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I 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 th
by lhorie 6y ago
I 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?