Atheism

[Muncey]

Haha I thought that part would be picked out.. yeah I'd like to think we're inherently good but that in no way effects my view on innate morality. Also even if I don't believe we're inherently good I can still hold the view its innate, inherently good means its innate in us to be at a particular point on the moral spectrum.. not that the moral spectrum exists. I don't suggest the first bit is true, I think the latter is. I'd be no better than any other person choosing to think things based on blind faith. I guess thats where we fundamentally differ, you see it far more likely that humans created this system of right and wrong and I find it far more likely we didn't. So do you think the strong emotions attached to 'good' and 'bad' were man made, taught and subsequently evolved over the years?

I don't think we were born with some morality gene, just the guidelines were set before man created rules and laws.. the foundations of 'the morality spectrum' were still there. Whether the 'rules and laws' started in one part of the world or another, both completely detached from one another, I think we would have ended up with roughly the same rules. If morality was a man made concept entirely then 2 completely remote parts of the world would come up with entirely different 'rights and wrongs' and I just don't believe that would happen. I'd suspect theres some evidence of this, I just don't have it lol.. most religious morality is roughly similar, I assume not all of them influenced each other.. I guess the argument then would be they had similar interests, survival ect. so its not surprising they came up with similar rules. I just find it hard to believe that strong emotions towards right and wrong could be taught.

My main argument still stands, the main reason for creating such concepts, rules and laws would be a moral one imo, which is a huge contradction. Survival and/or self correction along the way just isn't a satisfactory answer for me.

[magma]

You know how you become "more social as a species" than other extremely social apes?

You trust strangers. Chimps don't trust strangers until they've proven themselves trustworthy. In order to trust strangers you have to be able to assume they have a compatible world view/morality with you.

Human civilisation could never have started if we couldn't assume each other to be innately moral creatures.

But there are societies we consider less moral than ours, on what grounds do we do that? What does it mean for there to be objective moral facts about the world? We can share certain moral positions but do we need a compatible moral outlook to trust someone? How do I know that a stranger I trust has a compatible moral outlook or worldview to mine?

Morality has to adapt to society - there are more ways you can fuck someone over today than there were in the wild; morality has to catch up... so it can't be ALL innate, clearly. I definitely wasn't born with a natural stance on abortion or loan sharking. However, it seems innate to human beings that certain transgressions are 'wrong' - stealing and murdering mainly. Babies have a very clear sense of fairness far before they've been read any books espousing the joys of sharing with friends.

You can approach a stranger and have a reasonable amount of confidence that unless they're abnormal or desperate, they probably won't murder or mug you out of the blue... that's been a basis for humans building bridges between communities for probably a hundred thousand years. If you see a stranger that looks like they're not in dire straits (i.e. doesn't appear to be desperate enough for survival that their intelligence overrides gut morality) , you can probably try to be their friend.

One of the key phenomena to me is the existence of people who are born *without* the norms of human 'goodness' or 'normality' built in. Born psychopaths with little natural empathy exist (something like 1% of the pop because evolution is imperfect. Autism exists. Aspergers exists. Both seem to show signs that at least in some cases, no nurture is involved... although nurture is an important component in all our psyches, psychology also seems to be affected by the same genetic lotteries that affect our physical bodies.

[Jizz]

you fuck up once so you create institutions to make sure you don't fuck up again

but why did we fuck up once? because a few of us misplaced and misunderstood our standing with morals. as lovelydivot said, we see morality as a luxury and the fact of the matter was that before religion, we saw no incentive to yearn for this luxury. why would the primitive us let another tribe live, when all they seem to do is steal our food? it is morally wrong to let them live, lets kill them

religion was a means to understand this morality because when we fucked up once, a few of the more insightful out of us realized that there needs to be some standards set for society to become truly moral. but this is where i disagree ultra; because think of everything that has happened before this... they were all decisions based off of (largely self-interested) morality too. therefore when religion began, morality was not created, but rather formally introduced as an incentive in itself, one that led to a higher form of life. morals didnt come to be; rather, they became meaningful.

the primitive us were only ever looking for a way to inject meaning into our lives; if meaning came from being moral, then so be it. but what caused that decision, the decision to be moral according to a code as opposed to moral according to tribal instinct? must have been a moral decision in itself

morality is fundamental to human thought, because we have always judged and searched for reasoning behind absolutely everything we do.

[scspkr99]

Morality has to adapt to society - there are more ways you can fuck someone over today than there were in the wild; morality has to catch up... so it can't be ALL innate, clearly. I definitely wasn't born with a natural stance on abortion or loan sharking. However, it seems innate to human beings that certain transgressions are 'wrong' - stealing and murdering mainly. Babies have a very clear sense of fairness far before they've been read any books espousing the joys of sharing with friends.

You can approach a stranger and have a reasonable amount of confidence that unless they're abnormal or desperate, they probably won't murder or mug you out of the blue... that's been a basis for humans building bridges between communities for probably a hundred thousand years. If you see a stranger that looks like they're not in dire straits (i.e. doesn't appear to be desperate enough for survival that their intelligence overrides gut morality) , you can probably try to be their friend.

One of the key phenomena to me is the existence of people who are born *without* the norms of human 'goodness' or 'normality' built in. Born psychopaths with little natural empathy exist (something like 1% of the pop because evolution is imperfect. Autism exists. Aspergers exists. Both seem to show signs that at least in some cases, no nurture is involved... although nurture is an important component in all our psyches, psychology also seems to be affected by the same genetic lotteries that affect our physical bodies.

Thanks for the considered reply, I agree with a good bit of this but I'll speak mainly to the parts where I don't.

I think you and Muncey are kinda on the right lines with the concept of evaluating right and wrong / good or bad being innate. But our actual moral judgements differ from those of others, we have a very different moral framework than the one we held 100 years ago, we also have very different moral frameworks from each other and different again from other cultures. This suggests to me that while desire to differentiate good from bad is innate the actual judgements we come to aren't. And it's how to arrive at these judgements that I consider most important.

I'd suggest when we come to our judgements nurture is involved and this is why people generally share frameworks with those that they've had most exposure to. But lots of people steal and lots of people murder, I'm not convinced any act is always immoral fwiw but if moral judgements are supposed to motivate us there are real questions as to why few of us are actually consistently motivated by morality.

[magma]

Lots of individuals are abnormal and most normal people aren't "average" - in an extremely trite example that I apologise in advance for; blonde hair is an evolved trait, but it doesn't mean every human has blonde hair. I think something approaching morality is evolved in most social species on some level or another ('rules of engagement') - but I imagine every individual animal experiences it very slightly differently due to a subtly (in most cases) different starting point and wildly different experiences - the differences in experienced being more pronounced the more intelligent the species in question. We're so intelligent we can override almost anything our body tries to do outside of respiration. So some people have wildly different starting positions when it comes to empathy - plenty of humans are born entirely unable to put themselves in another's shoes - some people probably think about it too much but don't make headlines. That doesn't mean the species isn't naturally empathetic... it means we're imperfectly evolved by thousands of generations of sexual reproduction, rather than clones identical to whomever came before or adherent to any sort of "design". The fact that our empathy and therefore morality was evolved rather than designed means its 'implementation' leaves a lot to be desired... as with most of our traits.

Plenty of individuals murder and rob, certainly - but are there societies where murder and theft are considered acceptable? I know killing is quite commonly - people who support them tend to think capital punishment, ritual sacrifice and war are "necessary evils"... tacitly admitting that killing another human is generally an unfortunate occurrence - but people who think it's ok to go around randomly murdering people for no reason are generally thought to be insane no matter where they grew up.

[Muncey]

I think you and Muncey are kinda on the right lines with the concept of evaluating right and wrong / good or bad being innate. But our actual moral judgements differ from those of others, we have a very different moral framework than the one we held 100 years ago, we also have very different moral frameworks from each other and different again from other cultures. This suggests to me that while desire to differentiate good from bad is innate the actual judgements we come to aren't. And it's how to arrive at these judgements that I consider most important.

I don't think definitive judgements are innate but...

Most things aren't so black and white as being "good or bad" and most things lie in the middle, we may perceive it to be closer to one end of the spectrum (good) at one point in human history and closer to the other end of the spectrum (bad) in another point in human history, it could very well vary from one person to another.. but that foundation, the spectrum, has always existed imo. Collectively we have a general idea of what belongs on either end of the scale without being told/taught. Morality has evolved and changed over time but its built on a foundation of good vs bad and that very basic foundation isn't a concept some man created one day because of survival or whatever.

I think we have a vague understanding of where certain things sit on the spectrum, as well as that spectrum already existing within us, but this move along it as we grow both personally, as society grows (social norms ect.) and how humans evolve through different periods. But, like Magma said, theres never really been a time when whole societies thought murdering was a good thing. I think even people that do it, often understand they aren't exactly doing nice things to a person by randomly gabbing a knife through their eye. Just like helping a starving/dying person has never been seen as an act of evil. I'm sure we can see behavior like this in animals, I have no evidence, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't examples of animals bringing food to the weak and dying.

So we aren't born with an innate definitive set of rules but we have a vague idea of the concepts of 'good' and concepts of 'evil' and where things may or may not sit.

I'm don't know much about Noam Chomskys lingustical work but I'm sure he suggest humans have an innate ability to learn language? I sort of see it as a similar thing, humans have an innate ability to differentiate between right and wrong and our ability to differentiate between right and wrong also includes a very, very basic understanding of the concepts 'right' and 'wrong' and what would fit those categories... in the most basic form possible. The rest is down to human development and societies/social norms and all that jazz.

[rickyarbino]

still not an argument for innate morality, just that we're more social as a species

You know how you become "more social as a species" than other extremely social apes?

You trust strangers. Chimps don't trust strangers until they've proven themselves trustworthy. In order to trust strangers you have to be able to assume they have a compatible world view/morality with you.

Human civilisation could never have started if we couldn't assume each other to be innately moral creatures.

Not gotten all the way down yet but I'd like to say that there's a difference between trusting someone because you believe they have morals and trusting someone because you believe the have the same morals as you.

[rickyarbino]

still not an argument for innate morality, just that we're more social as a species

You know how you become "more social as a species" than other extremely social apes?

You trust strangers. Chimps don't trust strangers until they've proven themselves trustworthy. In order to trust strangers you have to be able to assume they have a compatible world view/morality with you.

Human civilisation could never have started if we couldn't assume each other to be innately moral creatures.

Not gotten all the way down yet but I'd like to say that there's a difference between trusting someone because you believe they have morals and trusting someone because you believe the have the same morals as you.

If it isn't clear, I'm trying to highlight the fact that you're wrong btw.

[magma]

still not an argument for innate morality, just that we're more social as a species

You know how you become "more social as a species" than other extremely social apes?

You trust strangers. Chimps don't trust strangers until they've proven themselves trustworthy. In order to trust strangers you have to be able to assume they have a compatible world view/morality with you.

Human civilisation could never have started if we couldn't assume each other to be innately moral creatures.

Not gotten all the way down yet but I'd like to say that there's a difference between trusting someone because you believe they have morals and trusting someone because you believe the have the same morals as you.

I definitely haven't disputed this - I'm confident that chimpanzees have some sort of morality (we didn't evolve in isolation - morality goes hand in hand with sociability IMHO), but I'm pretty confident it's not compatible enough with mine to "trust" them; unlike with most humans I bump into who I can innately trust to not kill and eat me on sight.

Not sure what point you're trying to make, jesslem tbh.

[wub]

Not sure what point you're trying to make, jesslem tbh.

There's a quote for the fucking ages.

[Muncey]

[scspkr99]

btw there's a couple of posts from Muncey and magma that warrant a reply they just warrant a better one than I have the time for here.

There's been some good contributions from both and ultraspatial which captures a lot of the current, and historic, debates in ethics. I do think it's important to distinguish morality from cooperative strategies though and some of the contributions are in danger of conflating the two.

There are a number of challenges in trying to identify moral properties and there are philosophers that deny these properties exist, those that claim they exist may claim they exist as natural or non natural properties, those that deny they exist may claim that our moral judgements are non-cognitive, they aren't beliefs they are better understood as desires, emotional expressions or prescriptions, they may also claim that they are beliefs but they are systematically in error as there is no property to which the belief refers.

How important this is is questionable, I generally think that our intuition that morality is a thing is sufficient for it to be a thing.

[DrGatineau]

i should have subscribed this thread a while ago, cba to read all 10 pages at this point....

[lovelydivot]

they may also claim that they are beliefs but they are systematically in error as there is no property to which the belief refers.

Can you talk more about beliefs having to have property please…
…break that down for me.

[scspkr99]

Beliefs are generally considered to be descriptive, if I tell you that this ball is round, roundness is a property that pertains to the ball. Similarly if I tell you that it's red redness is the property. If I tell you that some act is wrong this wrongness is a property that pertains to the act. If morality is going to claim an objective status then these properties need to exist independent of our minds so what is this property of wrongness.

Because of the difficulty in identifying this property some ethicists have argued that our moral judgements are non cognitive. That is they do not express beliefs but instead desires, or expressions of emotion, when I say some act is wrong I am not saying that there's a property of wrongness I am merely stating my disapproval of it.

Error theorists in ethics deny this they claim that our moral judgements are beliefs, that instead of merely expressing an emotional response they actually try to refer to this property of wrongness, but they claim that this property does not exist and so our moral judgements are systematically in error.

[rickyarbino]

Nfnf

My phone is being fucking loooooooooooong, so make do with a semi-legible post, but I'll correct what i can.


In before "exactly".

To further your remark about significance being reason enough to convince you of its thingness, if you will, the point about error theory could even just be viewed as implication of our property of wrongness really, if that is the best that can be done and not so much an issue of what (did i just use that incorrectly or does my phone mot actually recognize the word "what"? Can't tell because it's in quotation marks right there. By the way, apostrophes are about to go out the window) validity it even has.

That being said, is there really even any difference, at least in practicle terms, between morality as a human trait and as a cooperative strategy? They really are the same thing in the sense that morality is really a tool for the identification of perceivably appropriate behaviour for social animals seeking to promote personal interests, which is what a cooperative strategy is for. Without wanting really needing to ask too many questions of existence.

[rickyarbino]

still not an argument for innate morality, just that we're more social as a species

You know how you become "more social as a species" than other extremely social apes?

You trust strangers. Chimps don't trust strangers until they've proven themselves trustworthy. In order to trust strangers you have to be able to assume they have a compatible world view/morality with you.

Human civilisation could never have started if we couldn't assume each other to be innately moral creatures.

Not gotten all the way down yet but I'd like to say that there's a difference between trusting someone because you believe they have morals and trusting someone because you believe the have the same morals as you.

I definitely haven't disputed this - I'm confident that chimpanzees have some sort of morality (we didn't evolve in isolation - morality goes hand in hand with sociability IMHO), but I'm pretty confident it's not compatible enough with mine to "trust" them; unlike with most humans I bump into who I can innately trust to not kill and eat me on sight.

Not sure what point you're trying to make, jesslem tbh.

I'm addressing the implied reasoning for being any more social than a chimp.
Furthermore, I've seen two girls and one cup and eating shit isn't too far off from flicking it at someone for a laugh.

Beyond that, I've been approached by chimps, in zoos and they've trusted me enough to come up and steal from me.
if it's that trusting of a human i don't see why it couldn't black eyed pea and show some love for it's homies. Any further than that and it's little more than a matter of culture. Make of that what you will I suppose.

[scspkr99]

To further your remark about significance being reason enough to convince you of its thingness, if you will, the point about error theory could even just be viewed as implication of our property of wrongness really, if that is the best that can be done and not so much an issue of what (did i just use that incorrectly or does my phone mot actually recognize the word "what"? Can't tell because it's in quotation marks right there. By the way, apostrophes are about to go out the window) validity it even has.

That being said, is there really even any difference, at least in practicle terms, between morality as a human trait and as a cooperative strategy? They really are the same thing in the sense that morality is really a tool for the identification of perceivably appropriate behaviour for social animals seeking to promote personal interests, which is what a cooperative strategy is for. Without wanting really needing to ask too many questions of existence.

Yeah it's kinda tough and I'm undecided between a number of positions on what are considered meta ethics, the discussion about what ethical terms mean, what the distinction between motivations are and whether judgements are best understood as beliefs or desires.

I'm good with saying that an act is good or that we ought to do the right thing while these meta questions are unresolved. If I give 10% of my salary to charity because I feel I should, I don't think I will consider this wasteful if somehow these questions are resolved to prove there are no properties that moral terms refer. There are error theorists who are fictionalists, even if all our moral terms are wrong by not referring there's some sense we can consider a society in which people believe they do better than one in which they don't so we should make believe there are moral properties.

To answer the second question as I understand it the distinction between ethics and studies of co-operative strategies is that the ends may be different, we can conceive of co-operative strategies that we would consider immoral so morality should be defined separately. I also think there are real questions about future lives, animal welfare (ultraspatial will contest this) the status of embryo's that would generally be outside of the scope we may consider co-operative strategies for.

There is a sense in which an altruistic act carries a cost, it may be appropriate to carry that cost despite it not contributing to a co-operative strategy, however I do think that our understanding of reasons is aided by understanding co-operative strategies and Game Theory and answers to the Prisoners Dilemma give some indication of how understanding co-operation can assist is in a question for knowing what we should do.

[Muncey]

Beliefs are generally considered to be descriptive, if I tell you that this ball is round, roundness is a property that pertains to the ball. Similarly if I tell you that it's red redness is the property. If I tell you that some act is wrong this wrongness is a property that pertains to the act. If morality is going to claim an objective status then these properties need to exist independent of our minds so what is this property of wrongness.

Because of the difficulty in identifying this property some ethicists have argued that our moral judgements are non cognitive. That is they do not express beliefs but instead desires, or expressions of emotion, when I say some act is wrong I am not saying that there's a property of wrongness I am merely stating my disapproval of it.

Error theorists in ethics deny this they claim that our moral judgements are beliefs, that instead of merely expressing an emotional response they actually try to refer to this property of wrongness, but they claim that this property does not exist and so our moral judgements are systematically in error.

Can there not be a subjective and objective dimension to morality? Objective being, as I've said I believe, the core understanding and difference between right and wrong.. the 'moral spectrum'. The subjective dimension being that of which you described; telling someone that wrongness is a property of a specific act... filling up the 'moral spectrum' with human actions ect and placing them in an unfixed, often subject to change, position.

Although I'd agree in our every day lives we would use the subjective dimension far more but I believe that subjective dimension is built on the foundations of the objective. The way we define the terms good and evil, right and wrong.. it doesn't matter what language we use, the underlying meaning is understood by everybody.. its objective. People only get confused by the language of good and evil, most people (unless they have a mental condition) understand the concepts of good and evil.

The subjective is taught to us and developed through social norms and whatever, but its developed on top of an objective dimension imo.

[magma]

still not an argument for innate morality, just that we're more social as a species

You know how you become "more social as a species" than other extremely social apes?

You trust strangers. Chimps don't trust strangers until they've proven themselves trustworthy. In order to trust strangers you have to be able to assume they have a compatible world view/morality with you.

Human civilisation could never have started if we couldn't assume each other to be innately moral creatures.

Not gotten all the way down yet but I'd like to say that there's a difference between trusting someone because you believe they have morals and trusting someone because you believe the have the same morals as you.

I definitely haven't disputed this - I'm confident that chimpanzees have some sort of morality (we didn't evolve in isolation - morality goes hand in hand with sociability IMHO), but I'm pretty confident it's not compatible enough with mine to "trust" them; unlike with most humans I bump into who I can innately trust to not kill and eat me on sight.

Not sure what point you're trying to make, jesslem tbh.

I'm addressing the implied reasoning for being any more social than a chimp.
Furthermore, I've seen two girls and one cup and eating shit isn't too far off from flicking it at someone for a laugh.

Beyond that, I've been approached by chimps, in zoos and they've trusted me enough to come up and steal from me.
if it's that trusting of a human i don't see why it couldn't black eyed pea and show some love for it's homies. Any further than that and it's little more than a matter of culture. Make of that what you will I suppose.

Be careful not to make this too black and white. I don't think anyone's saying all moral decisions are "instinctive", in fact I've said numerous times that intelligence can override our base leanings on morality, just as it can most of our bodily functions, that individuals aren't even born with the same "starting point" and that modern life contains more moral decisions than any animal can be prepared for by evolution; just that there are certain in built "defaults" that most humans and social animals seem to lean to from birth. Our intelligence makes us feel that we're "above" our animal instincts, but just because we can override them doesn't mean they're not there.

Those chimps in the zoo have most likely learnt to trust the humans around them and have used their intelligence to move us out of the instinctive "stranger-danger" pile into the "safe" pile; they've spent their entire lives being fed and smiled at by humans... in older times they might even have been beaten into submission (you can do that to humans too). Approach a group of chimps or gorillas in the wild who've never seen a human and it'll probably take you days to convince them to let you get close. It took Jane Goodall weeks before wild chimps let her anywhere near them without scattering.

This is all generalities and trends, of course. I'm sure you can find an individual example to counter *any* 'average' human trait. Evolutionary traits have to be because in a species with 7 billion members that have been somewhat unreliably breeding in almost-isolation over the course of hundreds of thousands of years there is no end of subtle and not-so-subtle variation.

If humans were a blank slate that only used learning to learn its moral place, Neanderthals could've learnt the same thing, but they didn't. They were more intelligent than us, yet they never banded together in big enough numbers to kick start a wide society or civilisation - humans did it *every time*. We've known since life on the plains that more of us living together, sharing resources, sharing knowledge and distributing labour meant everyone had more chance of survival, more chance to be healed of injury and disease, more chance of successfully raising children whilst keeping up the hunting and gathering, more chance of getting old... the average human is a natural born villager.