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Morality — Biological or Philosophical?
loid_void writes to mention The New York Times is reporting that Biologists are making a bid on the subject of morality. "Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book 'Moral Minds' that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, 'Primates and Philosophers,' the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes."
I am moral, but not religious.
If I do (or don't do) something for someone else, benefiting that other person, then I have done some good. I do not do good for love (or fear) of a god or any god-like entity, I do it because I am moral.
I'll agree that what certain religions consider good or bad is somewhat debatable, but at the very least, they give immoral people some sense of duty (towards their god/gods/goddesses).
But my point here is that morality and religion are disjoint concepts: even though religion may instill some morality, one can be completely moral and completely atheist.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
All you need to know to tell you that physical structures in the brain are important to behavior is contained in the story of Phineas Gage.
We all know that people change throughout their lifetime in response to their experiences. So we don't need to prove the nuture part. That's obvious. But cases like that of Gage prove that the physical structure is at least as important, and is probably far more significant, than the experience that shape you. You are vastly more (and in some other ways, less) than the sum of your experiences.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Anyone who is intested in this subject or thinks this is something new should read Paul Lawrence Farber's The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics . It's basically a history of science trying to derive moral structure from the biological world for the last century and a half. It's an interesting book. Unfortunatly, it is a slow dry read as well.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
The old saying:
Me against my Brother
Me and my Brother against my Cousins
Me, my Brother, and my Cousins against my Clan
Me, my Brother, my Cousins and my Clan against my Tribe
Me, my Brother, my Cousins, my Clan, and my Tribe agaist the others.
Ones loyalty to others is proportional to how closely they are related to you. The biologists call this "Kin Selection". Helping your siblings' children to survive is as good for your genes as helping your own grandchildren.
Also of interest is the results from game theory; "iterated prisoner's dilemma". When the usual dilemma (2 players; each chooses a strategy, traditionally either cooperation or defection, and the payoff matrix rewards one player defecting, but punishes both players if they both defect) is augmented to have some noise in the channel, and the contests are repeated over time and space, the winning strategy for a population is to have most people (the citizens) cooperate all the time, and to have a fraction (the police) use a strict tit-for-tat policy to punish those who would attempt to take advantage of the cooperating population by defecting.
Robert Heinlein has been trying to tell people for at 48 years now that a moral code, for it to be consistent with nature, must be based on the instinct for self-preservation, and that higher forms of morality are reached through the development of high forms of preservation. Family, community, nation, species, and so forth. He went so far as to describe (thought not in a very detailed fashion) a system of morality that was rooted in these ideas and constructed on logical, scientific principles, and he makes a very good case.
Go read Starship Troopers. Ignore the less than insightful pundits out there who would have you believe that Heinlein was a militarist and a fascist. Curse Paul Verhoeven.
Starship Troopers, at its core, was a treatise on morality, not a bug hunt. I frankly find it disturbing how many poepl fail to recognize this simple fact.
On the other hand, what you describe sounds an awful lot like the auto de fe , in which the Christians burned Moors, and of course Jews, once the tables had turned, in the numbers you mention. It strikes me that this may be an unfortunate inversion, given the way it's likely to feed into modern prejudice.
By coincidence, a NYT article seems relevant: Brain injuries affect morality:
Currently hooked on AMP
They're still rather crude at that.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The odd thing about Buddhists is that the center of their practice isn't about following a moral code - oh, they've got various enumerated lists but their claim isn't "follow these directives or go to hell." Instead they're after what in Zen's called "natural mind." The claim is clearing the mind and senses to really perceive the world and other beings directly leads in itself to great compassion, from which acts flow which are superior to anything that can be attained by following any code - even the various codifications of behavior the Buddhists themselves have written down.
Now, the odd thing about this in the context of the present discussion is that this would be consonant with our having something of an inborn sensibility which is superior in itself to anything that our cultures can come up with. Indeed the original Taoists also claimed precisely that, with the further claim that it's our cultures that obscure this natural order "between heaven and earth." So the Buddhists and Taoists are coming from precisely the other direction than the Christians who claim that we need to impose religious belief in order to have morality. Their contrary claim is that we need to get beyond our cultures - including their religious formulations - to be at our truly best behavior.
That's also why Buddhists are most gracious to visitors from other cultures - they don't read visitors in terms of how our behavior conforms to their own local cultural code, but rather try to see us more directly.
There is a parallel formulation in the philosophy of one of the founders of the "Scottish Enlightenment," Frances Hutchinson, who held that "the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue" was something natural in us, which he called our "moral sense" - and explicitly described as being the conjunction of our other senses, when not clouded by culture - which is to say very much what the Buddhists claim. Hutchinson was the favorite philosopher of Thomas Jefferson. In that way, America was founded on an appreciation of human nature very close to the Buddhist and Taoist (which enjoyed a re-emergence in New England Transcendentalism, which in turn informed the ethics of our current environmentalism - flowing nicely together with Zen concepts of nature in the work of, for instance, Gary Snyder).
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
My understanding of the prohibition on eating the meat of a calf boiled in its mother's milk is that this particular dish was a common part of local fertility rites when the Mosaic law was established, and the rule was laid down to encourage cultural cohesion among the Israelites-- keep them from joining neighboring fertility cults.