The Human Animal (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, August 13, 2009, 00:34 (5580 days ago) @ dhw

dhw, - > 
> I had a very long discussion with Mark (a reverend) some months ago, and he seemed ... presumably like Adler ... to believe that without God humans were incapable of living good moral lives, since they would then believe in a free-for-all. I hope that's a fair summary. There is no-one at the moment on this forum who will defend that point of view (that's an open invitation to anyone out there), but it might be worth asking ourselves exactly where we do get our moral sense from. On the assumption that none of us are murderers, rapists, child abusers, thieves etc., why is it that - disregarding the obvious social constraints - even if we don't believe in an all-powerful, all-seeing god or gods, we still genuinely care about our fellow creatures and do not always simply put our own interests before those of others? 
> - Morality is one of my favorite philosophical topics. Though proponents of "tabula rasa" will completely disagree with me here, man most certainly encapsulates a moral instinct. I--consider myself a particular case in this. I did not have a very strong religious upbringing at all, I think my mother made me go to church for about a year when I was... 8. She tried again for a few months when I was 13 but by that point I was introduced to George Carlin and that was that. But from the time I was about 11 on, I was on my own. (Single-parent family.) - There was a physicist I think that wrote a scathing attack on psychology, stating that if physics disappeared, so too would all knowledge about how to build all the trappings of civilization, however if psychology disappeared, people would still know how to deal with people. Groundbreaking discoveries, are not to be had in psychology, he argues. His idea is extreme, but salient... - The best moral instinct argument I've ever thought of lies in serial killers. They fit in so well with society because they deliberately find and follow all of the rules--like a robot. They don't "feel" what's right and wrong they "know" what's right and wrong purely by logic and what is given by society. When you think about "tabula rasa" that is precisely what I think would happen if we simply learned to "do what we see and/or told." Tabula rasa does not explain why when I think of cheating on a test, I feel bad. "Because I should feel bad" does not explain that. Morality is too intuitive NOT to be a part of man. - > Just in case anyone thinks this is proof that humans are "special", let me sing a hymn of praise - no punk band backing I'm afraid - to ants, which knock us sideways when it comes to altruism.
> 
> A message to David: I'm afraid I haven't read Victor Frankl. But I don't think there is anything original in my belief that meaningfulness does not depend on eternity, God, or a special place in the universe. 
> 
> And a message to Matt: I'm sure I'm not the only one anxious to know how your exams went. I will type better if I can uncross my fingers. - Heh. Been avoiding that one. I'm afraid that my initial assessment was right... I should have spent the *entire* summer studying, yet that's hard to do when I'm also taking 3 classes. I underestimated it completely. I didn't think I performed so badly when actually taking the test however. - I got a 590 on the Verbal, (between 81-85%ile) but an absolutely dismal 480 on the quantitative. (English majors average higher than that.) My assessment is that I simply lost my nerve. I would test 590 on the verbal portion in the practice tests, 620 on the math portion. There's no reason that the scores should diverge so wildly. I didn't take it seriously enough until the last 3 weeks. - So I'm slated to retake it save for one thing. My GPA is almost high enough to waive the test entirely. I'll have to swing an A in every class from here until May to move from 3.4 to 3.5, so I'm wary. To be safe, I'll study GRE math problems every saturday and sunday morning each week, then if I need to retake it I'll do it next summer after I've graduated. I need to approach it like I did martial arts... practice, practice, practice.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"