Does Morality Do Us Any Good?

H

Hume

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When the German philosopher Hanno Sauer titled his ambitious new book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality” (Oxford), he made it clear that he sees morality as quite different from science. In his account, morality—that body of judgments about good and evil, the practices that reflect those judgments, and the blame, guilt, and punishment that sustain them—hasn’t always existed. That’s why it had to be invented, rather than discovered.

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Does Morality Do Us Any Good?

Our basic sense of right and wrong appears to be the product of blind evolution. The hard question is how unsettling that should be.
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"For Sauer, the story of the invention of morality is really the story of the evolution of humanity. The processes that produced our morality are simply the processes that produced us, produced us as beings who have this morality—rather than, say, the norms that govern ants in their caste-bound colonies, or wolves in their packs, or the snow leopard in its solitude. To understand ourselves as moral creatures, we have to understand that we’re built that way.
 
This is a SUPER interesting topic since it sounds like Sauer is possibly wrong. Moral instincts in many cases do appear to be instinctive to social animals like humans.

Indeed no one came to the conclusion "murder is wrong" through reason. No one came to the conclusion "theft is wrong" through reason. We see moral instincts in groups of other primates.
 
You people have grown up in a highly moral world so you think peace, and stability, and schools, and roads. and banks and churches and strip malls just exist automatically.

they require that enough individuals in a population live in a cooperative fashion.

morality is cooperation.

and cooperation is humanity's advantage.

we couldn't even dominate animals until we learned to hunt cooperatively, and that requires not treating each other as enemies and prey.

the neocon banker fascists are trying to demoralize humanity so we cannot work together to repel their tyrannical bullshit.
 
Hume said:
When the German philosopher Hanno Sauer titled his ambitious new book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality” (Oxford), he made it clear that he sees morality as quite different from science. In his account, morality—that body of judgments about good and evil, the practices that reflect those judgments, and the blame, guilt, and punishment that sustain them—hasn’t always existed. That’s why it had to be invented, rather than discovered.

www.newyorker.com

Does Morality Do Us Any Good?

Our basic sense of right and wrong appears to be the product of blind evolution. The hard question is how unsettling that should be.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Its painfully clear that morals separated from God dont do us any good.
 
Hume said:
"For Sauer, the story of the invention of morality is really the story of the evolution of humanity.
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A plausible hypothesis. But if true, it means all morality is ultimately about selfishness and self-preservation, because evolution is ultimately all about propagating one's own genetic information.

I'm not sure I like the idea that morality basically comes down to selfishness.

My opinion is we do not know enough about the human mind and conscience to be able to say definitively it can all be explained by the known principles of Neo-Darwinism.
 
Cypress said:
A plausible hypothesis. But if true, it means all morality is ultimately about selfishness and self-preservation, because evolution is ultimately all about propagating one's own genetic information.

I'm not sure I like the idea that morality basically comes down to selfishness.

My opinion is we do not know enough about the human mind and conscience to be able to say definitively it can all be explained by the known principles of Neo-Darwinism.
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it comes down to selfishness through cooperation.

it's two apparently opposite things working together.

yin-and-yang-symbol-dualism-black-and-white-positive-and-negative-chinese-concept-vector.jpg

the western mind is intentionally dis-integrated, hemispherically.

you're just paid by criminals to fight actual morality.

it's not actually complicated.

:truestory:
 
Cypress said:
A plausible hypothesis. But if true, it means all morality is ultimately about selfishness and self-preservation, because evolution is ultimately all about propagating one's own genetic information.

I'm not sure I like the idea that morality basically comes down to selfishness.

My opinion is we do not know enough about the human mind and conscience to be able to say definitively it can all be explained by the known principles of Neo-Darwinism.
Click to expand...
I do not think all morality is reducible to practical needs. But a lot of it is.
 
Cypress said:
What Giorgio Perlasca and Oscar Schindler did in Nazi-occupied Europe was not about selfish cooperation, mutual benefit, or expectation of reciprocity.
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sometimes there is just charity too.

another very moral thing.

doy.

your gotcha made the case stronger.

see how your energy is inverted?

why are you fighting goodness?
 
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