comprehend it in order to draw inferences, and this capacity must grow in power and be closely associated with increases in general intelligence, and we also have a capacity for manifesting innate reactions and unlearned appetites that can direct and motivate our behavior and decisions, which are inherited genetically as biologically successful adaptive traits. Descriptive instinctivists (sentimentalists) argue that our instincts, although amounting to information, are so cognitively dominant that they employ our rationality in order to satisfy the motives that they yield. We experience hunger, and so seek food, or sense food which triggers hunger, and various sensory and remembered information is corralled and put to work until the hunger is satiated, for example. Supposedly, there exist no other motives than instinctive, so right action is necessarily reduced to instinctive action; instincts are inherited and not learned or controlled; free will is an illusion and genuine choice does not exist.