Survival of the fittest.

[Pythagorean]

Aedes, just a few thoughts:

Humans may be born silly and the thoughtlessness of youth related to such childishness but what is the good if it doesn't require the labour of the mind? Even if the good be such a simple thing as some say, its simplicity is all the more a rare thing being so hidden and as basic a thing as it is; as invisible to the eye as air and life's automatic living. I don't confuse outer beauty or youth or innocence with the performance of good or moral actions.

No. The good is not given to us but like Adam and Eve when we enter into culture and knowledge we enter into a bargain and great claims are made upon us there. It requires knowledge and sacrifice. What would it be worth if it didn't? It would be worthless, then? The real good as some suggest may even consist of knowledge itself.

So, if ignorance is good it is worthless, I say. But the good, if it exists, can not be worthless. It's not found in raw speechless nature, if it exists at all, but in certain acts of human origin. And this is what makes it difficult- so that there is never a point at which it could be finally reached and immortalized -except as a lesson for students- but it must be wrestled with and strived toward at all points at every moment in time. And I believe we are destined to lose it most of the time, lest we become infinitely wise.

-

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Pythagorean

Hello, Fido.

You seem to be indicated that there is an inherent progress going on. What is the basis of this assertion? Why would such progress be inevitable?

Also, I want to ask a clear question: what is there to prevent a man or some men to pursue their own advantage at the expense of other people who are helpless to prevent it?

-And for the sake of argument let us say that all parties concerned are located out in a wilderness.-

--

First. Progress is only an increase in knowledge and a refinement of technology. People have not changed, but have changed their forms of relationship, such as government and technology to avoid changing their basic personalities. It does not mean that people have not changed some, usually for the worse, but that having the mastery of nature means that people have less need to control themselves.

Second. The scene you paint of people pursuing their own advantage is much more likely in a modern, technologically advanced setting than beside nature. The reason for this is simple, and two sided. First; is that modern society putting bread on everyones table without the trouble of growing and havesting and all else leads people to believe that it just happens. Weather just happens to primitives, but all cooperative effort among primitives is bought with a pledge of honor. For example. When a society was surrounded by nature and nature was abundant in enemies, one would get his identity directly from membership in society, -and mutual support and succor from ones community. No person stood alone, and no man would choose to. Any person put out from society would be damned or hunted from one end of the earth to the other, like Cain, or Oedipus. What was true of the Anglo Saxon, was true of the German outlaw; that if he could not tell the name of his lord he was liable to be killed on the spot. Only society could protect any man from his fellow man.

[Aedes]

Pyth,

In the article I link an experiment is cited (that I have brought up on this forum before). A monkey is deprived of food until it is severely hungry. It is then given a button which when pushed will release food for it to eat. However pushing this button also delivers an electric shock to a second monkey that is visible to the starving one. And the starving monkey will NOT press the button to feed itself once it discovers this. So here, in raw nature, in some subhuman creature, we have altruism or empathy -- we have an animal that will sacrifice its own physical need rather than cause pain in another.

Massive surveys done in cultures throughout the world reveal striking similarity in our moral beliefs, and this holds true across widely disparate religious and ethnic groups. How is this true if these beliefs are not innate?

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Pythagorean

Aedes, just a few thoughts:

Humans may be born silly and the thoughtlessness of youth related to such childishness but what is the good if it doesn't require the labour of the mind? Even if the good be such a simple thing as some say, its simplicity is all the more a rare thing being so hidden and as basic a thing as it is; as invisible to the eye as air and life's automatic living. I don't confuse outer beauty or youth or innocence with the performance of good or moral actions.

No. The good is not given to us but like Adam and Eve when we enter into culture and knowledge we enter into a bargain and great claims are made upon us there. It requires knowledge and sacrifice. What would it be worth if it didn't? It would be worthless, then? The real good as some suggest may even consist of knowledge itself.

So, if ignorance is good it is worthless, I say. But the good, if it exists, can not be worthless. It's not found in raw speechless nature, if it exists at all, but in certain acts of human origin. And this is what makes it difficult- so that there is never a point at which it could be finally reached and immortalized -except as a lesson for students- but it must be wrestled with and strived toward at all points at every moment in time. And I believe we are destined to lose it most of the time, lest we become infinitely wise.

-

I have to laugh in reading about Greek Ethics that their philosophers thought to make people good through reason. I do not think they understood that people are good out of an emotional revulsion from the effects of bad. There is much that a person can accomplish through reason that is Good, but virtue cannot be achieved by thought, knowledge, or reason. Nor does one need a definition of good to pursue it since we are born into goodness, and none can survive without some goodness so that the knowledge of good preceeds the knowledge of knowledge.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

Pyth,

In the article I link an experiment is cited (that I have brought up on this forum before). A monkey is deprived of food until it is severely hungry. It is then given a button which when pushed will release food for it to eat. However pushing this button also delivers an electric shock to a second monkey that is visible to the starving one. And the starving monkey will NOT press the button to feed itself once it discovers this. So here, in raw nature, in some subhuman creature, we have altruism or empathy -- we have an animal that will sacrifice its own physical need rather than cause pain in another.

Massive surveys done in cultures throughout the world reveal striking similarity in our moral beliefs, and this holds true across widely disparate religious and ethnic groups. How is this true if these beliefs are not innate?

In my brief stay at university, I learned of a similar study in which a monkey had to cross an electric grid to get a bit of food. Starvation drove the monkey to cross, so he had to consider the effects of his actions before hand. Another monkey in an nearby cage got the same amount of food and a shock every time the first monkey got a shock. The first monkey got a serious stomach ulcer, presumably because of the choice anxiety. The second did not.
I doubt that your anthropomorphism works to explain anything of humans. We are quite capable of empathy, but for that very reason people keep their distance from those they exploit. We have fed off the world, but until recently the world has not come to our doorstep looking for their wealth. We build walled communities patrolled by private police or simply escape from the cities to the suberbs and blame the losers for their plight. We accept ignorence of pain, crime, and dsparation as a defense against a charge of responibility. The fact is that as it stands, we can only have our security if we wrest it from the grip of another.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Fido

I do not think they understood that people are good out of an emotional revulsion from the effects of bad.

And this is very well documented too, as the article I link discusses.

I do think there is more to it than just that. Acts of generosity are not simply revulsion from reciprocal greed, and paying a compliment is not simply revulsion from a reciprocal insult.

To be sure, though, it's without a doubt that our moral reactions are visceral and emotional first and foremost, and then we retroactively apply reason to our reaction (usually unconsciously). This is not reasoning -- it's rationalizing. And it wasn't only the Greek moral philosophers who didn't realize it -- Kant and Mill didn't either. Machiavelli and Nietzsche certainly did, though.

[Pythagorean]

Originally Posted by Fido

First. Progress is only an increase in knowledge and a refinement of technology. People have not changed, but have changed their forms of relationship, such as government and technology to avoid changing their basic personalities. It does not mean that people have not changed some, usually for the worse, but that having the mastery of nature means that people have less need to control themselves.

I basically agree with you here. Before you mentioned that change was good and I just wondered what you meant by that.

Second. The scene you paint of people pursuing their own advantage is much more likely in a modern, technologically advanced setting than beside nature. The reason for this is simple, and two sided. First; is that modern society putting bread on everyones table without the trouble of growing and havesting and all else leads people to believe that it just happens. Weather just happens to primitives, but all cooperative effort among primitives is bought with a pledge of honor. For example. When a society was surrounded by nature and nature was abundant in enemies, one would get his identity directly from membership in society, -and mutual support and succor from ones community. No person stood alone, and no man would choose to. Any person put out from society would be damned or hunted from one end of the earth to the other, like Cain, or Oedipus. What was true of the Anglo Saxon, was true of the German outlaw; that if he could not tell the name of his lord he was liable to be killed on the spot. Only society could protect any man from his fellow man.

Well said, Fido. You seem to have a good grasp of the authentic realities that pre-modern people had to face. The tightly woven pre-modern societies faced grave difficulties together as a tribe, whereas the modern man is dissociated from these honour bound connections. And the dethronement of the virtues is a modern "enlightened" development. One that goes hand in hand with the discovery of new scientific methods of utilizing nature in a non-theistic context for the betterment of man's practical needs. Man is treated as an empirical body and the ties of honour take second place to the bodily requirements. I wonder would you agree with this general assessment?

--

[Pythagorean]

Originally Posted by Fido

I have to laugh in reading about Greek Ethics that their philosophers thought to make people good through reason. I do not think they understood that people are good out of an emotional revulsion from the effects of bad. There is much that a person can accomplish through reason that is Good, but virtue cannot be achieved by thought, knowledge, or reason. Nor does one need a definition of good to pursue it since we are born into goodness, and none can survive without some goodness so that the knowledge of good preceeds the knowledge of knowledge.

Virtue, of course, is innate (as the Greeks have taught us). But what can it be without experience? They will burn me as witch out of their virtue and their sense of what is good, but they do so in deep ignorance. Untutored virtue is worse than no virtue at all.

--

[Arjen]

Originally Posted by Pythagorean

Yes, suvival of the fittest is thought up. It is a theory as to the nature of things. But I would argue that it is founded upon pure practicality, and is an empirical insight. It is modern and therefore goes hand in hand with the higher cultivation of nature by mankind (which has been wildly successful).

As a theory I would consider it a "rulebase" for the absence of ethical judgements. There are obvious parallells with Hobbes' war of all against all, which removes any conception of virtue and offers up a picture of mankind as he is prior to external imposition of ethics. It could be considered a "rulebase" because it is a theory, an "enlightened" theory.

My point was that we can't disagree with this enlightened theory if we are to accept the hard sciences as the last word regarding the truth of nature and reality as that would be a contradiction -the two go hand in hand.

We are searching for a valid theory of the good which would weigh against the natural and obvious lust for power. In the Republic Plato has Socrates' forthright admission that the cities were in actuality within the grip of evil. And this is similiar to what Hobbes is saying. Plato puts forthe the idea of the philosopher king and Hobbes puts forth the idea of the sovereign who maintains order on the basis of the way men actually are and not the way men ought to be, which is a modern and enlightened philosophy. But neither of them are fooled into thinking that mankind as a whole is good enough to relinquish his own advantage for the sake of the good in itself, or for the sake of virtue.

-

I am going to skip replying to argumentations such as "enlightend", "modern", "cultivation", etc. and go right to my point. I hope you will pardon me from withlaying such things. I think Fido has taken up some of that duty and I think that you know these things yourself as well, but that it is simply hard to formulate ones thoughts sometimes, whch makes for said expressions.

I think that the point you are making is that survival of the fittetst is an a posteriori "rulebase" with which we judge if any being was the fittest (from an a posteriori point of view). The rulebase is really small though: the only condition that needs to be met is the fact that a being survived others in any kind of examination. You base your "rulebase" on science in the sense that science is empirical in nature and therefore is a trustworthy means of examining nature because nature is reality and vice versa in every sense of the word. I would personally like to change the word reality for actuality, but that is not really important.

Am I correct in understanding you so far Pyth?

[Pythagorean]

Originally Posted by Aedes

Pyth,

In the article I link an experiment is cited (that I have brought up on this forum before). A monkey is deprived of food until it is severely hungry. It is then given a button which when pushed will release food for it to eat. However pushing this button also delivers an electric shock to a second monkey that is visible to the starving one. And the starving monkey will NOT press the button to feed itself once it discovers this. So here, in raw nature, in some subhuman creature, we have altruism or empathy -- we have an animal that will sacrifice its own physical need rather than cause pain in another.

Massive surveys done in cultures throughout the world reveal striking similarity in our moral beliefs, and this holds true across widely disparate religious and ethnic groups. How is this true if these beliefs are not innate?

I'm not privy to the 'massive surveys' that you're talking about but I think a lot of our discussion hangs around how precisely do we define morality. I don't think it is too unusual for someone to question whether a monkey can be used as a sign of innate morality on the part of human beings.

Secondly, human morality, if there be any, would naturally be generated from within the individual. How else could it be generated? So we're not talking about the direction from which it is issued, but what the nature of it is and whether or not it requires some knowledge or experience in order to be properly formed.

It is hard to believe that someone who was raised reading the old testament (as I am guessing that you were) would hold the position that morality is something that comes easily. A moral choice is not the same thing as a monkey alleviated the suffering of his brother monkey by incurring suffering of his own. In fact, if this were a human test case, then incurring someone else's pain with no benefit to yourself might not be the "right" thing to do at all: because in the human world things are infinitely more complicated and open to changes of all sorts. All I am saying is that such tests don't prove much and we don't become more moral by conducting such experiments (although we may educate our inner selves by reading of religious and spiritual texts, for example). It just seems absurd to me to say that we are all naturally moral by simply existing.