[quote]ephrem wrote:
[quote]Cortes wrote:
Eph we’ve been here before and you know better.
Show me a society where greed, cheating, lying, or stealing were considered “right.”
Where generosity, integrity, honesty, charity or love are considered “wrong.”
These societies don’t exist and they don’t work and there’s a reason for that.
Even in the animal kingdom you won’t find a group of animals that exists without some form of cooperation and “integrity.”
*Edit: Posted before reading your previous post.[/quote]
…what i’m saying isn’t a reflection on the succes or failure of certain sets of morals. Certain sets of moral have been succesful, and other sets have been failures. Christian morality has been succesful, but there are other sets of morals that have been succesful. That something is an idea or opinion doesn’t invalidate it’s value…
…i’m happy to concede that morality has been a wildly succesful invention, like sliced bread or the toilet, but you wouldn’t praise the toilet as a gift of god, would you?
Introducing the army ant: Army ant - Wikipedia Moral behaviour has been observed in primates, but i consider nature to be a-moral. Since i believe we are animals, we are in essence a-moral too. But because we’re highly evolved animals our moral structures and behaviour are evolved aswell, even upto a point where they’re believed to be absolute…
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See, I’ve always found the argument for the evolutionary origin of morality to be a square peg. Evolution, along with “climate change” is one of those great subjects where the tables get turned on the so-called scientific-minded folks (ie, the ones who are always making fun of religious folks for attributing everything they can’t understand to God). Somebody gets backed into a corner with something he can’t empirically justify and suddenly out comes, “Well it’s teh evolution.” The truth of the matter is that there is a LOT that evolution does not or cannot explain. You may try and fit morality into it, but you’ll end up with a lot more questions than answers. Not directing the full force of this at you, eph, but you are using the argument, so I will tell you what I think of it.
The thing is, morality, when we are called upon to “exercise” it in very important circumstances, more often than not involves an extreme act of the will AGAINST our very nature, AGAINST our “natural” instincts, in short, it involves making choices that are actually in direct contradiction to what our finely-honed-by-millions-of-years-of-evolution instincts are screaming at us to do. So, it’s part of our evolutionary imperative to do whatever it takes to survive, but there are countless stories of men and women willfully choosing their own deaths to save another, or choosing death rather than violating a principle. I could start a list here and go on forever, but the point is that these drives are, again, very often in direct opposition to our natural instincts.
Now you can give me all sorts of explanations and justifications as to why really it is possible that we have instilled in us an evolutionary drive that is in direct opposition to our other evolutionary drives, but I’ve never seen anything but conjecture on this point. Much like the sociopath who doesn’t fit the mold you require for 100% absolutely absolute morality, just saying that “It’s teh evolution” doesn’t make it so.
