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True enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense, death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking lives. I
by Drakim 6y ago
True enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense, death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking lives. I read somewhere that Nazi Germany moved to gassing those they persecuted rather than simply killing them by firing squad because the firing squads couldn't handle it day in and day out. The majority of mankind abhors murder, and has to invent elaborate methods and rules to avoid facing the brute reality of it, even when they say that it's good.
My point is just that to me, and my society as a whole, murder is seen as something bad, as a simple and obvious fact, a safe assumption. If somebody wants to tell me that assumption is wrong and should be removed, I want to see what sort of stuff their assumptions are built out of to justify such confidence.
- lhorie 6y agoI think there are both nature and nurture aspects to why in general we dislike the thought of killing our own kind. Physiologically we have brain mechanisms that activate when we see a stimulus to another person (yawning and phantom limb experiments being well known examples). Hypothetically if we had evolved from mantises instead of primates, we might be physiologically conditioned to think eating our sexual partners was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if our moral framework in that case lead to utterances such as "how dare you not sacrifice your life for your children!" On the nurture side, the sentinelese are perfectly fine with killing foreigners violently on sight. There are also records in other tribal cultures of the belief that cannibalism was a way to inherit someone's desirable traits. So clearly culture plays a role as well.
- Drakim 6y agoYup, agreed. Likewise, concepts such as the taste of sweet, salt, sour; colors such as red, blue and yellow; behaviors such as aggressive, calm, afraid; emotions such as happy, angry, sad; evaluations such as beautiful, ugly, plain; All of these are from nature and nurture, they don't exist as mathematical laws or any sort of foundational aspect of how the universe works. It's all just subjective and arbitrary inventions we have created to categorize and make sense of what we observe. Yet they are all immensely important to us! Even though they don't have objective grounding. We base our entire societies, our ways of life, our ways of thinking, around these incredibly non-justified categories of things. Yet, there is a whole lot of people who seem to want to exclude morality from this box. It has to be thrown out, because it's not objective, not justified, not "real". But in contrast to what exactly?
- matz1 6y agoBecause not everyone think the same. We are not machine where everyone run the same software. Some people like chocolate, some people hate chocolate. Likewise some people think murder is good, some people think its bad.
- Drakim 6y agoHumans are not a chaotic collection of random emotions and opinions. You'll find that those who like to eat dirt and murder others are far outnumbered by those who like chocolate and want to live in harmony.
- matz1 6y agoMaybe outnumbered but still exists and still human.
- DonHopkins 6y agoIf God didn't mean for people to eat other people, they wouldn't be made of meat. ;) (To paraphrase Flanders' and Swann's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw "Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not." "I won't let another man pass my lips!"