Guybrush

Grats on the +1s to your post counts, guys.

edit :

Oh wait, you don't get post count here. Maybe you should spam other parts of the forum instead.

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Something Completely Different

swim

Maybe you should take a joke? Did I accidently log onto the seriouswebz again?


Anyway I believe in community.

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anticipation

don't be a dick just because yours has frozen and broken off and you're trying to compensate.

sleepy jack

I guess this has always been my main objection, I have not read much of Dawkins aside from his stuff in regards to religion (as I care more about that) but from what I'd briefly read and seen in interviews I didn't really understand how everything could come down to being a, I believe he used the phrase "misfired Darwinian impulse"* or not. I just don't understand how you can approach the more abstract/modern moral problems from an evolutionary standpoint. Like, I understand how you could approach things strictly related to survival but the morality of contemporary issues, to me, seems beyond those sort of basic instincts.


*I wish I could find the interview. It was with some twit with glasses on a Canadian station. It's somewhere on youtube I was looking for it the other day because he talks about religion and the lack of in regards to morals and I thought it would be interesting to bring up in the morality and bible thread.

Guybrush

I haven't read all of Dawkins, but I have read The Selfish Gene which is extremely good and something everyone should read, although some readers have appearantly felt that reading it tore a hole in the bottom of their world and they needed some time to recover. Dawkins, as far as I know, is a biologist and not a philosopher who deals with ethics. He's very outspoken against religion and probably has strong opinions on morals, but unlike someone preaching a certain morale view, I don't think he promotes "biology morale" as a full-blown morale theory that could potentially replace other morale theories out there.

I know there are other philosophers who do, but so far I haven't been impressed and so I can't remember any names.

Dawkins did a great job popularizing the genecentric idea of evolution, but he also coined the term "meme" and memetics. Evolution is something that applies to things that can replicate, change and compete over resources. He saw that human ideas also did this. If an idea appears in a persons mind, he can tell it to someone else and now you have two of the same idea. If the idea is that the world is flat and there is another idea out there that says the world is round, then those two ideas "can't" be believed in at the same time, so there is a competition between them where they fight for a limited resource - people to believe in them. Ideas going from person to person might change a little on the way, so "mutations" are commonplace.

Based on this, you can apply some of the theory behind evolutionary biology to explain the evolution of ideas and mostly, it does a very good job of it as well. Like many genes go together to make up an eye, many ideas go together to form advanced cultures and religions. You can immediately see how thoughts like "we have to mission our religion" and "if you don't believe, you will go to hell" or even "believing in our religion will give you supernatural powers" add to the collective fitness of their respective religions. In the end, religion becomes sort of predictable and it also ends up being somewhat part of our biology on several levels. For example, we are scared of going to hell, so that helps a religion survive, not only by scaring people to believe in it but also by making believers want to save others from the dark fate that awaits non-believers in the afterlife.

This is written about at great lengths and I'm just hoping that readers of this can see that there is some logic behind this even if I'm just mentioning it too briefly in a forum post. This is where Dawkins is coming from when he criticizes religion - and it is a kind of meta-take on the whole thing. The foundation of religions is human emotions, not rationality. The unconcious biological meanings of life are not enough for people, they feel better when they have something to believe in that gives life some wonder or some meaning and perhaps explains what happens when we die. Rationality does poorly competing against that - something that frustrates him I expect, especially as he's always under attack from the media and people pushing creationism.

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garbanzo

1. i am not religious or spiritual in any way whatsoever.
2. i'm not a strict materialist. i know too much about quantum physics to believe in a purely predictable, mechanistic universe.
3. i am neither a subjectivist nor an objectivist. i follow a middle path known to some as experientialism. (i can explain if there is interest)
4. i believe very firmly in the theory of evolution by natural selection.

these four fundamental issues really screw things up for me when it comes to thinking about ethics. i can't turn to dogma, personal belief, pure nihilism, or most other 'standard' sources for my own personal system of values. i struggled for a long time with these issues. but in the end, this is where i stand:

1. on a very basic level, i feel that biological imperative should be the end-all of ethics. that which promotes the replication of my DNA is good, and that which is detrimental to it is evil.
2. unfortunately, that point of view is very impractical. i was born into a world with pre-existing values and rules. whether i agree with them or not, i am bound to them. sure, i am free to do as i wish - condemned to be free as Sartre might say - but i must be willing to face the consequences of my actions.
3. as such, i float along with the stream. i neither condemn nor condone the values of others, and i take no strong stance of my own in any direction. does this make me weak? perhaps. but i do know this - if i did everything in my power to spread my seed, my life would almost certainly be cut short, and i would not be around to care for my offspring. plus, it would really suck being in trouble all the time.
4. and there's the rub - pleasure. i'm no hedonist, but i do take care of myself. i'm definitely selfish to a fault, and i enjoy my life tremendously. so really, i just end up conforming to the normative values of my society.
5. here's the real kicker - biologically, this is the best i can possibly do! act like the rest, pass their tests, and i'll live long and my DNA will prosper. it's not necessarily what i want to do, but it really does seem to be the best course of action.

The Unfan

Since I believe that there is no objectively moral being or universally accepted long term goal I believe that ethics and morality are both purely subjective.

From a strictly political view on ethics I value the right of the individual above community. This is probably because I don't believe that a community can be objectively ethical or moral. I think anything should go as long as the concerned parties consent and it doesn't violate anyone else's rights. Do what feels good as long as it doesn't impede on the rights of others.

From a non-political philosophical view I personally highly value knowledge. For me, personally, I try to let skepticism shape my world view. Faith is detrimental to my personal pursuit of knowledge so I would never do anything that could potentially prevent me from advancing mentally.

On a more visceral human level I honestly don't see whats wrong with acting on instinct. If there is no logical reason to second guess my actions than I won't. If I offend you I'm not sorry. On the other hand I also never assume anyone's character before its revealed and will show respect until you prove you deserve otherwise.

garbanzo

Unfan, you talk about your ethics emerging from a visceral, human level, then suggest that ethics on a larger, social level are more a matter of a collective subjectivity. i think this is spot-on.

to me, your desire to incorporate instinct into the picture is an appeal to the primacy of our embodied and experiential understanding of the world around us. before we can have opinions about the world (subjective level), we must have knowledge of the world (experiential level - not objective! knowledge arises only through a dialog between subject and object). here i appeal to the phenomenological philosophy of Merleu-Ponty, but also to the contemporary theories on metaphor and experientialism put down by Lakoff and Johnson.

combining these, we come to a hub, where paths lead in all directions. all our knowledge of the world around us comes either from direct sensory experience, indirect (communicated by others) sensory experience, or via metaphor. metaphors are used to connect the ineffable with the experiential, to help us understand anything that cannot be directly experienced in terms of that which can. it is far more pervasive in human speech and cognition than most people realize.

on a deep, personal level, we are very much connected with our embodied selves, as they are our only tools for exploring the world around us, and for interacting with the Other. as a result, it makes perfect sense that personal ethics are driven by instinctual, biological urges. but to this, we must also add learning from experience. if it causes pain, it's bad, and vice versa.

then there is the subjective level of collective ethics. while we all have bodies that are more or less the same, not all of us have had the same experiences. to one person, rape is pure physical and psychological pleasure, and is therefore good. but to most, the opposite is true. an average is calculated, and good vs. bad is defined not by pleasure and pain, or by what is good for the human organizm and what is not, but instead by what is good for the group (good), and what is detrimental to its smooth functioning (evil).

in the end, i think that for most people, these "collective subjective" social constructs take precedent over physical instinct or raw experience only when the person is subject to "the gaze of others". but once those oppressing eyes have turned away, then 'do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law.

everybody has a truly primal side, but usually it only comes out when nobody is looking. in western society, people have to learn to let it through in public, to let our own biological knowledge overrule our learned social knowledge. most, of course, don't care to do so. furthermore, anyone who does is usually sequestered.

interestingly, we could come right back 'round to biology again, and argue that social taboo is an evolutionary trait that keeps us from disrupting group solidarity, but i don't want to get into an anthropological discussion right now

cardboard adolescent

to be ethical is to be selfless, but to need ethics is to be selfish, therefore ethics are unethical.

jackhammer

/ thread.

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