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people feel empathy without being taught, for people and even animals they've never seen before. they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wr

people feel empathy without being taught, for people and even animals they've never seen before. they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. they share the notion that there is some kind of reciprocity, or social contract, even if they differ on the details of what the contract allows. see also http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-shows-toddlers-understand-right-wrong-just-19-months.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-sho... animal experiments in fairness, etc. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_mora... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds

lsc 11y ago
If you are saying that believing in something like morals or ethics seems to be a universal, then I agree with you; it does seem to be a universal. However, if we talk about any moral or ethical value or set of values, I still don't see any that are universal in any meaningful way. Across time and culture they are so different that what is the greatest good can be the greatest evil and vis-a-vis. >they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. I'm taking this as "everyone thinks killing a human is a big deal" (implicit in your statement, I think, is that reasons like "because it gave me slight pleasure" or "because they slightly inconvenienced me" count as "no reason" - because otherwise the statement has no meaning. There's always a reason, even if it's a bad one.) My counterargument is slavery. Even Aristotle, the father of western philosophy, thought that slavery was a perfectly natural thing; that humans could, in fact, be property. Yes, I know, not all systems of slavery were absolute to the point where a master could kill a slave with the same ethical and legal consequences as I would face for destroying my old laptop rather than passing it on to someone would could make use of it, but in all systems of slavery, killing a slave was much less of a big deal than killing a noble, and in many systems, it would qualify as "not a big deal" I also point you at "ethnic cleansing" and religious violence, though part of that is that is my own values; I think that killing someone for their race or religious affiliation is killing for a trivial reason. I'm sure the people doing or organizing that killing disagree with me.
- RockyMcNuts 11y ago
  once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps. Kant did a pretty good job with this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
  - lsc 11y ago
    Kant was quite a writer, and yea, an innovator for his time, but the idea that you should act in a way that, if everyone did it, would turn out okay was radical in his time, and still not generally accepted. If anything, your categorical imperative is another argument that people don't agree on what is right across time and culture. In fact, considering his socioeconomic position at the time, I highly doubt he lived anything like a life that could be lived by everyone. We talk about economic inequality now... but in his day the difference between the rich and the poor wasn't the number of dollars, it was who had access to food and who did not, which I personally think is a much greater inequality than any amount of dollars. > once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps. The point here is that you can go back and rationalize people's actions like that, but to say those people are acting on the same ethical principles that we are makes a mockery of our modern ethics. If you have rules about what you can and can't do to a person, as we do, and you re-define person to not include a bunch of humanity, you are no longer following the same ethics we are following now.

lsc 11y ago

If you are saying that believing in something like morals or ethics seems to be a universal, then I agree with you; it does seem to be a universal. However, if we talk about any moral or ethical value or set of values, I still don't see any that are universal in any meaningful way. Across time and culture they are so different that what is the greatest good can be the greatest evil and vis-a-vis. >they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. I'm taking this as "everyone thinks killing a human is a big deal" (implicit in your statement, I think, is that reasons like "because it gave me slight pleasure" or "because they slightly inconvenienced me" count as "no reason" - because otherwise the statement has no meaning. There's always a reason, even if it's a bad one.) My counterargument is slavery. Even Aristotle, the father of western philosophy, thought that slavery was a perfectly natural thing; that humans could, in fact, be property. Yes, I know, not all systems of slavery were absolute to the point where a master could kill a slave with the same ethical and legal consequences as I would face for destroying my old laptop rather than passing it on to someone would could make use of it, but in all systems of slavery, killing a slave was much less of a big deal than killing a noble, and in many systems, it would qualify as "not a big deal" I also point you at "ethnic cleansing" and religious violence, though part of that is that is my own values; I think that killing someone for their race or religious affiliation is killing for a trivial reason. I'm sure the people doing or organizing that killing disagree with me.

RockyMcNuts 11y ago
once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps. Kant did a pretty good job with this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
- lsc 11y ago
  Kant was quite a writer, and yea, an innovator for his time, but the idea that you should act in a way that, if everyone did it, would turn out okay was radical in his time, and still not generally accepted. If anything, your categorical imperative is another argument that people don't agree on what is right across time and culture. In fact, considering his socioeconomic position at the time, I highly doubt he lived anything like a life that could be lived by everyone. We talk about economic inequality now... but in his day the difference between the rich and the poor wasn't the number of dollars, it was who had access to food and who did not, which I personally think is a much greater inequality than any amount of dollars. > once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps. The point here is that you can go back and rationalize people's actions like that, but to say those people are acting on the same ethical principles that we are makes a mockery of our modern ethics. If you have rules about what you can and can't do to a person, as we do, and you re-define person to not include a bunch of humanity, you are no longer following the same ethics we are following now.