I need a Twitter break. Thanks for being understanding. I shall now chill.pic.twitter.com/OcWc2dy8CB
I don't know what you mean? Why does knowing that it evolved mean it isn't actually what we ought to do? The universe doesn't care if we torture each other to extinction but humans do. We have empathy, compassion and sense of justice.
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We'd condemn him on the grounds that we don't like to suffer & have empathy for others who suffer & anger to those who cause suffering & so we have written & unwritten rules about this. We haven't always extended our circle of empathy v far but consistent morality would do so
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But that condemnation is purely subjective. Why should he care what we think? Why should he extend the circle of empathy?
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It's not subjective. Try not having empathy.I took part in a test for psychopaths as a control subject when I was doing psychiatric nursing and had to look at neutral and upsetting images. My frontal lobe fired at pictures of people in distress. Yours must too. Can't you feel it?
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People who don't care for others are psychopaths, deeply depressed or too profoundly autistic to relate to others at all. If someone doesn't care, they don't. The rest of society has to enforce it. That remains the same wherever morality comes from. It happens now.
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I wrote some things ages ago when religious people kept saying this same thing and I posted them when they were being rude. Please excuse the tone and see the point?pic.twitter.com/DGDYhoMau3
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I c the point, but I'm not trying to argue for a theistically revealed ethics at the moment. I'm just trying to establish whether it is possible to have a normative ethics derived from pure empiricism.
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Depends what you mean by pure empiricism. The moral foundations in humans are also found to a lesser degree in other apes and social mammals. We don't have to consciously observe and reason from them to consistently come up with the same basic foundations for morality.
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Don't steal, don't lie, don't commit unjustified violence, respect your parents, cherish your children etc. We do this in different ways and we are constantly fighting our own tribalism where other groups are not included in our moral circle but its there.
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If morality can be reduced to nothing more than a set of intuitions that evolved by natural selection, then I don't see how it can be normative. Why shouldn't the mob boss ignore it if he finds he thrives by hurting others and stealing? Why should he empsthize with his victims?
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I don't know what you mean? What would make it more normative? That's like saying 'If eyes evolved by natural selection, how can they be normative?' They are. We can see them. They're universal apart barring disability. We can see the prefrontal cortex where morality evolved too.
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There will always be a criminal element and they will try to except themselves from moral requirements laid down by the society. But I'm not sure why you think this wouldn't be the case if morality came from elsewhere. Criminals do exist wherever it came from. That is a fact.
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