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Old 07-05-2010, 08:21 AM   #631
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There is another sense of "natural", and that sense is concerned with what this brain/body system we refer to as human is like and how it interacts with its environment.
I don't see how this overcomes the objection. Indeed, I do not see that your use of the term 'natural' differs in any crucial way from my own. If our ethical determinations spring from our being in the world, then they have no more than local extent.

Take one example of how our brain/body system interacts with its environment: the blood feud. We know that for millennia human beings have acted upon the principle that injury done to one member of a group is injury done to all, and that there is no distinction to be made between the aggressor and other members of his group. If a member of your family is injured by the member of another family, then all members of the other family are legitimate targets of your wrath.

Now, there are excellent biological reasons why this should be so (you may look at Daly and Wilson's book 'Homicide' for a rehearsal of these). But I have to doubt that anyone on this list would accept a moral principle that says you have a right to harm your neighbour's son if your neighbour has harmed you.

Similarly, female infanticide is a practice which can be shown to contribute to lineage fitness under certain circumstances (for a discussion of this, see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's 'Mother Nature'). Indeed, it seems likely that any lineage which did *not* pursue this practice in the mountain areas of Northern India and of Pakistan would very quickly have lost its status, its lands, its means of subsistence. Once again, it seems unlikely that anyone here will uphold a principle that makes such behaviours morally desirable.

One could continue with similar examples. It is very easy indeed to demonstrate that our species being cannot be, in and of itself, a guide to present moral practice.

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Old 07-05-2010, 08:22 AM   #632
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What is the human moral sense in relation to those examples?
Some humans think them wrong, others don't.
I mean by having a moral sense that there is a moral question to be asked - is this a good thing, a permissible thing, a bad thing. That different people ascribe a different moral value to an act demonstrates the exercise of moral sense, or moral reasoning, or ethical thinking - it doesn't mean that everyone has to agree. Ethics then becomes the discerning of the principles upon which such moral reasoning is based and the application of those principles to moral issues.
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Old 07-05-2010, 08:31 AM   #633
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I'm interested in your implied distinction between "apparently ethical" and what that might be contrasted with - "really ethical", "genuinely ethical"? If there is such a distinction what does it rest upon? This is a guess and by all means shoot me down, but is there a hidden assumption in your distinction that "really ethical" behaviour cannot be motivated by self-interest, whereas "apparently ethical" behaviour looks as though it is not motivated by self-interest but when you break it down it actually is?
In a nutshell, I think human behaviour can be explained by self-interest. When you understand peoples' motives, you understand their behaviour.
I wonder to what extent we need to think of ethics at all outside of philosophical debates. Applying Occam's Razor seems to eliminate it from any discourse about how people actually behave, or want to behave.

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Old 07-05-2010, 08:44 AM   #634
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In a nutshell, I think human behaviour can be explained by self-interest. When you understand peoples' motives, you understand their behaviour.
You might be right but it is probably always possible to find exceptions, or at least cases where it is difficult to see what self-interest is being served, in relation to some bit of behaviour. What does one do with those cases?

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I wonder to what extent we need to think of ethics at all outside of philosophical debates. Applying Occam's Razor seems to eliminate it from any discourse about how people actually behave.
You might be right there too, but then we're not outside of philosophical discussion, we're on a discussion thread discussing philosophy.
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Old 07-05-2010, 08:45 AM   #635
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In a nutshell, I think human behaviour can be explained by self-interest. When you understand peoples' motives, you understand their behaviour.
I wonder to what extent we need to think of ethics at all outside of philosophical debates. Applying Occam's Razor seems to eliminate it from any discourse about how people actually behave, or want to behave.
Exactly!
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Old 07-05-2010, 08:47 AM   #636
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Oops, yes, hello and welcome Jar. I put your question aside last night because I didn't have the time to answer it, and I almost forgot to do it

Thank you for welcoming.


However, what I did see and didn't like in Plato's rendering of the dialogs was the insistence on a higher truth, and on an eternal life where we are supposed to get our rewards for living according to higher principles...

With this your first post is comprehensible to me. I do not share your attitude and I even admire people who believe there are things worth of dying. I do not think Sókrates drank poison with thought of reward in future life or anything like this. In Rist's Stoic philosophy there's a definition of wisdom as a harmony of thinking and doing...

I didn't call Socrates a christian, I said that some chistians "tried to make him an honorary christian" because they recognized similarities between their beliefs and his. Namely the belief in an afterlife where we are rewarded for our good deeds, and the contempt for this life that we do have.

Sorry I misunderstood.


I used the word theory in its modern sense, I don't think Plato did it, it's my interpretation. Art is a word from Plato, and yes it has a different meaning from the one we generally understand, but I believe that when we say "the art of medicine" or "the art of cooking", we are still reasonably close to the meaning Plato had in mind. I may be wrong of course. I still believe I understood Plato's meaning about the difference between medicine and cooking, whether or not I got all the nuances of the word correctly. Do you disagree?

I am not sure here. The meaning of philosophy stands on astonishment or surprise over nature of things, that we now see in a different light. Did Plato compare or measure "cooking" and "medicine", or did he just try to explain why to use the word "art" for cooking and not for medicine? It suggests that some people had used word "art" for medicine. Why? And why it is not propriate usage?

Thanks, I'll look it up
Still even here Sókrates isn't shown as a bad character; I do not want you to be disappointed...
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Old 07-05-2010, 08:49 AM   #637
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Oops, yes, hello and welcome Jar. I put your question aside last night because I didn't have the time to answer it, and I almost forgot to do it

Thank you for welcoming.


However, what I did see and didn't like in Plato's rendering of the dialogs was the insistence on a higher truth, and on an eternal life where we are supposed to get our rewards for living according to higher principles...


With this your first post is comprehensible to me. I do not share your attitude and I even admire people who believe there are things worth of dying. I do not think Sókrates drank poison with thought of reward in future life or anything like this. In Rist's Stoic philosophy there's a definition of wisdom as a harmony of thinking and doing...

I didn't call Socrates a christian, I said that some chistians "tried to make him an honorary christian" because they recognized similarities between their beliefs and his. Namely the belief in an afterlife where we are rewarded for our good deeds, and the contempt for this life that we do have.

Sorry I misunderstood.


I used the word theory in its modern sense, I don't think Plato did it, it's my interpretation. Art is a word from Plato, and yes it has a different meaning from the one we generally understand, but I believe that when we say "the art of medicine" or "the art of cooking", we are still reasonably close to the meaning Plato had in mind. I may be wrong of course. I still believe I understood Plato's meaning about the difference between medicine and cooking, whether or not I got all the nuances of the word correctly. Do you disagree?

I am not sure here. The meaning of philosophy stands on astonishment or surprise over nature of things, that we now see in a different light. Did Plato compare or measure "cooking" and "medicine", or did he just try to explain why to use the word "art" for cooking and not for medicine? It suggests that some people had used word "art" for medicine. Why? And why it is not propriate usage?

Thanks, I'll look it up


Still even here Sókrates isn't shown as a bad character; I do not want you to be disappointed...

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Old 07-05-2010, 08:50 AM   #638
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But if he sees that another chimpanzee is getting a better reward for the same task - say, a raisin - he will get annoyed and refuse to perform.
This may suggest that the chimpanzee has some rudimentary sense of economics, but not necessarily that he has a sense of morality. If the chimpanzee who received the higher reward refused to perform until his companion were offered the same, perhaps we might be heading towards morality - although that too could be argued to be little more than a higher form of self-interest.
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Old 07-05-2010, 08:59 AM   #639
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You might be right but it is probably always possible to find exceptions, or at least cases where it is difficult to see what self-interest is being served, in relation to some bit of behaviour. What does one do with those cases?
Plead lack of data, or assume someone acting in a manner outside their own self-interest is, by definition, insane.

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You might be right there too, but then we're not outside of philosophical discussion, we're on a discussion thread discussing philosophy.
Q. What'll happen when philosophers find the ultimate solution to all the ethical problems humanity will ever face?
A. Nothing.

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Old 07-05-2010, 08:59 AM   #640
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Sorry for this double post. I shall learn how to "move" on forum. J.
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Old 07-05-2010, 09:25 AM   #641
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I don't see how this overcomes the objection. Indeed, I do not see that your use of the term 'natural' differs in any crucial way from my own. If our ethical determinations spring from our being in the world, then they have no more than local extent.
I think we agree that human morality is ...human...that there is no access to anything outside human being against which we might measure our judgments. Where I think we disagree is on a particular set of implications the you draw from this and that I don't. If I understand you right the particular implication that you draw is that given this limitation then the specificity or context-boundness of any moral judgment in some way disbars it from being a genuine moral judgment, (since, to be afforded the status of a genuine moral judgment such a judgment would have to be underpinned by something transcendental to human being). My argument is that given the inescapability of such context-boundness, there exists no other mechanism for making moral judgments, and pointing at this limitation is tilting at philosophical windmills.

That different groups of people make different judgments about the moral status of a behaviour - whether it's female infanticide, putting shampoo in rabbit's eyes or raising animals for the sole purpose of killing them - is, it seems to me, a reason to engage with the discourse, not a reason to declare the discourse invalid and/or impossible.
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Old 07-05-2010, 09:36 AM   #642
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In a nutshell, I think human behaviour can be explained by self-interest. When you understand peoples' motives, you understand their behaviour.
I wonder to what extent we need to think of ethics at all outside of philosophical debates. Applying Occam's Razor seems to eliminate it from any discourse about how people actually behave, or want to behave.
Arthur Schopenahauer's praxeological observation was that the three prime human motivators are self-gain (egoism), malice, and compassion which exist in varying degrees in each individual with self-gain being, by far, the most prominent of the three. BTW, I read Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell on my ebook reader. I'm not really interested in reading any other philosophers. Schopenhauer wrote on self-interest/self-gain :

"The individual is filled with the unqualified desire of preserving his life, and of keeping it free from all pain, under which is included all want and privation. He wishes to have the greatest possible amount of pleasurable existence and every gratification he is capable of appreciating."

"Egoism [self-interest]… will never be argued out of a person, as little as a cat can be talked out of her inclination for mice."

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Old 07-05-2010, 09:39 AM   #643
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Q. What'll happen when philosophers find the ultimate solution to all the ethical problems humanity will ever face?
A. Nothing.
Ah, but sometimes the journey is more important than arriving at the destination.

Actually if philosophers do find the ultimate solution to all the ethical problems humanity will ever face then it can't be the case that nothing will happen because, ex hypothesi, philosophers have found the solution to all the ethical problems humanity will ever face, so that will have happened. The problem comes when philosophers continue to fail to make any meaningful contribution to solving even the smallest ethical problem that humanity faces - then nothing happens
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Old 07-05-2010, 09:51 AM   #644
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I have argued against there being anything that one could point to as a 'natural morality'. That does not mean that I believe that all talk of morality or ethics is useless - simply that without transcendence there is no natural morality.

This said, there clearly exists something that we can describe as 'morality' or 'talk about morality' or, despite what Sparrow says, morally motivated behaviour. Moreover, all this talk and much of this behaviour does have real-world effects. The modern state, its laws, its protections, are all in part shaped by moral concerns. It is because the church set out to curb the excesses of the medieval feudal lords that we today have societies in which the blood-feud is a thing of the past, and in which infanticide is far more rare. It is because the state - at least in some places - was *moralized* that we live longer,healthier lives.
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Old 07-05-2010, 10:08 AM   #645
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I have argued against there being anything that one could point to as a 'natural morality'. That does not mean that I believe that all talk of morality or ethics is useless - simply that without transcendence there is no natural morality.

This said, there clearly exists something that we can describe as 'morality' or 'talk about morality' or, despite what Sparrow says, morally motivated behaviour. Moreover, all this talk and much of this behaviour does have real-world effects. The modern state, its laws, its protections, are all in part shaped by moral concerns. It is because the church set out to curb the excesses of the medieval feudal lords that we today have societies in which the blood-feud is a thing of the past, and in which infanticide is far more rare. It is because the state - at least in some places - was *moralized* that we live longer,healthier lives.

Sorry Tim, but you haven't argued anything. You state and seem to believe that morals only come from religion and unsupportable/unprovable supernatural being.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Tom had pointed out Sam Harris' take on morals based on science and others have pointed out the biological/evolutionary basis. It's this latter that seems most likely as a basis for what we call morals. What are morals but beliefs about how to interact with the world? Not that different than any other beliefs as far as I'm concerned it's all about survival and as Sparrow says - self-interest in surviving and ensuring the survival of progeny.
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