Sunday, March 11, 2007

#8

People can suggest that we have educated ourselves. However, how did the first cause, monkey, cavemen, get educated on what is absolutely moral or immoral?
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You first have to show that morals is absolute before you can ask that question.

March 12, 2007 at 4:36 AM
Tommykey said...

Early man, at least in cave man times, probably did not have much of a moral sense. There was no written or spoken language, except for maybe some grunts for the latter, so there was no way to formulate ideas. Outside of one's self and one's immediate band of hunter-gatherers, there was no sense of belonging to a human race.

Early humans led a marginal existence, and cooperation was necessary in order to survive. You see the same thing with dolphins too. I saw it on a dvd I have at home. When dolphins see a school of fish, they do not all make a mad dash for it and try to grab what they can, because the fish scatter and become harder to catch. Instead, the dolphins surround the school of fish, and then each dolphin takes a turn darting through the school and grabbing a fish. The school of fish starts to separate but then condenses itself again, whereupon the next dolphin takes its turn and the process repeats itself until all of the dolphins have had their fill.

Now, this cooperation was obviously a learned behavior, just as humans learned that they needed to cooperate in order to have food, shelter and clothing. This is probably the origin of where our morals come from. As humans developed the power of speech, the older people in the band would be looked up to as the repository of knowledge and they would convey their accumlated knowledge and wisdom (along with their biases and superstitions) to the younger generations and so on.

March 16, 2007 at 9:59 AM

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