I certainly appreciate your comments, as we think through some of these ideas together. Below you will find my responses. I had broken my points up into separate posts, assuming that it would be easier to address comments. However, I really did not anticipate multiple visitors. Now, instead of replying to two people through 20 different links, I have decided we could engage back and forth from two posts - one for Ghost, and one for Spring - though others are welcome in the discussion. Once again, I appreciate your interest in my blog.
Also, because I am behind in terms of work I need to get done, I will attempt to respond to any comments you leave, once a day, most likely at night. Thank you for your patience.
Now, may the intellectual stimulation begin!
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2 comments:
For reasons that baffle me, Jason, it seems to have escaped your notice that humans tend to survive better when they operate together as a group, rather than as individuals. The dynamics of social systems are such that certain behaviours are disallowed, since they are detrimental to that group. Killing other members of the group or stealing from them are judged as "bad" actions. No abstract "moral law" is required here; their utility is obvious. It is no surprise that most of humanity agrees with these behavioural strictures, since no society where such norms can be ignored seems to have survived to this day.
Such features of social groups have also been well documented by animal behaviourists. Lesser primates have been observed implementing strategies that can only be described as "ethical", such as by refusing to cooperate when they notice a breach of "fair play" rules, and by instituting systems of "policing" to enforce good behaviour. Since we cannot expect the lesser primates to even understand the word "ontological", one cannot surmise that they have access to any kind of absolute "goodness" floating around in an immaterial moral æther. They may not think, yet they still are.
Your understanding of evolution is short of the minimum required to comment usefully, and you would do well to redress that lack. You fixedness on the notion that self-preservation is paramount is a woeful misunderstanding of the mechanisms involved.
Please try and separate your "explosion" simplification from the emergent phenomena that we observe in the universe today, if only to identify the crux of your argument.
It has been observed in flocking birds that when they are attacked by a predator, one or two individuals will fly apart from their escaping siblings and cousins, thereby making themselves easier prey. This altruism serves the interest of their flock, and not their own. If such an action can not be described as "good", then nothing else can.
Can we also say that God's absolute moral code has been written on the heart of a sparrow?
Zara, I also tried explaining to him on my own blog that our morals develop over time as our understanding of the world and our intellects grow.
I used the example of a builder discovering a method of constructing buildings that are sturdier so that they are less likely to collapse and cause injury and death. Once such a method becomes common knowledge, no one who has a choice is going to use the inferior building methods. As time goes by, better and better building methods are discovered and implemented, and the standards become better.
Just as over time, what began with people not wanting to die, so they realized that cooperation was necessary and that they wanted laws to protect them from harm, gradually our consciousness evolved so that we saw slavery as wrong, misogyny as wrong and so forth.
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