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Originally Posted by Freebase Dali
The answer is yes. I've broken many laws, some reasonably serious. However, those actions were not at odds with my general sense of morality. They were at odds with legal expectation.
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You seem to be contradicting yourself. You said earlier you wouldn't be murderer or what not because of the legal consequences. I said if you ever broke the law before then you don't abstain for that reason because you have no problem with breaking the law. Now you've switched gears and are saying murder, rape and such are at odds with your general sense of morality. Part of my point was you don't do certain things because YOU don't want to and now you seem to be confirming that. My point was further that you don't know why you don't want to you just don't. You can cover it up with saying it's at odds with your morality but that doesn't really explain anything. You're just saying you don't do that because you don't do that.
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Furthermore, I've done things that I consider immoral that have no legal ramifications,
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I'm not talking about those things. I'm talking about doing something that could land you in jail but it didn't stop you from doing it. Some things we will do and some things we will not do. Why? We don't know. Or we could say that we were raised that way but then that's doing things automatically without any real thought going into it which is doing it without really knowing why.
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I don't understand how you're willing to speculate that all of humanity acts out of fear of reprisal, and simultaneously are unwilling to entertain the likelihood that most of us genuinely care about the well being of others because it's just part of who we are (most of us), which is far more evident than your sweeping assumption, which can be quantified as unlikely if you walk into a prison and see people occupying it without being able to classify them all as psychopaths.
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I'm not saying people behave a certain way out of fear of reprisal. It's cause and effect. We watch bad causes beget bad effects and that, in turn, affects what we do. I wouldn't call that reprisal. We know once things are set in motion--that's it. It will have to run its course and we can't change it. That has to nag like a b-itch at the root of our subconscious.
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I hope you're aware that the majority of the human race is not psychotic...
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You mean psychopathic? Psychopaths are not psychotic necessarily. They are generally as sane as anyone perhaps even more so in some ways. They are simply devoid of a conscience.
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The human race as a majority is what drives the whole. To use a statistical minority to make assumptions about the majority is fallacious. In fact, had the majority not been successful at co-existing with its own species, the deviant minority would not have survived either, since it's still part of the species. So in all actuality, that minority owes its survival to the co-existence of the species as a whole, which evolutionary morality supports in the first place.
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That doesn't explain the presence of the psychopath or the proliferation of such. The truth is, no one is even sure how much of the human race is psychopathic. We only know they are found in every race, country, culture and both genders. Psychopaths are the premier solipsists. Solipsism is a philosophy that holds that you are the only real being and the others around you exist only for your benefit and can be used anyway you like. They don't really feel anything, they only appear to for your benefit. It's called a defunct philosophy but nothing could be further from the truth. EVERY ontological philosophy MUST have some degree of solipsism in it. This philosophy I am expounding relies on it a great deal.
And perhaps human beings are that way--we are all to some degree psychopathic. We have to be. If we were emotionally devastated by all the death and tragedy we read in the news everyday, we'd be complete wrecks in the space of a week, totally dysfunctional. Being able to detach ourselves emotionally from the tragedies of others and even joke about them also affords us some clarity, some sense, some way to learn from it without paying too high a price emotionally. And that's why, I believe, that psychopaths survive and in large numbers, because we share enough of their characteristics. But just as you can take solipsism too far, some people take psychopathic behavior too far.
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Since you have unrequited access to the collective subconscious of our entire species, please tell me why people still feel remorse for things that are commonly forgiven.
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You can figure that out on your own. You too have access. That's why it's called COLLECTIVE.
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Cynicism isn't in the detached analysis of behavior. It's part of behavior.
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It's part of nature and nature is cynical. What do you call the food chain? No loving god would have come up with something so brutal and thoroughly absorbed in self-interest. It's a bloody outrage.