No it is not. Freedom in America was won by brave men who risked their lives to get here, risked their lives to stay here, and thought living free was worth risking their lives in war for. It is the immigrants who came later, after it was safe, that depleated the gene pool.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Both morality (helping out your family, for example) and immorality (having sex with someone who is not your partner) have evolutionary advantages and are therefore built in to the system. Neither of these are "human constructs" and neither can be manipulated, though they can be encouraged or suppressed through laws and social sanctions. As such, morality then is not an imaginary human construct but a reaction to inbuilt evolutionary behaviors.
Yep, both empathetic, cooperative, pro-social behavior and anti-social aggressive behavior have survival advantages. Anti-social behavior tends to have more short term survival advantages while cooperative strategies tend to confer more long term survival. Neither are human constructs. They predate humans and are found in other species.
I see a very sharp distinction between 'morality', as a Real Thing, and normal animal instinct. Definitions, again: Instinct: *a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason* Morality: *principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior* Morality and instinct are not synonymous. Instinct is more of an involuntary response to stimuli, not a reasoned decision. 'Right and wrong' are meaningless factors, in an instinctive situation. You react, instinctively, with no moral question. ONLY if morality arrests the instinct, does an inner struggle occur. This is a Moral conflict, not an instinctual one. It is morality, not instinct, that tells you to not steal an item you see and want. An animal instinct would say, 'Take it!', with no second thought. It is the moral 'sense' that overrides the instinct. The same with survival. The 'flight' instinct would cause you to flee from personal danger. But the moral sense overrides that instinct, and invokes courage, for duty, honor, pride, or other intangibles that have no instinctive basis. Pick an instinct. Almost every one is tempered by an overriding moral decision. Sex, vs restraint. Theft, vs respect for property. Murder, vs Natural Law. A moral 'sense', at times conflicting with our natural instincts, 'reasons' with us, at the conscience level, so we do not respond instinctively. Morality, as a factor in behavior, is unique to the human animal. All other animals respond instinctually, to their environment. They migrate like clockwork. Even jump over cliffs, at instinctive intervals. They steal, murder, & have random sex, with no sting of conscience. So, the Real Question is, 'What is the Source of this 'sense' of morality? Did an Embedding Force put it there? Or is it a acquired trait, indoctrinated by society or human manipulation? Even if you believe that instinct and morality are the same, why risk your life or progeny for platitudes with no personal benefit? Whether man indoctrinated it, or evolution instilled it, why follow it? Why not pick the best choice for your own personal benefit, and reject the platitudes from deluded moralizers, who only want to manipulate you for some agenda? Morality, as a Real Thing, can only be a human construct for manipulation, in a godless universe. Only if an Embedder instilled it into the psyche of humanity, can it be a Real Thing.
Lets look at this one, which is an excellent example to contrast instinct vs morality. The sex drive is an instinct. Men would bang any female they could catch, with no moral restraint. THAT is the instinct. Morality, otoh, tells men to restrain themselves. Respect boundaries. If they meet an attractive married woman, it is morality, not instinct, that restrains them from hopping in the sack. So our natural instinct, to procreate with any and every woman of child bearing age, is tempered by a moral 'sense', that is either constructed by man, for manipulation, or is embedded by a Higher Power, or Creator. Why should we let deluded human platitudes interfere with our natural instincts, if we are in a godless universe?
Many, many examples have already been provided showing that you are wrong about your universal claims regarding animal instincts. Empathetic, cooperative, reciprocal instincts do indeed exist in social animals, and they confer evolutionary benefits. Humans are like other social animals in this regard, only with bigger brains to reflect on those instinct, the ones you call conscience.
Is this because 'Natural Law, and human rights are a Real Thing, or because they were manipulated by some moralizing controllers, for some agenda?
Lemmings don't jump off cliffs. That was shown to be a myth. No, I didn't suggest morality and instinct were synonymous or even close, I suggested that morality is an in-built reaction to instinct. A PBS program showed that chimpanzees a) know how to lie, and b) know that if they get caught, they will be beaten, by the head male or the whole family. This, I suggest, is the origin of morality, that in-built knowledge and/or guilt about doing something "wrong", that knowledge that an action will result in penalties if one is caught. This is one step up from the standard mammalian recognition of making a mistake, such as tangling with a porcupine or a skunk. Once they've made that mistake once, they know not to make it again. This isn't morality, but it is learning. For the chimpanzees, they might lie and get away with it the first time, so when they lie and get punished the second time, the lesson isn't "don't lie", the lesson is "don't get caught". So yes, morality is a social phenomenon, but because humans aren't blank slates but have inborn behavioral traits, you can't just create morality from whole cloth. It's amazing how malleable morality can be, like the Amazon tribe whose women don't feel loved if their husbands don't beat them, or the ancient Moloch worshippers who voluntarily served up their children as sacrifices, but morality across societies is remarkably uniform (Islam excepted). Only religion can overcome natural moral sense, such as incest taboos and opposition to cannibalism. Something interesting to note, while you're right that animals in the wild have no sense of morality, domestic dogs do. You can make a dog feel guilty, and by making a dog feel guilty, get that dog to behave in a moral way even when you're not there.
I would see those things as a conditioned reflex, not a rational moral 'choice'. Humans often project upon their pets their own emotional, and volitional reasonings, when no such reasoning exists.
Instincts are reflexive (as is conscience), and such behavior isn't always conditioned. As I've said, empathetic, cooperative, pro-social, even altruistic behavior is well-documented among social animals.
Again, you changed the meaning of what I said. I didn't say the dog is making a choice when it behaves morally.
So no one who was not subjected to such training ever turns out to be a moral adult. Right? Certainly that's true of what passes for morality in the minds of those who understand nothing about it, but the only emotion - if it can even be called that - behind actual morality is disinterested love. resent you for presuming to act as his or her conscience - which is a helluva lot more immoral than anything a child is likely to do. Sure, which is why it's just as effective in training people to be evildoers as pseudomoral automatons. No, all you can do is get it to behave in a manner you find acceptable. Please, you have no idea.
Correct. "In research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, ASU researchers Sarah Mathew and Charles Perreault find that the main determinant of human behavior is social learning, which is contrary to established assumptions of current thinking in cognitive sciences, psychology and human behavioral ecology." https://asunow.asu.edu/content/how-we-were-raised-not-physical-environment-explains-human-behavior Truly feral children are extremely rare; most of them were raised by humans for some time before being lost in the woods, etc., so how much moral training they received before becoming feral is unknown. But what we do know from the few truly feral children that have been discovered is that they have great difficulty learning language and the basics of human social interaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child Pffft. Excuse me while I point at you and laugh. Until the age of about seven, a child has no conscience. The conscience is part of the superego, which doesn't develop until around the age of seven. It is the superego that contains the moral sense of the human being. Not sure what you mean here, but if you mean that people can be raised to be suicide bombers like in Islamic countries as easily as they can be raised to be good and decent human beings like in Christian countries, you are correct. Which is pretty much what we try to do with human beings.
~ Men would bang any female they could catch, with no moral restraint. THAT is the instinct. ~ All? If this is your claim, please provide scientific evidence to support that statement. As for morality, over my many years I have found humanists and progressive intellectual types to be the most moral of people. Not only more moral, but more tolerant, more open minded, more kindly disposed towards others, and more receptive to new ideas. On the other hand, professing Christian types have a tendency to be highly intolerant, full of anger and hate, and are prejudiced unlike the moral people. Seems like they feel the Bible or the church, or their new status as "Christian" gives them license to see themselves as better than any and everyone else. That arrogance and self importance seems to come with the territory. While the Bible teaches them to be humble, to wash the feet of their visitors, the turn the other cheek, to refrain from speaking badly of anyone, etc, none ever demonstrate lives which conform to Jesus's actual teaching. If anything, more often than not, it is atheists, humanists, and other of that type who are more like Jesus. Why can't Christians and right wingers be that way as well?
Not even close, trust me. And also utterly beside the point. Be my guest. You won't be doing it for long. Trust me, that word doesn't mean anything like what you think it means. And experience suggests you won't have it otherwise. If the pronoun refers to loveless manipulators who have no damn business being within earshot of a child, you are quite correct.
This is a debating site. Either provide evidence of your claims or say nothing. You posited the question whether someone who was not socialized would develop morality as an adult. To find someone who was not socialized would require finding children raised by other beings than adult humans. I see no evidence so far that you have anything to support your contention. I'm still not even sure what your contention is. Again, either provide evidence or say nothing. I have studied psychology extensively, so I know what "conscience" means. Cheap shot with no attempt at clearing up what you actually meant. Teaching morality to children means being a loveless manipulator? Seems like an awfully big jump.
I find most atheists to be arrogant bastards who have a holier-than-thou attitude towards believers, thinking that they are smarter, wiser, or somehow better than people who believe in God. Bill Maher is their poster boy. Why are atheists full of anger and hate towards and intolerant of Christians? Why do they feel that atheism gives them license to see themselves as better than all those believers out there? And since atheists are just 2% of the population while the believers (in the US) are 90%, that makes atheists far more arrogant than Christians in terms of sheer numbers they look down on. And your understanding of Christianity is flawed. Jesus is not the Christian model, Paul is. Paul set the standard for how to be a good Christian, and he was all those things you condemn: judgemental, exclusionary, preachy, anti-gay, anti-hippie (Paul condemned long hair on men), anti-liberal, anti-vegetarian, even. Christians understand that you can't "be like Jesus" because Jesus was divine, without sin, perfect. But you can be like Paul, who was weak, imperfect, human. But it's funny and ironic that those who refuse to believe in Jesus hold him up as an example for Christians to follow. How about you follow Jesus instead? Paul will teach you how.
I'll leave that as a self evident observation, regarding the human male. Do you really think we need a 'study!' to prove men are horn dogs? ..maybe.. do you have a peer reviewed scientific study for that? I dispute that.. i don't find any ideological group inherently more 'moral!' than any other. All are human beings, presumably, and all share the same human nature. The irony of this claim.. which i hear quite often, btw, is that an ideology that has no basis for ANY absolute, objective morality (atheism), claims to follow deluded human moral constructs better than those who believe in the basis! Morality, like the soul, conscience, meaning, destiny, etc.. these theistic specific concepts are delusions, in a godless universe. So here are people who believe others are deluded, for believing in God, the soul, meaning, purpose, morality, etc, yet they claim to be superior in keeping these arbitrary, relative moral constructs, that man has invented to manipulate people! They are better at being deluded? Why would anyone boast of superior delusion? 'progressive intellectual types'... Now that is funny... an oxymoron if there ever was one!
How does one define, 'good and decent'? To Islamists, bravely giving your life in jihad is 'good and decent'. To national socialists, purging humanity from inferior stock was 'good and decent.' To Stalin and the Russian communists, eliminating inferiors, to help evolve the 'New Soviet Man', was 'good and decent.' So, is 'good and decent', just a relative concept? Is 'evil' just an arbitrary label, to apply to ones ideological enemies? IF.. there is no Moral Embedder, that has instilled universal, absolute morality in human beings, THEN... there is no absolute morality, but all are platitudes, constructed by man, for manipulation. It is a simple dichotomy. Either there are Real Moral Values, inside of humans, ('endowed by the Creator'), OR, 'morality!' is a human construct. It is not real. It is a delusion. What other possibilities could there be? 'Morality', is either a Real Thing, or it is not. If it is not, then any moralizing by humans is a manipulation, to control them. It is a delusion. The question remains: Why should we let deluded human platitudes interfere with our desires and/or natural instincts, if we are in a godless universe?
One more video illustrating the misconceptions this theory has about animal behavior. Earlier in the thread it was claimed that reciprocity shouldn't result in any kind of advantageous alliances in social animals. Of course, in reality, these alliances happen all of the time. In fact, they are the norm in Chimpanzee social groups. The alpha is typically not the strongest, most aggressive male, but instead the male that has formed the best alliances with the females in the group and with the older males, and some of the alpha's primary roles include providing empathetic responses to distressed members of the group and breaking up fights impartially. Empathy, in this thread, has been characterized as somehow disadvantageous in Darwinian terms (something Darwin would, and in some ways did, emphatically disagree with), when in fact Chimpanzees prove that it is an advantageous trait in a social species.
And that's the heart of your misunderstanding. Empathy and cooperation ARE human desires and natural instincts.
Projecting human emotion, reason, and decision making onto animals is called Anthropomorphism. Studies that attempt to 'prove!' uniquely human attributes in animals are roundly criticised for anthropomorphic projection. Chimps have been studied extensively, trying to prove anthropomorphic qualities, when there are other, more reasonable explanations, than 'human like!' projection. The attempt, here, is to blur the distinction between morality and instinct. But instinct is not morality. There are no 'good and bad!' judgments in instinctive behavior. Animals might SEEM to exhibit human qualities, but that is merely projection.. anthropomorphic projection. YouTube videos, showing animals exhibiting human behaviour, are just tricks, trained by conditioned response. Talking animals, oozing human emotion are Disney films, not biological reality. There is no 'justice', or 'morality', in any animal society. There is jungle law. Might makes right. There are thousands of studies of animal societies, and any 'human like!' behavior is projected. There is no moralizing taking place, or abstract reasoning. But in the Brave New World of Progesso mandates, real science must take a back seat to religious belief, and fantasy as reality. Here, animals talk and are just like people. You pick your own identity, regardless of your born biology. 'Morality', if it is real in humans, is not the same as animal instinct, no matter how hard we try to project it upon them. Only humans have this abstract sense of morality. The question is, Is it real, or imagined?
I'm primarily talking about animal behavior, not emotion, reason, or decision making. And it isn't "projecting" when it is backed up by evidence and well-reasoned hypothesis. It doesn't matter what unnamed people criticize the studies for. What matters is their hypothesis, testing methods, and the evidence gathered. Chimps have been studied extensively and exhibit cooperative, empathetic behavior that challenges your false claims about universal animal nature. Moral philosophy is an attempt to study, categorize, account for, universalize, and/or resolve conflicts in instinctual conscience. Of course there are. If you aren't experiencing them, you may be suffering from psychopathy. If you see a child in distress (unless you are a psychopath, once again) you have instinctive reaction and a shared distress response before you ever start philosophizing about the situation. There isn't a biologist anywhere in the world who claims that animals have NO human qualities. The only question is how much. Except that they also cover natural behavior. This is problematic for six major reasons. 1) Talking? Why are you attempting to cloud the issue with "talking"? 2) This is yet another instance where you flip-flop on our moral senses. You say we have them and that they are reliable one minute, and the next you claim they are unreliable. My moral sense tells me that animals actually feel distress and that I should do something about it if it can be helped. 3) This is another instance of you using a line of reasoning that you've challenged as irrational. You claim that animal emotions don't exist on the basis that they haven't been proven to you. 4) Some animals exhibit the same physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral reactions associated with our emotions that we do, and they do so in reaction to the same sorts of stimuli. Yes, even when it comes to empathetically comforting others in distress. The idea that they have emotions or something like emotions is the best explanation offered so far for these phenomena. 5) Your argument is tantamount to denying that animals have experiences at all. 6) As a Christian, you should be concerned that your argument is unbiblical (see the story of Balaam's ass) These are abstract concepts created by reflecting on our moral senses. Our moral senses come first. Abstractions come later. The whole concept of a moral "sense" implies something that is pre-abstract, pre-philosophy, pre-theory. Your false portrayal here of animal behavior has been corrected with numerous natural observations, none of which you've yet addressed. It hasn't been proven to you, therefore it doesn't exist. Where have I heard that before? See comments about abstract concepts above. 1) You've been provided real science, which you have ignored, and you haven't provided a single scientific observation of your own 2) There you go with your straw man again. No one said anything about animals talking (although some can, of course), and no one anywhere, at any point, said that they "are just like people. Please stick to intellectually honest responses, not straw men like this 3) Desperately trying to change the subject to transgender issues? Really? Make up your mind. Are we talking about moral sense or later abstractions? Which is it? You keep switching tracks. I agree that it is likely only humans who have abstract concepts about reality (though some experiments come to mind that could challenge that notion, such as the fact that dogs have "theory of other minds"). The moral senses are another story. We have instinctual, automatic, neurological responses to others in distress that don't require any kind of abstract theory to trigger them. Our moral "senses" seem identical to the instincts that social animals have toward empathetic response and cooperative behavior. Moral senses? Real, of course. And animals seem to exhibit them too. Moral abstractions? That's a great question. They are real in the sense that triangles or the number 8 are real. They are mental models without a concrete existence. If you believe that abstract objects are "real" in some sense (and I happen to agree), then yes, they are real.
"horn dogs" - mebbe so for the party of morality and family values "deluded" - definitely so for that tribe "oxymoron" - nothing worse than the claim of being principled and of professing morality along with family values
I did no such thing. Maybe pointing and laughing some more will improve your reading comprehension. Non sequitur, obviously. Not at all. No such effort is warranted at this time. No, teaching a semblance of morality by means of emotional manipulation, as you have advocated, is being a loveless manipulator. You're welcome.
