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> 1) We profess a belief in human rights, etc We talk like that. But it's just talk. It is clear from our behavior that this is not the case. I'd love to beli

• DubiousPusher 7y ago
  This is kind of the core of why I think maybe the moral failures of our time may uniquely condemn us. In the past, the concious or wordy parts of our brain didn't exactly contain the moral philosophy we have now which is supposed to counter our basic cruelty. We have hundreds of years of it. We call the enlightenment foundational to our governments and ethics. Many people hold the Bill of Rights sacred like a religious text. We have the most extreme examples of human cruelty to heed as examples. Anyone may read about them, most American school children are required to learn about them. But even that knowledge, that programming is not capable of overcoming our basic tendency toward violence and cruelty. Maybe, there are some behaviors the wordy part of the brain just can't reason us out of. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe there's an even better set of ideas than the enlightenment, humanism, and human rights that will be more contagious and more powerful to overwhelm our basic nature. Perhaps those ideas are already out there in some culture being drowned out by the hegemony of Western moral philosophy. IDK.