Fair enough. But if you ever do come up with a way that is more basic and fundamental than my own, please share it with the rest of us. Especially if you can demonstrate it is not just a point of view but the whole truth.
Feel free of course to consult with Mo. 
Sounds to me like you are wiggling out of doing that yourself.
That is a long discussion concerning the “purpose of life” and “rationality”. Something I can most definitely do but… another thread. 
Interpretation issue. The “experts” seem to disagree with you, not me.
But as I said before. I don’t see great value in studying what children deduce about reality.
Hit and run, huh?
Well, I’m a masochist, so I’ll respond anyways.
I promised to post a rebuttal of Hume, and I did. I didn’t promise to do it myself.
I post anyways because I kind of hate your style of philosophizing, where you pick an opponent and engage in a dialectic where you take 0 responsibility to make an effort to understand the other’s claim. To you, it either made sense the first couple of seconds after you read it or it never did.
I post because I assume that there are people out there who are willing to read a statement, consider the given evidence, and then spend a considerable amount of energy making sense out of it themselves. Skatisketch does this, as well as others [originally, I had a list of people, but they were all too relative]… The problem is that these guys don’t have the same idealistic hope that I do (one might say, the idealistic hope of the class virgin ) that people that don’t do this are capable of changing their ways, that some of them are super smart people that simply have never even considered that intellectual honesty is possible; so they tend to participate a lot less than me.
It’s a damn shame, but I need a philosophical outlet like a fucking drug, and ILP is the best I got right now. I’m like an addict of the finest opium that has resorted, out of desperation and lack of opium, to smoking shitty crack. 'Course, for every 19 dirty crack trips, I get a little opium piece. You know, to keep me coming back.
A quick Google gives me
jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2 … 6114103833
philosophy.unc.edu/people/facult … AUHAUS.pdf
books.google.nl/books?id=pyLjX4w … sp&f=false
to be getting on with,for anyone who may be interested in the counterpoints.
I read the quote. I checked it against my copy of the book. I didn’t see why you thought it was a rebuttal.
I mean, I’ve read Hume. I’ve read Nietzsche. I know Nietzsche didn’t like Hume (let’s face it, there’s only really Schopenhauer that he hates any less than all the others). I reread the passage. And I didn’t see anything that really stuck as an attack particularly on Hume.
You may be unwilling to explain yourself, or you may be unable. You claim the former; they are indistinguishable from where I’m sitting. But you’re putting a lot of effort into haughty disdain, when a cut and paste of relevant quotes would have saved a lot of time. Just saying.
How is asking you what you mean not making an effort to understand you? Wait, that question clearly means I’m not making an effort to understand what you mean. I’ll go away and meditate on your profound truths instead. Goodness knows what pearls I’ve been missing. [-o<
I feel dirty just for having read that post.
Haha… 
I said I’d be back to clarify but looks like Only Humean was satisfied by what I had already explained (btw, no worries), and buffalo, you read it right. Once I process everything, I may have some questions for some of you. Glad to see this spurred some discussion 
Hi!
Anyone mind if I argue with Nietzsche?
I think hes not looking far back enough in the genealogy of morals. I have to side with the “English Psychologists” on this one.
What the “noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded” have done is they have given the concept of morals the widespread, institutionalized authority that the concept enjoys now, as only aristocrats in positions of power and influence can. But morality existed in some form long before aristocracies and organized governments. It existed in the earliest tribes and even in different species. Nietzsche might claim that in tribal societies it was likely the Alpha males (or females) that dictated morality, but this would be inaccurate I think. The Alphas certainly had an influence on early morals, especially on how other members treated them, but there was, without a doubt, a set of learned behavioral practices that governed interaction among the “common folk” members of the tribe that the Alphas had nothing to do with.
Im thinking of interactions way back in the primate days, like grooming your buddies to gain favor and cement yourself in the social framework. And interactions like, getting beat up when you try to hook up with someone else’s monkey…
Such interactions develop into an unspoken sense of how to behave in the group, and this is the origin of morality. Eventually, as our ability to communicate improved, we would have been able to articulate these heuristics, and those would have been the pre-cursors to words such as good and bad.
And these heuristics are, without question, all about “usefulness.” These heuristics are borne out of a punishment/reward system. When you groom your buddy, he is happy, and in one form or another expresses his affection. Either through grooming you back or sharing his banana, or having your back if you get into a fight. When you try to steal his monkey-lady, you get beat up, and this unpleasant experience leads to developing the heuristic that picking up taken women is bad. If there was no benefit for the recipient of the grooming, and no consequent expression of affection, then the heuristic would never evolve.
Over time, these heuristics become ingrained in the culture and they become more like the “cultural values” that we know of today. Somewhere along in the process, there is this detachment from the utility of the heuristics that the “English Psychologists” mention when they speak of people forgetting the origins. What happens is that, as the values become fundamental elements of the cultural identity, the individual’s ego takes over as the motivational force behind being “moral.” The motivation to follow the heuristics detaches from the perceived utility, and it essentially becomes “cool to be moral.” “Cool” meaning, highly regarded within the culture and among peers. Since the Ego is a mechanism in social animals which motivates members to climb their social hierarchies, this becomes the force behind morality.
So uh… .thats that… Oh and what this has to do with Hume I have no idea… ok bubye!
Oh yea, forgot to address this part:
“It is because of this origin that from the outset, the word ‘good’ is absolutely
not necessarily attached to ‘unegoistic’ actions: as the superstition of these
moral genealogists would have it. On the contrary, it is only with a decline
of aristocratic value judgments that this whole antithesis between ‘egoistic’
and ‘unegoistic’ forces itself more and more on man’s conscience, – it
is, to use my language, the herd instinct which, with that, finally gets its
word in (and makes words).”
So yea, considering the evolution of morals, I would say “unegoistic” actions were a major part of original morality. That was one of the advantages of being social animals, it lead to developing heuristics that improved the effectiveness of the group at the cost of the individual’s resources. I would agree that morals did not necessarily originate as “unegoistic.” Rather, behavioral heuristics developed based on utility, which in some cases may have lead to promoting egoistic behaviors, but in many cases lead to discouraging those behaviors, such as the case with stealing a taken monkey-lady.
You make a lot of assumptions here: on what basis can you claim the history of the developpment of morality that you present here?
This is pretty standard evolutionary psychology. Its a science I mean, you could find the types of behaviors im talking about in monkeys right now… so theres nothing really unbelievable about it I would think… What part seems at all controversial to you?
What about the “history” of morality I subscribed too above? The one that is built right into the “human condition”? What makes better sense than that?
This:
[i]When people interact they do so from a point of view that is never entirely the same as any other. We all have our own deep-seated wants, needs and desires. And they revolve around production and reproduction.
But there are any number of ways in which any particular human community can be ordered to accomplish this. But one thing we know for sure: there are always going to be lots and lots and lots of conflicts regarding which is the best way.[/i]
I don’t know what you mean by controversial. I just want to hear the basis for all the assumptions you are making.
Science is, after all, a set of assumptions, no?
So far, so good…
I’m gonna need you to back up and explain to me particular human community first, and how it relates to hwat you said above.
Science is as much a set of assumptions as anything else. All human beliefs/concepts are inevitably founded on some assumptions. I dont understand your targeting of science here. I guess if I had to specify which assumption science in particular is founded on, it would be that there exists an external reality in which we are observers and that our senses provide some level of interface with that reality.
From that basic assumption, science builds theories about the nature of that external reality based on empirical data. You say that I made alot of assumptions in my original post, but I really dont see them… The theories presented are simply an interpretation of empirical data, such as the behavior of apes and human tribal societies. I wonder if you can highlight any particular claims I made in my post that you feel are controversial, in that you are not convinced in their veracity, so that I could address those.
Nono, I wan’t asking you to justify science, I was asking you to justify your specific claims scientifically.
I couldnt give you specific studies. What I can say is this line of reasoning is a common thread or type of explenation that is used to describe human behavior by evolutionary psychologists and sociologists alike. I get this from reading stuff. Ive read lots of stuff online and heard many smart people arguing about it… but I dont remember anything in particular. I do know of one book that might be informative on this topic: The Moral Animal by Robert Wright en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Animal
Well that’s the thing, I’ve read a lot of smart people too. Even the dumb people in this forum have read smart people.
I want to know, in as few words of possible, what the basis for your claims is/are.