Does is not strike you as curious that we see such behaviour in creatures like ants and as we move further along the spectrum of brain complexity and sentience we see even more complex behaviours until we approach the higher mammals and primates. There we see quasi-moral and ethical behaviours which are refined and codified still further by homo sapiens.
This is exactly what one would expect if such behaviours were purely a product of nature and evolution. This includes the aberrant behaviour of both Ted Bundy and the Nazis.
You don’t know that. You can’t know that and there is no evidence to show it, nor any suggestion that you can prove it.
You’ve made that up out of whole cloth and if it is merely a personal belief taken on faith then clearly say so and we can safely discard it from the debate.
Nope, that won’t cut it here. You have no evidence, and there is certainly no line of logical reasoning that means it must be so.
For something to be “taken for granted” there must be overwhelming evidence for it.
Where is your evidence for this earth-shattering and paradigm-shifting claim?
You should really discard all the wooly thinking regarding secular morals and concentrate first on establishing the the existence of the supernatural rock on which your theories stand.
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Likewise, a welfare recipient who doesn’t work and contribute financially to the economy but who has 10 kids on the dole is more “fit” than a full-time worker who only has 1 kid. The Octomom is therefore more “evolutionarily fit” than Donald Trump from a scientific perspective.
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Well, welfare moms having 10 kids is a recent development and I doubt evolution has had much time to weigh in on the matter, but let’s take this to its logical conclusion: all women should be on welfare and have 10 kids. What happens to our species’ fitness then?
More babies isn’t always better as far as evolution is concerned, which is why human females rarely have more than one at a time, and other species like whales and elephants have also traded size and longer lifetimes for plopping out litters. *Less *children can be good for a species too.
Run an electrical current through a coil of copper wire. A magnetic field is generated. Does the field have a separate existence to the wire? Does it continue once the power is turned off?
The OP might benefit from some reading on emergence.
And that includes social structures and mores as well.
Maybe I’m wrong, but given your stance that one can’t prove murder is wrong I read you as a non-realist, or maybe an epistemological skeptic (moral facts exist, but we don’t know what they are). You then seemed to worry you may have been a Nazi if you grew up in Germany, which would be bad. Psychologically that makes sense if morality is an objective standard outside of your mind you’re trying to live up to, not so much if it’s a personal preference or what works best for society’s current situation. It’s right out of the spinach argument.
Your comment was directed at Miller, not me, but here goes…
I read about half of that “spinach” paper and I think it’s bullshit. Frankly. His point is that worrying about what I may have been had I been born in Germany in 1920 can only make sense if morality is objective, and I think that’s plainly wrong. His argument just doesn’t make sense. He tries to use our sense of whether a certain joke is funny or not, with different substitutions, as a guide to whether it’s about preferences or objective facts, but the whole approach just doesn’t work.
You don’t have to find the joke literally funny, but you do need to recognize the different attitudes behind the different statements. Of course, one could be a non-realist but also believe that humans are hard-wired to treat moral statements as if they were real, which means the non-realist would also fall into the same trap through no fault of their own. Somewhat similar to how one may believe free will doesn’t exist, but instinctively treat it as a useful fiction.
Humans are complex social animals who have evolved morality simply because we’ve learned that communities help us exist. Morality springs from the human desire to live lives free from anxiety and worry. This is due to secular law and personal ethics, not religion or some higher power.
Funny, I just ordered a book from Amazon called The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright.
Seems to me that religion is consoling if your life isn’t free from anxiety and worry, i.e. those people that are oppressing you or scaring you? God will punish them in the afterlife.
My point was, we’re shaped by the environment we grew up in, and it’s difficult to say how much of what we hold as our values are a result of having a particular moral clarity, and how much are just going along with what everyone around us is doing. My ethics are based around not harming other people. Do I hold those ethics because I’m particularly perceptive and empathic to other people’s suffering? Or do I hold them because I grew up in hippy California in the '70s? One way to think about the question is to imagine if you were born in different circumstances: Jim Crow South, or Nazi Germany, or what have you. But, as I said, it’s not really a meaningful comparison, because there isn’t really a way for you to be born in such radically different circumstances, and still be “you” in any meaningful sense.
I would say that 'you would not be “you” ’ is precisely the point.
Considering that Germans today are as empathic as you or me, despite being genetically exactly the same as 100 years ago, it must have been something else that made the Nazi’s unempathic towards Slavs and Jews. The only logical explanation is upbringing and surroundig moral values of that time and place.
