While I agree with much of your post, DT, I have a slight problem with describing the coitus of lionesses with a lion who has taken over their tribe as rape. I don’t think the term is meaningful for a non-sapient species, and I’m not convinced lions are sapient.
I could be wrong about the latter, I freely admit.
Well, we are talking about sapient descendants of lions, not real world lions. Lion-women smart enough to know that the male mating with them killed their children.
For that matter, smart enough to form a mob, kill him and leave his crucified body as a warning to others. The more I think about it, the less I think that a society where one male brutally lords it over a large number of females is likely to last past the Paleolithic. It’s not like humans, where it was a matter of males plural lording it over females; it would be a matter of one against many, and that tends to turn out badly for the one. For that matter, sooner or later it would occur to a male to try to convince his females that if they fight with him no male will survive any attempt to take over the pride and therefore won’t kill their babies.
A lion type society doesn’t strike me as one that would survive participants who were capable of thinking and talking; it is set up so everyone loses. Even the dominant males since they can’t be dominant forever.
I’ve been reading Sam Harris’ new book on morality and I think he has very interesting things to say on this issue. To boil it down to a few bullet points:
-Morality hinges solely on the well-being of conscious creatures (particularly humans)
-The well-being of a conscious creature depends on facts about the state of the creature’s brain and the environment it finds itself in.
-It’s possible to investigate these facts, therefore it’s possible for there to be a science of morality that is not based on instinctual behaviours or current cultural practices. Clearly some moral codes produce more overall well-being than others, and by investigating these differences we can learn more about “true” morality.
Bad Astronaut, i’ve been thinking about reading Harris’ book.
I saw him on The Daily Show recently, and while it’s clear that he’s a smart guy and has some good ideas, i found his own explanation of his book’s argument in that interview to be completely unconvincing. It could be that he suffered from the necessarily abbreviated and simplistic format of the interview itself, but his explanation of his book’s main point seemed incredibly reductionist and seemed to rest on the rather problematic assumption that we can not only reach a universal notion and a quantification of what constitutes well-being, but that we can get everyone to agree about whether reaching greater well-being justifies certain moral codes.
I’ve also been reading Harris’ book, The Moral Landscape, and I recommend it. I didn’t see the Daily show interview, but it would be hard to get the arguments he’s making into the time span Stewart normally allots.
I haven’t read the book, but discounting our moral instincts seems like a recipe for disaster. It’s sort of like coming up with a perfect economic system that only functions if everybody rationally stops being selfish.
Hamster King
Harris isn’t discounting our moral instincts, he’s more pointing out that in morality, as in many things, our instincts aren’t necessarily always right. He’s also arguing against moral relativism, which I loudly applaud him for.
As far as well being, he draws an analogy with the concept of ‘health’. There is no exact definition and there may be disagreements about certain aspects, but there are many propositions for which pretty much everyone can agree that one state is healthier than another. It’s still possible to have a science focused on improving health (medicine) without having a bulletproof definition of health.
As to your second point, he talks a lot in the book about consensus and how people want to apply a different standard of agreement for morality than they do in other scientific areas. A consensus can exist despite many dissenting viewpoints. Plus, in other areas a lack of consensus is seen as indicating the more data is needed, not that the question is fundamentally unanswerable. He also points out that there could be a consensus among ‘moral experts’ that the public in general does not agree with. This would be parallel to the consensus among biologists concerning evolution by natural selection, which a large swath of America disagrees with. This does not make the ideas invalid.
Anyway, he certainly elaborates on his ideas with plenty of detail and addresses many potential objections. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in the topic.
That may certainly be the case.
You could be right, of course. It’s difficult to separate what seems right because we evolved that way from what is objectively right, if there is such a thing. However, there are societies today where powerful men have multiple wives, where women are treated not all that differently from lionesses, and so on. It’s hard to argue that some form of that kind of society would never get off the ground, since we have some similar forms today (not as extreme, of course).
How about ants? They are pretty alien. In a sapient ant society, slavery would be run of the mill. I guess one could argue that, while the queen could be highly intelligent, the workers (or drones? I’m no entomologist) would remain mentally inferior or naturally submissive, or something.
You seem to be defining “moral” as that which causes the least amount of suffering or promotes the most happiness. But, that’s a Vulcan view of morality. I think that most humans would not consider it moral to, for example, push one person in front of a train in order to save three people (or whatever the example from that recent study was).
I feel like we’re really hijacking this thread, though, so I guess I’ll leave it at that.
I think what would happen instead is that some lion group would mutate either in the genetic or meme sense to ceremonially neuter the beta males instead of killing them. They would then be available to support their relatives by hunting or even developing technology. Tribal structures would no doubt grow so that they would be honored, and lionesses could mate without any feeling of oppression.
In fact these neutered males could be the risk takers: explorers and warriors, since their fate does not affect the genetic pool of the population.
And as far as morality went, mating with the genetically superior male would be considered moral, and our society where females are excluded from access to “superior” men through monogamy would be considered foolish, and forcing breeding with inferior stock considered immoral.
Is security better than freedom?
Stability in most cases reduces violence and maintains order and prosperity.
Ancient Chinese tyrants think so.
Yes in most circumstances. If for instance 90% of a nation were uneducated mobs under the sway of demagogues a rational dictatorship would work better.
However, there is an important difference; with humans (like chimps*), males are the ones naturally prone towards organization. Women can organize of course, but it isn’t instinctive with them. Just look at basic groups like street gangs; males get together in alliances, females are usually just the hangers-on. Males have typically run society because almost always any dispute between the genders boiled down to one or a few women against many men. Women finally successfully fought for their rights when they gathered together in large organizations and eventually a social movement; when it was finally many women against many men, they eventually got their way.
Lion-people would have the opposite dynamic; females are the organized hunters, the males are the ones with the trouble forming alliances.
Actually I suspect the opposite; the idea that the queen is “in charge” is just a bad analogy to human societies. If anything the workers and soldier would be smart and the queen would be stupid; she’s an egg machine after all, while the workers actually work.
As for slavery being run of the mill maybe, maybe not. Real ants practice “slavery” after all. On the other hand a sapient ant-person might be too dangerous to enslave depending on how their loyalty to the hive works; they might be prone to wait until the work possible moment then strike out in the most destructive way possible at the enslaving hive, even at the cost of their own death. “Obey or die” works better against creatures that value their own lives after all.
More of a collective one. Morality is in part a collection of rules against things that none of us want to happen to us, and which we are willing to forswear doing to others if it means we never suffer such ourselves. A sort of social contract. No one wants to be murdered, or robbed, or enslaved; therefore murder, theft and slavery are immoral.
This is, it seems to me, completely ass-about.
It’s meaningless to say that stability causes a reduction in violence, or an increase in order and prosperity. Rather, order and prosperity, and a lack of violence, are some of the symptoms or characteristics or causes of stability.
A stable social order can be enforced brutally and keep a society impoverished, anyway. Admittedly only the very worst social orders are worse than outright anarchy, but that’s a very low hurdle.
Yes, but this is an artificial stability, usually with an undercurrent of rebellion and increasing harsh dictatorship tendencies. Real stability really comes from an open society, through peace and prosperity.
I guess the question is, is an artificial stability better than no stability at all?
A very low hurdle indeed. IMHO that’s why the “argument from nature” is a fallacy. We not only can do better, it’s obviously better to live in a society that punishes rape and murder. I don’t particularly care about logical arguments for rape and murder. We humans don’t work like that, and it’s a good thing too.
Maybe you could even read something like this along the lines of de Sade’s “artificial morality,” from the OP—“true” Lion-person morality might be, “don’t slaughter all the males and rape the Lion-women because it’s causes suffering, it’s harmful to our civilized Lion-society, and by extension our species as a whole,” and “artificial” lion-person morality might be “don’t fight back or resist when the new Lion-king slaughters the males and rapes the females, because the Lion-god orders it thus, and his roar be law.” The latter might bring order, or at least make things go quieter, than if Lion-people tried to fight back when things didn’t go their way. But I’ll leave it to the board if that makes it “better,” more “moral,” or what. As much as any of those means anything, of course. 