Philosophy: books and discussion

[TGS]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I think it was the booze. Not everyone knows who Heidegger was (and many of us who do are still extremely uncomfortable about his Nazi connections), but lots of folks can relate to boozy beggers!

Last of the Summer Wine was a wonderful show, as was Waiting for God. The elderly are rarely made the central figures of series in our youth-centered U.S. TV culture.

Pfff...you gave the world The Golden Girls! Embrace your contribution to the betterment of western culture

[nguirado]

There is no contradiction. For those who think morality is a social construct, what they call "morality" isn't something that's always right or wrong, naturally. It's just a collection of what they think are good and bad practices. If everybody holds to them, the thinking goes (Kant), society would function best.

Think of life as a game and morality as the rules. You decide that not using slang in Scabble would make for a more enjoyable game. It's not that using or not using slang is naturally wrong; it's just something you all decided on or somebody imposed on the rest of the group.

Now, I believe there is a natural morality and that people can sense it in some way. What might be going on with some people is that they naturally feel uncomfortable believing that there's really no rules to the game.

There is a contradiction in what you say, and I think it points out to something very important. If morality is a social construct (which I agree with, although I would add that it is based on biological premises), then potentially, holding a different morality than the rest is a threat to society. After all, morality is what is supposed to guide your behavior as a member of society.

In theory, you could for instance decide that in order to preserve the Earth's peace, harmony and balance, humanity needs to be reduced to a population of a few thousand individuals. I would respect your right to believe this (I'm close to it myself some days ), but if there is the slightest chance that you would be ready to act on it, I would prefer you to hold this view while safely locked away from any sharp-edged object

The purpose of morals is to hold society together, and for this we need to choose, collectively, a set of rules and keep to it. As you said, it doesn't matter what the rules of a sport are, but if there were not rules, there would be no sport. Any set of moral rules chosen by a society has some arbitrary in it. You can build your own morality, I think it's even important to do that, but you also have to work with the rules of the society you live in.

I think this is an important issue, because we now live in a very open society, where different sets of moral rules can come into contact, with extremely destructive results. It's not an easy one. What do you do if society requires you to do something that you hold to be evil?

[nguirado]

Oh, and if morality was based on nature in the sense of genetic advantage and disadvantage only, we wouldn't have to think about it, much less argue about it. It would just be built-in, like in animals.

Also, nature in the sense of the physical world doesn't really care what we do. It's not like in Avatar. We can be gone tomorrow and no other physical think would notice. Well, my dog and cat would, but only because I feed them.

[FlorenceArt]

Morality is a human construct, but it has some biological basis. I'd say that it's probably about 1% instinct, and 99% education. The way I see it, it's similar to the differences between men and women.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Morality is a human construct, but it has some biological basis. I'd say that it's probably about 1% instinct, and 99% education. The way I see it, it's similar to the differences between men and women.

I only disagree with you on the ratio of social construct verses biological basis. I wouldn't attempt to put a number to it, but I think the biological basis of morality is much higher than 1%. It seems to me that as we have evolved to be social animals, the biological component urging us to behave in ways that allow us to fit in society must be greater. That being said, the aspects that are instilled in us by environment and experience aren't inconsiderable, either; the contributions of both nature and nurture are important. The particulars vary over time and from one culture to another, but there has never been a society to my knowledge that had no concept of right and wrong behavior toward other people like ourselves; and as the planet has shrunk, and as we come into contact with more and more people from other cultures on a face to face basis, that circle of "people like ourselves" expands, and our concept of morality shifts from tribalism to internationalism.

We have a natural revulsion against causing harm to fellow humans, and that's why during times of conflict, allegiance to our tribe tends to make us sink to de-humanizing the enemy with racial slurs and making accusations that the enemy is not like us, and doesn't place the same value on life as our side does. It's always easier to kill people when you convince yourself that they are sub-human.

[TGS]

FlorenceArt thinks that there is a very small impact of biology on ethics and that by far the greater influence is socialization. Tom thinks that the impact of biology is greater than FlorenceArt grants - though he grants that socialization is significant.

Lets assume there is a fact of the matter, the philosophically interesting question is how would we determine whether FlorenceArt or Tom is right. if either of them are, or if neither of them is, how we would determine that.

Suppose we took a poll and found that 86% of people thought that between 1% and 3% of our ethical behaviour is biologically determined. Would that "prove" that it was true? If it wouldn't, what would - or what would prove it wasn't true?

[Ea]

Good question. I am myself leaning towards that society has by far the greatest impact in either case - but how much if we were to determine it in 1/100's...? I have no idea.

I don't think asking people is the answer because they wouldn't know. They'd only know what they think they know.

If we could measure in some way how much impact biology has, we may be able to give an educated guess. But then, on the other hand, our interpretation of what constitutes 'biology' is subjective and decided by 'society' So we're back to square one.

[Jar]

Hello, FlorenceArt (and others of course),

I enjoyed your post. I have- if I may- couple of questions though.

First I´d like to stress do not be afraid of the same end of Socrates. Do you know he had been offered chance of escaping before he drank the poison? He refused to do so, ´cause he knew he had break the law.

You probably figured out That isn´t a question... so there you go:

1. Why do you think Plato´s Sokrates hated body and life?
2. And what do you think is the essence of Christianity, for calling Sokrates a christian?
3. question goes toward the language: What if those two words "art" and "theory" had back then a bit different meaning they have today?

There is a dialogue called Parmenides you could enjoy. Sokrates is there very young and he is the one who listens and who is taught. His oponents are definitelly "able to rub two ideas together". I would say it can be see as a part of how he obtained his "metodology" even though the characters in this dialogue could never meet in real life. But does it matter?

I am glad I dropped by. I´m looking forward to hear from you.
J.

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

To be honest, I have only recently started being interested in philosophy. Of course I read some when I was a teenager. I remember reading Nietzsche (mandatory teenage reading I guess) but I don't remember anything about it. I also read a few religious texts, the Koran and the Tao, and even parts of the Bible

I tried reading Plato at that time, and was shocked by the so-called "dialogs" that consisted mainly of some acolyte cycling through a dozen versions of "yes, you are so right" while Socrates was rambling on. The shock was because of the way my father had told me about Socrates and the "maïeutique", or how he helped others "give birth" to ideas. Yeah, right.

I have always been interested in ideas and theories, but until a few months ago, so during an interval of at least 20 years, I don't think I read any purely philosophical book. Then I decided to give Plato another try.

Oh my. It was even worse than I thought.

Not only is Plato's Socrates a rather unlikeable individual who obviously enjoys befuddling and making fun of adversaries who are invariably presented as barely able to rub two ideas together, and quickly reduced to either bovine agreement or threats(*). The worst is his philosophy.

No wonder the Catholic thinkers were delighted by him and tried to make him a sort of honorary Christian. He was, in the worst sense of the word. He hated life and the body. He had a passionate contempt for reality. He was -gasp- an idealist.

One example stayed with me: in one of his -ahem- dialogs, he explains why medicine is an art, while cooking is not. The reason for this, ladies and gentlemen, is that a cook learned how to cook (which food tastes good, which is poisonous, etc) through experience. But he doesn't know why. Which makes him obviously inferior to a doctor.

In case you're not getting this, let me expand: a cook, who knows how to feed people and keep them alive, is inferior to a doctor, who kills people (because that's what doctors did in these times). But that's OK because the doctor has a theory (most likely some nonsense about humors or the balance of elements in the body).

It's with nonsense like this that you end up killing people for their own good.

So in case it's not clear already, no matter how much I love ideas, I don't think they matter more than people, or life, or reality. Even if they are so much more comfortable to play with

So, I guess that was a bit more on my philosophy, or lack of it.

Aren't you glad you dropped by?


(*) Well, considering what happened to Socrates, I'm obliged to admit that maybe the threats were not entirely fictitious

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by TGS

FlorenceArt thinks that there is a very small impact of biology on ethics and that by far the greater influence is socialization. Tom thinks that the impact of biology is greater than FlorenceArt grants - though he grants that socialization is significant.

Lets assume there is a fact of the matter, the philosophically interesting question is how would we determine whether FlorenceArt or Tom is right. if either of them are, or if neither of them is, how we would determine that.

Maybe we could assess to what extent different societies throughout history have shared the same ethics.
Of course, ethics may be the result of something other than socialisation or biology - increased knowledge, greater prosperity, perceived threat levels etc.

[WT Sharpe]

I'm not saying I believe that the biological component is greater than the social, all I'm saying is that I believe it is more significant than Florence thinks it is. Determining just how significant is not easy, but I think Sparrow's idea warrants investigation.

Throughout cultures there are certain norms that seem to be more biologically based, such as the prohibition against incest, while prohibitions against robbery and murder could arise from social interactions. The drive toward socialization itself, however, is probably more a result of our evolutionary history. There's a natural feedback loop IMO that makes separation into components of biological and environment subsets difficult.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Maybe we could assess to what extent different societies throughout history have shared the same ethics.
Of course, ethics may be the result of something other than socialisation or biology - increased knowledge, greater prosperity, perceived threat levels etc.

So the idea would be that those elements of ethical ways of being that have existed through time are more likely to be "hard wired", whereas those that can be shown to be subject to change are more likely to be socially determined?

Isn't one of the difficulties that whatever hard wiring there is and whatever social determination there is don't act alone, they interact. For example, lets assume that men have a biological drive to dominate women (I'm not suggesting this is the case, but let's pretend for a minute), let's also assume that men dominating women in anything less than a very subtle way is less effective as a mate finding and keeping strategy than it was, (which, presumably, was the biological driver for domination in the first place). Lets also assume that we are a moral male who has learned through socialization that dominating women is oppressive, and also learned that, ethically, oppression of any kind is a no-no. How do we unpick the different and countervailing forces at work here to sort out moral from immoral behaviour?

[TimMason]

Without God, a natural morality has no foundation. This is because in nature we find all kinds of behaviours that we would be unwilling to regard as morally good: we find animals that lay their eggs in the living bodies of other animals, we find animals that eat their young, we find animals that do a variety of unpleasant and disgusting things in order to survive and proliferate. How can we assume that the sub-set of behaviours that human beings engage in is morally superior to the behaviour of a prying mantis or a pig? Only if we assume, like Thomas Aquinus, the existence of a transcendent being who, for whatever reason, favours our species, can we explain our moral superiority to others and regard morality as being 'in nature'.

Otherwise, as TGS argues, any biological impulsion will need to be scrutinized in the light of ethical principles that are not themselves given biologically. Acquinus held that humans use reason in order to understand the natural commands of God; even if we assume that morality is natural, we cannot simply taken it as given. Without Acquinus's God to invest nature with morality, we cannot even make the assumption.

Morality is, and probably always will be, ultimately undecidable. The hope that there might be a natural set of rules or principles is only viable in a world in which transcendence is possible. In a world completely governed by scientific principles there is no bed-rock upon which to build the one true moral system.

[GeoffC]

Jar Welcome to mobileread - and, also, to this thread ....

[FlorenceArt]

I don't think anybody is suggesting we should discover a "natural morality" and rule our behavior according to it. That would be absurd, especially if we look for it, not in human instinct, but in Nature in general. That implies a personalization of Nature, or the existence of an entity that planned it and expects us to follow an externally set rule.

We were only wondering about what part of morality comes from biological imperatives, but morality is a human construction, it's useless to try to avoid that.

What we need to come to terms with is a morality that we now know is relative, and yet that we feel is essential to our peaceful cohabitation with other members of the species that have a different morality.

[GeoffC]

The problem might come with your datum point for "relative" ....