Ethics - What are yours like?
 

I was wondering ..

How do you guys see yourself in relation to morale and ethics? Do you consider yourself a moral being or not? Do follow abstract principles (f.ex act so that you minimize suffering/maximize happiness) or do you follow a morale that is more context-related (f.ex everyone else is full so it doesn't matter if I steal the last piece of cake)?

Supposedly, there are some trends - for example, women are supposed to be more contexty while men are supposed to be more abstract-ruly. It would be fun to see if any such trends will emerge. Also, although I doubt we'll get enough answers to determine that, there could be differences between nations.

You don't have to get too philosophical or too niched. I think everyone is aware that most who follow absolute rules will sometimes be a bit utilitarian or opportunistic and vice versa for the others. Just roughly try to describe yourself and explain your "rules" even if you don't follow them 100%.



I tend to follow absolute rules. Variations of the golden rule is what I sort of put on the highest pedestal. By that, I mean I believe we should behave in such a way that if everyone behaved that way, it would be best for everyone. As an example, I might say you shouldn't steal because if everyone stole, it would suck. If you don't want people to lie to you, you shouldn't lie to others .. and so on.

It is a rather community-minded way to think and I tend to think of living in a community as a sort of social contract. Being a part of a community is a privilege that is bestowed to you as long as you follow the rules of that community -> rules that help people live peacefully together. I think people who viciously break those rules should have their privelege revoked and be removed from the community .. And this is basically how it is all over the world, so nothing new here I guess.

Reading what I just wrote, I seem kind of strict and I guess I am, but I'm no absolute absolutist .. Many ethical challenges should be approached with a bit more context than what absolute rules allow for.



I'll add that I, unsurprisingly to most I'm sure, believe that morale very much comes from our biology and I also believe in selfishness. However, we're adapted to be social beings and by taking care of our fellow men and women, we are also taking care of our (unconcious) selfish interests. The best thing for social animals to do, thinking collectively, is to be nice to eachother. However, everyone being nice is easily exploited by selfish single individuals for even greater reward on the expense of everyone else, so you need some kind of system to deal with those exploiters.

(note that "selfish" is a term we use in biology that describes the biological urge to raise your own fitness - or rather, the fitness of your genes which will extend to close family whom you share genes with and possibly others whom your own fitness depends on.)


A bit more than I thought it would be. Anyone else? :D

mmm. I guess I'm rather on the side of context-related morals.

Though I must say my social behavior follows certain principles. I can't help but mainly see the good in every one, so at first I'm always nice to everyone, and even when I'm dissapointed, I tend to still be nice. I don't know, call it naive or stupid, but that's how I am. Just because someone did something wrong I don't judge him/her for that really. I actually forget most of the things people did.
I've had plenty of discussions with my friends over that behavior in contrast with their behavior, as I have some friends who are over-critical towards others in my opinion.
They seem to have developed that behavior as reaction to being disappointed in the past on several occasions, which is understandable. I don't know, I think I just don't let people disappoint me, by never having too high expactations in people.
But in the end I'm not sure whether my behavior really fits with other people's feelings. I could imagine, that I have disappointed other people, because the way I talked to them could have made them expect me to be something I'm not, like their friend or something, where I just behaved in a nice way. Sounds mean and maybe selfish, but I can't help it really, I just would never interact with someone in a disrespectful way.

Other than that, I do behave context related, like I've stolen stuff a few times, but only in shops that seem to be well off, like H&M. I don't neccessarily follow that Golden Rule all the time. I know it's true, but I'm not that perfect. That's why there is a police, stuff like that. Of course, it would be perfect if we all lived by that Rule, but it will never happen.
So that's the occasions, where my disgust at people shines through. I like my friends, see the good in everyone. But in the end we are all animals. We think we're so much better, but we're not. Mankind has brought the worst to the world. Society's expectations are a burden for people who don't fit in perfectly. I love the individuals, but I hate them as a whole. So sometimes I feel the need to do something bad.

Another thing: I go voting, because it is my right and I should be thankful for that right. But on the other hand, the old problem: it's just 1 single vote, it doesn't matter really. And now don't start stuff like, but if everybody thought that way bla bla. Thing is, just because I think so, doesn't make ANY one else think so. I'd never try to convince people of that mindset, because I know THAT would have an effect.
So my conscience tells me: rather that vote yourself, you should go on the streets and tell everyone how important it is to vote. sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't. It's not even selfish, because by trying to convice people to vote I help the system. It's just hypocritical, but as I said, it's even of higher value if you compare the two. (Of course, a combination of both is the best)
But then again, I'm lazy :laughing: so my conscience tells me: you didn't go on the street, at least vote yourself.

EDIT: damn, that's a lot of text.. but it's an interesting topic. couldn't stop my thoughts from rushing up to me.

I don't think being quick to forgive/forget is necessarily naive. On the contrary, in biology, it is part of a very successful strategy for social animals .. ;)

I think I would bore everyone if I start to explain why, but should you be interested, you can read about tit for tat and prisoner's dilemma on wikipedia. Game theory is used by biologists to explain evolution of certain behaviours, for example in relation to animals that live in cooperative societies.


Other than that, it seems to me that you base most of your moral decisions on a sort of "gut feeling", but that you consider yourself nice by nature. Is that a good description?

Live and let live, man.

i used to believe in nothing, now i believe in even less.


deep.

Do as thou wilt, as long as "I" don't have to watch it.

I took Al's eternal message and modernized it.

As cheesey as it is, the golden rule is really the way to go.

I probably go by the whole "be yourself" thing. I try to be really honest and genuine to everyone, I try to trust them even though its not fully there. I never try to act or be someone else for acceptance. I am content with myself for that. Acceptance, open-mindedness, and forgiveness are all principles I practice and preach. However sometimes I try to adopt a more apathetic or cynical view, because I feel like I'm seen as too emotional by others. I feel I am too self absorbed in many ways. I feel I am too immature, and must act maturely. I feel frustrated when I don't think others are considering other people than themselves, or is being selfish. I don't like judgmental people, or pretentious people. I try not to be either of those. I deeply admire humility. I don't feel I practice that enough. I try to always lend a helping hand but I find myself to be EXTREMELY selfish when it comes to certain things. I hope selflessness comes easier as I mature and become less self absorbed.

I think selfishness = the root of all evil. Acceptance is the key to inner happiness. You should always forgive for you never know when you will need to be forgiven. You should always be sincere and genuine, then other people will not like you for someone they think you are rather than who you really are. You should have standards but low expectations of other people, so disappointment never hurts too much. You should never be smug, boastful, arrogant, or pretentious about your abilities. And, you should try to be as understanding as possible,so sometimes when you're a little too human, others around you will understand...

I don't really have any rules I follow, but I tend to be a moral person anyway.

I don't really have any sort of values that I absolutely must always follow, I just do what I believe is right.

That describes me pretty well. I have trouble really explaining morales or ethnics because I always keep thinking "but what if this was the case" or something like that.

yeah right! hahaha
as hard as I want to have a strong convincement on every other topic sometimes, most of the times it results in some kind of back and forth reasoning inside my head, that leaves me all confused in the end..

I'd never be a good politician I guess. but I could imagine me to be a good host of discussions in general.

So far into the discussion, there's been a few good answers and a lot of spam posts. It seems most so far lean towards context-ism while me and possibly dac are more rule-followy. Still, I get the impression most people here haven't really thought about morale much. At the university in Oslo, a course in morale theory is required for all higher educations you might study. It's kinda old fashioned, but I think the subject is quite interesting.

It always rubs me the wrong way when people who don't understand biology but do understand morale think they understand morale as it should be if based on humanity's evolutionary history. They almost always get it wrong at some point

I've never really understood the idea (I've mostly heard Dawkins briefly talk about it in interviews and books) that our morals are determined by our genes. I don't think, as beings with independent minds, that we are simply our genes. I think our thoughts allow us to progress beyond that because of our ability to think abstractly. The idea that everything is some misdirected Darwinian impulse just seems too simplistic for me.

Yeah I'm into a healthy mixture of free will and something predetermined, you can call that (the predetermined part) genes and it suffices to my mind just as much as just about anything else, i.e. predestination, synchronicity, etc. I think the world is in a pretty strange place so we've lost our instinctual ethics to a large degree. The environment we were built to be ethical in has changed so rapidly that its a very difficult question. In fact, I don't think ethics would even be an issue in a more 'natural' (I know the risk in bringing up this word) environment. I think that to figure out what our collective ethics should be as humans we need to figure out what our common goals are as a species. The pursuit of wealth, politics, and the loss of the true definition of wealth have twisted our ethics into a confusing mess of greed.

One point regarding free will versus genes is that a very primal part of our brain is the limbic system - the center of emotions and this is ancient. Inputs are processed and applied various emotional tags by it. It's not part of your free thinking. Let's say genes make you angry .. That's your genes talking. However, you have free will and you can suppress that anger. In that respect, you're not a slave to your genes.

However, generally speaking, we do follow them. Most of us by far tend to avoid unpleasant situations if we can and other things we don't like. Then we pursue good stuff - good food, sex, etc.

To understand the "biology morale theory" fully, you really need to understand evolution and even though people think they do, they usually don't because it's actually a rather expansive subject that incorporates a lot of theory most people don't even know about. Richard Dawkins is the nr.1 biologist to have popularized the idea of selfishness because he was able to convey to the man in the street the thoughts and learnings of his fellow evolutionary biologists. This morale theory has it's roots in a lot of this, but most philosophers don't understand it fully, I think, because of their lack of evolutionary understanding.

edit :

I can add some info for the curious. At the core of this idea is that every being is selfish and looking after itself. Itself means it's own genes - and we share our genes with our closest relatives, so you're gonna look out for them as well. So, we are all adapted through millions of years to effectively take care of our genes (survive and reproduce) and that has a lot of implications. It means that a lot of the things we do behaviourally are tailored to raise our fitness. Humans are social beings and by cooperating with others, your genes are more likely to survive and so selfishness becomes similar to altruism in some cases.

A lot of emotions are expected to be adaptations that have evolved because they raise our fitnesses. For example, most get jealous when their partner flirts with someone else. That makes perfect sense from a biological standpoint and most think flirting with someone else when you have a steady partner is morally wrong. The morale may not be hardcoded into us, but the emotions are and that's a likely morale view to arise from those.

People sometimes say "why do we feel sorry for kids in Africa then? Giving them money doesn't raise our fitness!" The answer is simple - we're social beings adapted to taking care of eachother and children has a special appeal to our warmer feelings. That is easily explained by evolutionary theory. If you then remember that evolution of our biology is relatively slow compared to the evolution of our culture, you'll realize that humans didn't evolve to live in big societies with TVs. Not long ago, in evolutionary time we lived in small communities where we all depended on eachother, more or less. If you see a starving kid on TV, your "genes" may not know that this kid is far, far away and has no impact on your fitness. You may react as if the kid was a part of your community and that helping it will benefit you.

Remember also that selfishness and preserving your genes is not a conscious agenda. It's hardcoded into all of us. You want sex, but you don't think "I wanna spread my genes!" In a similar way, I'm pretty sure starfish don't "know" why they do the things they do.

I understand that but I'm more curious of moral issues that have nothing to do with the survival of your genes. This is the problem I've always had with Ayn Rand, it's the idea of an "objective morality" that comes down to shag, eat, and most importantly ensure your race to survive. To me, that isn't morality so much as common sense...I tend to think of morality as being something a bit more widespread then that. For instance, the issue of gay marriage, now I would personally consider it immoral to deny rights and pleasures to others, but some people, based on a religious text, considering the very act of homosexuality immoral. How does that fit into your argument? From the stand point I've heard, and this may sound prickish, there seems to be an inherent contradiction there. On one hand you don't want to see someone of your species suffer an injustice because of some sense of empathy on the other hand wouldn't you want to discourage sexual behavior that doesn't lead to reproduction? This is kind of a bad example because it's not an issue totally separate from it but I'm tired. I guess we could get into taxation but I'm growing tired of debating the "morality" of that.

This biology morale is not so good for producing a set of rules to live by. In my opinion, what it does is explain is why we have morals to begin with - where they come from - and it does explain some of the things we do, as my brief example on why we get jealous. It deals with a sort of caveman intuitivity, but now the caveman might live in a flat in NY and we need something a bit more elaborate. For me, it's more a way to help explaining where morals come from rather than something to live by. As a biologist, I expect a lot of deviants from a normal moralistic behaviour to be the result of mutations. Just like mental illnesses may have a genetic component, so may murdering others. However, as I wrote in my first post, what I follow are variations of the golden rule - not biology morale. However, if someone says something that is a complete contradiction of biology morale, I tend to say "wait a minute ..." and argue against that.

Homosexual behaviour is perfectly normal in nature and I wrote a lengthy post about that in the *** sex and religion thread, page 2. Homophilia - individuals that are exclusively going for same sex partners - is more rare because they produce less offspring and the more same-sexy they are, the more they are selected against in evolution. There shouldn't be a gene that if turned on or off determines *** or not, it would have disappeared a long time ago. Rather, I believe we are all somewhere between homo and heterosexual and the norm is to be oriented somewhere towards hetero, say 80% hetero and 20% homosexual. Many other mammals know how to live out the *** side, but we don't anymore because we have a need to define ourselves as one or the other, something a giraffe wouldn't concern itself with. Just like you get statistical outsiders that are very short or very tall, you also get people who are 70% *** and 30% hetero. Maybe they define themselves as *** people. That's roughly my own hypothesis, but it seems to make the most sense from what I've seen. There are identical twins where one is *** and the other not, so it can't be up to genes alone. I don't know if exclusively *** animals may cause problems for other animals, say a *** wolf in a wolf pack, but so far I don't think they do and I don't think we should discriminate.


I've never read Ayn Rand, but in reality, we don't care for our species. At least not in a care-that's-hardcoded-into-us way like we might care for our children. We only care for those of our species that we can benefit from. Altruism, if it exists at all, should be little more than a genetic anomaly and would be selected against in nature. The reason is because at the basis, we're selfish and altruism is exploitable by selfish individuals.

A popular example in evolutionary biology that can be used to explain my previous statement is this : Let's say you have a species of birds that consists of only two types of individuals - doves and hawks. When a hawk meets other hawks and doves, they fight the other bird for resources. If a hawk fights a dove, the dove shyes away before it is hurt. If a hawk fights a hawk, they fight until seriously injured, perhaps fatally, or until dead. If a dove meets a dove, nobody gets hurt, but they spend some time threatening eachother. The birds don't know prior to a fight what kind the other bird is and they have no memory of the bird they fought after the fight is over.

From this, we can make a sort of prisoner's dilemma with different outcomes. Since they are competing for resources, we can award the different outcomes different points to illustrate what they lose or gain from outcomes :

• Win : 50 points (for winning)
• Lose : 0 points (for losing)
• Injured : -100 points (hawk losing to hawk)
• contest : -10 (for meeting doves)

An individual that scores many points is an individual that tends to leave behind many genes in the gene pool.

If a dove meets a dove, they will spend some energy on a stare down and they will both gain -10 points. However, one will win and gain 50 for a total of 40. Let's say that on average, they win every other stare-down contest. Then you can say that the average pay-off for doves in a population consisting of doves only is +15 - the middle ground between -10 and 40. So the average score for every individual in the population so far is +15 ..

What happens when a hawk appears? The hawk will win every fight and so it's average score will be 50 - all win. It will leave lots of genes behind because it's strategy is so successful, but then his offspring will also grow up as hawks . Maybe the strategy is so successful that all doves are killed and we now have a population consisting only of hawks. As before, if a hawk in a population of hawks win every other fight, the average gain for every hawk is -25, halfway between -100 and 50. So you see, a hawk in a population of hawks every individual does worse than in a population where you only have doves. If you then reintroduce a dove to the hawk population, the dove should do better than the hawks again because it doesn't pay the cost of being severly damaged in fights.

So you see neither a dove population or a hawk population is expected to arise from this - they are not evolutionary stable. If everyone was doves, that would give the highest gain for everyone, but that social strategy is susceptible to being exploited by hawks (a hawk could appear through gene mutations and evolution). In the same way that hawks may exploit a population of doves, altruism is exploited in nature by selfish individuals and the population you end up with probably has both the equivalent of hawks and doves. So the population you end up with does not have the optimal strategy point-wise, which is all doves. Instead of hawks and doves, you can say you have a population of birds that always groom eachothers feathers (doves). A selfish bird that never grooms back would thrive in such a population - everyone would groom him and he doesn't have to spend any energy grooming others - so again the altruistic grooming behaviour is exploited by the selfish bird who's genes will spread.


The hawk-dove scenario is extremely simplified here and it can be elaborated on. Biologists like to set up lots of variables like kinship and explain them with math, but suffice to say that this is for illustrative purposes just to show how altruism can be exploited. In many populations, animals have adapted to remembering eachother and also with figuring out the would-be exploiters before they are exploited and so on, so you don't come across pure dove-hawk scenarios in nature. You can have societies and social rules where exploiters are excluded that push the population towards the optimal.

Gods damn, this is a long post now .. sorry. I can't blame anyone for not reading my wall of text. :p

I can't believe I read that entire thing.

So, to put it in simpler words. A population of only doves is the best way to go, but all it takes is for one hawk and the whole thing gets screwed up.

I guess you could compare hawks to a disease or a virus. No matter how many doves, as long as there is just one hawk, the disease will spread.

Yes, when talking about evolution in populations, it only takes one hawk to ruin the bliss that is all dove.

The hawks and doves are living in an anarchy though. A hawk in a population of doves can do whatever it wants and get away with it. In populations, exploitation strategies have countermeasures and so it's often an evolutionary arms-race between exploiters and the would-be-exploited. Identifying and/or remembering exploiters is often a good strategy. Vampire bats may share blood with other bats who are starving, but those who only take and don't give back are probably ousted from the bloodsharing and that makes the exploitive strategy less successful and the numbers of exploiters will go down.

Perhaps you could use that as an argument against liberalism. ;)

what if the hawk is really old or tiny and the doves kick the shit out of it?

live free die hard

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.

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


Anyway I believe in community.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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

/ thread.

The tendency to establish a system of ethics is inherent in mankind, and therefore (governed not so much by a person's mind but by their instincts) cannot be considered selfish, unless you blame the species for wanting to look after itself.

i'm sorry, what is this mankind you're referring to, and how have you discerned its inherent tendencies?

i can't blame the species for wanting to look after itself, because i do not recognize the stable identity of the entity "the species" and as such i don't see how it could look after itself (to make this clear, a 'species' is an abstract concept derived from a familiarity with various individuals, and as such anything said about the species is simply a generalization of observations in particular instances. to say then that the species looks after itself is at best to say that in general individuals tend to look after themselves, and at worst a reference to an entity that simply doesn't exist in the way you're assuming)

as an individual, i notice personal tendencies toward both self-preservation and self-destruction, and i also notice that any system describing how to interact with other people is inevitably self-centered, since its primary content is the relation between the self and the other. to say that the system is other-centered amounts to pretty much the same thing, since we can only think about the other in relation to the self.

I am obviously referring to the species of Homo sapiens. Do explain how saying that you do not recognize the stable identity of the entity of "the species" is not an obviously absurd position to take.

As an individual you may notice certain things as you've described, but a system that preserves its constituents itself is not barred from appearing selfish at an individual level. There is a natural desire in human beings to establish or advocate a system of ethics, and it is not in the least bit selfish to do so - it's beyond our control. Without such a mechanism inherent in human beings, the species would not survive. It's an explanation of how we have survived.

it's beyond your control to act ethically?

I never said anything of the sort. It's simply a natural part of me to want to implement a system of ethics based on an inherent sense of right and wrong. That doesn't mean I'm incapable of wrong, but I'm aware of what it is and the system helps to discourage it.

Why implement a system when you have an inherent sense of right and wrong?

I've just explained it. There is no 'why', other than because it's in our nature. It just so happens to be useful in promoting good and discouraging evil, because just having a sense of right and wrong does not mean all is going to be perfect.

i'm not sure what you're talking about when you say ethics, it's a system that encourages certain types of behavior? i thought ethics was a system which defines right and wrong, but you're saying right and wrong are innate so ethics is just a system of behavior that makes it easy to be right and avoid wrong? that would mean that ethical dilemmas would only present themselves as issues over the best 'way' to avoid wrong rather than whether something is wrong or not, since everyone would have an innate sense of this. but since people argue all the time over what is right and what is wrong (see abortion, animal rights, slavery) ethics probably goes a bit deeper than that.

The sense of right and wrong are innate. We don't need ethics to know the difference between the two, and I've never said or thought that. Ethics are a collective definition of right and wrong. You could say the 'reason' behind ethics is that it helps to encourage good behavior and provide validation for it, and discourage bad behavior. Ethical dilemmas would, indeed,only be issues as to how good should be done. People argue all the time over what's right or wrong, but as I explained in the "Morality and the Bible" thread, that has a lot to do with corruption of morality via religion or other cultural factors. This is another thing that ethics can help with: attempting to create a moral common ground between various groups.

While I may be going back in the thread a bit, which I did not read all of, how are ethics selfless? Ayn Rand would say the exact opposite.