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.
There is no more to it than this. You can ask how do I justify this rationally to someone who doesn't want to do it and if this requires something outside shared human needs and moral foundations to justify it, I can't. This is a human morality expanded to all humans.
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Perhaps I'm reading you incorrectly, but it appears that you are conceding that empirical reasoning alone is insufficient to provide a rational argument as to why people ought to expand their circle of empathy too all humans. Do I have that right?
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??? I really can't explain any better than that, I'm afraid. If you still don't understand what I mean, saying it all over again is unlikely to help. I am speaking to what is optimum human morality which SH explains by saying it is akin to an optimum human diet.
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You're not following me for the reason religious people generally don't. You'd first need to accept, at least for the sake of argument, that morality is not something humans seek outside themselves but a quality of us, that we can understand as a whole load of 'is's & get right.
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I am perfectly willing to entertain the idea. What I can't understand is how all those 'is's' can possibly provide a rational argument to follow moral precepts that might, on occasion, be against our individual self interest.
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It's the same as how all these 'is's can provide a rational argument for eating an optimal diet that might, on occasion, be against our preferences. These are different things - what is optimal and what we want to do.
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If we could programme all the 'is's that pertain to human morality into a computer & it could calculate the optimum human morality in any given situation, this still won't wash with someone who isn't thinking morally but selfishly. Those would be different calculations.
End of conversation
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Persuasion thru physical non-violence is the conceptual cleaver that, in the end, distinguishes between every Good & Bad society ever, or yet to be, proposed. Finding a way to further extend the reach of (physical) Ahimsa morality should become the goal of all social thinkers.
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You have eloquently expressed what you think is the way things ought to be, and I mostly agree. You haven't, tho, justified it with a purely empirical argument. This whole conversation started with my claim that one cannot discover moral truth through the scientific method alone.
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I'd agree w your specific first claim. We categorize arguments/evidence in numerous ways, e.g., distinguishing between a priori & a posteriori, but at the end of the day, "Yes, that seems right," or "No, that doesn't seem right," is about as 'hard truth' as any of us ever gets:)
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To put it another way, I can't think of a single claim that is beyond the reach of doubt, refinement, or falsification. I'm including "2+2=4," gravity, & rules of logic. Even Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum," I'd argue, is false, on the basis of a 'cognitive distortion' objection.
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So given intrinsic separation btwn consciousness & external reality, we must dive in & get dirty. The world's at a crossroads—current menu options (democracy, capitalism, socialism, etc.) are inadequate. We need robust moral clarity to construct a better way (i.e., my 1st point).
End of conversation
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