I am merely quoting the man (in this case Imp) himself.
Now, go steal some hubcaps or something.
Thanks for the detailed response Polemarchus. It’s hard to do justice to the complexity of someone’s position whilst at the same time making the requisite assumptions necessary to accommodate the condensed forum format.
As it is, I was not wielding this assumption against you, only assuming that it was necessary to your argument. Particularly here;
I have two general points to raise here;
(1) As I see it, my original point would have been stronger if you had said ‘genetic’ instead of ‘generic’. However the fact that you used ‘genetic’ in your response (thus interchanging it with ‘generic’ in your original post) above indicates to me that I have failed to indicate a potentially important distinction. As I understand it, ‘generic’ is a broader or ‘looser’ categorization than ‘genetic’, and thus when you are assigning causes, as in this case for moral behaviour, it is more difficult to argue for the narrow cause of genetics, as opposed to the broader, but also vager, cause of generic association. By using ‘generic’ though, you allow, or potentially allow, for other forms of causation to account for the difference say, between humans and chimpanzees. This brings me to my second point.
(2)
You see, this is where I am tempted to think that you are still thinking in ‘linear’ terms after all. I think one of Dunamis’ last conceptual threads serves as a good example of this. The behaviour of the wolf is in some senses closer to us than the behaviour of the chimpanzee. Yet the wolf has less genetic simularity to us than the chimpanzee. Hence genetic simularity within the human species does not account, solely or perhaps even predominantly, for shared forms of behaviour, moral or otherwise. Do you perhaps espy something amiss here in my reasoning?
Check out the thread here, in any case;
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=147180&highlight=wolf
2b. A similar point may be made here, when you argue;
So I respond; imagine how tough it would be if his audience did not speak English? Or if they spoke perfect English, but came from a foreign culture, and did not understand his particular form of black humour? Calling it ‘genetics’ - nay even suggesting that genetics is the predominant, let alone sole cause, seems to me two or three steps too far. Perhaps when I put my argument this way, you will grant that your original position works better when it says ‘generic’ instead of ‘genetic’? But then we end up back at iuris consensus. What makes your position unique?
Now I sense at this point that I am not doing enough justice to what you are saying. Because you add the following; (my initial responses follow after each)
a) “morality hasn’t changed as much as we might have wished.”
Resp: Hasn’t it? Perhaps not in some senses, and there are always lapses here and there, periods of ‘barbarism’ if you will… examples include the Usual Suspects, whom you know well enough. Now here perhaps is a double edged sword. That we have the capacity for complete relapse, which crudely put is when a ‘whole society’ looses its ‘sense of compassion’ (Nazi Germany, perhaps), may serve as an argument that the supposed iuris consensus (‘common sense of what is right, or just’) is fragile enough that to rely on fuzzy genetic ‘predispositions’ to prevent these relapses is both conceptually confused and extremely reckless.
The double edge however is this; that morality has changed very significantly given the amount of time that the human species has remained more or less biologically the same (for the sake of argument, let’s say 30 to 50 thousand years at least); I would argue that even compassion is only relatively more universal or general than other characteristics; it is not a ‘genetic’ predisposition, and it emerges and submerges with subsequent movements of the ‘flow’ of history.
[edit: A triple edge may be discerned by asking; what do you mean to say that morality hasn’t changed as much as ‘we’ ‘might have wished’? Who is this ‘we’, and what does the fact that ‘our’ wishes have been continually disappointed suggest about the supposed universality of compassion?
b) “The problem, I think, is that you’re asking how one thing is determined by the other. My reply is that one was not determined by the other, the one was enabled by the other.”
Resp: Well, what is the significant difference between ‘cause’ and ‘enable’? There is a sense in which priviledging one cause above another in making explanations is always already an act of abstraction. But it works well enough so long as you don’t tear it away from the function towards which it was designed - prediction. But when you make it ‘vague’, this is just the inverted equivalent of positing other causes. It is causation coming from another direction, if you will. I’m sorry that this is so vague - I haven’t really had much time to flesh it out. Essentially what I am objecting to, I think, is this;
“Collective morality works as well as it does because we’re all built according to the same generic blueprint.”
What does this ‘because’ mean? I suspect that the argument is malformed.
c) “But compassion isn’t secreted from the heart, such as bile comes from the liver. As with language, compassion is mostly (though not entirely) learned.”
‘John Searle once remarked that we’ve no more reason to expect that your mind and my mind function differently than we have to expect that our kidneys function differently. This is why you and I both both tend to cry when someone we love has died and why we tend to laugh at the same jokes.’
Confused,
James
Hello F(r)iends,
Go have another donut, fat boy.
-Thirst
Who said simple couldn’t be subtle?
James
Dudes! Did you ever steal those crome air-caps? Those were the shit back in the day. Us kids had the whole neighborhood on lock down. We used to steal them and put them on our bikes, or sell them to other kids who didn’t have the balls. Yeah, we were hard-core alright. You were a serious gangsta if you stole crome air-caps.
Ahhhh. Thanks for the memories, fellas.
I would argue that you are wrong. If not compassion, then love itself, provides the bonds for the human species to survive.
Unlike a host of other animals, human offspring are incredibly fragile, and they remain so for a disproportionate amount of time. If not the feeling of love in a father for his children, it would be much more difficult for that child to survive. If not the love of a mother for her children, there would be no human race… at least as we know it.
In fact, if a father has a genetic predisposition to care for his children, the likelihood increases that his children will inherit said predisposition and survive to pass it on to their own offspring.
Love is what holds families together. From there you can extrapolate communities, cities, nations, etc. The problem, if I understand Polemarchus correctly, is not that a given individual does not experience compassion for others, but that there exists limits to how far most people are willing to extend compassion to those they do not identify with.
Hello F(r)iends,
No one in my neighborhood was rich enough to own these unless they were drug dealers… for the most part, no one messed with the dealers.
-Thirst4Mettle
Ok so now it is time for some clarifications;
(1) Some people have compassion. Some people do not. Therefore compassion is more than just genetic. This argument stands until refuted. I would be in your debt if you would do me the service.
(2) I have nothing to say about love, except this; it does certainly not provide the bonds for the human species to survive. Part of the bonds, perhaps, but it is not the fulcrum on which the functioning of the whole system depends. Furthermore, as a ‘poetic’ objection, life is not ‘nasty, brutish and short’. I am not here to talk about the sufficient conditions for the survival of the human race, but whether morality is predominantly genetic. Sorry to keep things so narrow. I think there is too much confusion in those other discourses which you seem eager to bring into this discussion. I do not find sociobiology to be convincing, in content or in ‘spirit’.
For instance this. Human offspring would be incredibly fragile, if left in a ‘state of nature’. But where are they in fact? In a warm house usually, unless they are in Africa. Human beings do not ‘fight for survival’ in downtown Los Angeles. I don’t know where you are going with this.
You are too far from me GCT. I do agree with this though;
Regards,
James
Then some combination of environment and genetics then. Perhaps, also, a good society is one where this flourishes.
I am not certain what you mean. Moral action entails, what, acts by human beings, no? You say your interest rests in whether or not what constitutes moral action is genetic, you are saying, basically, what constitutes humanity itself.
Your predecessor, WhiteLotus, once pointed out to me the influence environment plays on evolution. If we assume that, by and large, man lives and thus is influenced by, an environment he himself creates, then that environment is not just a cause of his behavior, it is also an effect.
At least, I think that is where I am going with this.
Really, I am not that big of a fan of Hobbes. I have mentioned him once or twice in other discussion to show how, using his methods, one can reach opposite conclusions.
I will say this though, a baby lives in a warm house, or even a mud hut most likely because someone loves him or her. If the child is completely unloved, it may find itself in more drastic circumstances
Yes. And it is more than genetics. This is admitted by genetics itself, when it spawns derivative fields such as sociobiology. For something waay out of left field, have a look at this;
Well this is a more complex set of issues. Whitelotus would simply say that the mechanism in its entirety is the correct level at which to apply evolutionary descriptions. For me this just creates unnecessary confusion, and is in any case wholly arbitrary when viewed from a positivistic position. This is the position I generally use on these issues, even though there are more creative alternatives. (Whitelotus’ position is itself quite creative, but it is not ‘scientific’ and should not be considered the ‘only option’ for intellectually ‘conscientous’ people.)
The other approach is the one I did not take in this thread, given that Polemarchus seems to have given up quoting the Beitrage for quoting John Searle, I did not think it would be productive. When whitelotus said that the ‘ubermensch is no longer human’, it is I think just such a thing as the above which he had in mind. For him Darwin asks the question ‘what is species’ and answers ‘struggle for existence’. The key concept to understand is the relationship between humanist discourse and evolution. That is kind of what the field of biopolitics is concerned with. Whitelotus takes this discourse and perverts it with his hardcore esoteric rhetoric. At the end of the day though, an argument between him and I would probably still resolve to an argument between a ‘pessimist’ and an ‘optimist’. It would have the logical form of;
whitelotus; “You don’t understand the power of the negative…”
Me; “Your fucking right I don’t.”
Anyway, I took a shot at explaining this statement a while back, if you’d care to refresh your memory; (forgive me the pretentious Derridean tone of the thread - it seemed appropriate to the subject matter…)
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=145625&highlight=human
This seems fair enough as far as it goes. But I would not try to seperate the concept of ‘love’ from the context of social meaning and interaction. This is the only context in which genetics makes sense, because genetics is defined by its boundaries as much as by its object. The dynamics of social interaction are not genetic; they are the container in which human beings and other biological organisms exist. The genetic component is one cog in the wheel, not the whole machine. There are other discourses to account for the other cogs. If you wanted to ‘universalize’ genetics, you would have to take out those components which give the discourse its distinctive identity to begin with. In other words, you would end up with physics. What I am saying then is that a kind of ‘perspectival distortion’ is created when one takes this discourse out of its ‘natural habitat’, and tries to see a too broad a field through the mediation of its conceptual lens.
Like I am fond of saying then, when trying to put all of the above into a single crystallized message or maxim…
PUT DOWN THE RICHARD DAWKINS, DAMMIT!!!
Regards,
James
James,
I’m curious about your statement about compassion, that some have it and others not. Is it a case of presence/absence?. Or is it possible that all have it, but some learn through experience to repress it?
Additionally is compassion an expression of our capacity to empathize with not only other humans, but with other interactive states of being as well?
JT
This is a dead-end avenue, as far as I am concerned. “Maybe they do really (really!) have it, but it is just ‘submerged’ beneath the surface. It is hidden.” For me this can work in certain contexts, but it is not a profound analysis - just one which works with a different logic. Positivists would call this the ‘veil’ argument, and reject it in all cases. (‘Beneath the ‘veneer’ of society is a Struggle For Existence!’…)
I think this is going too far; by simply inverting the validity of the logic, they build a discourse based on an indeterminate negation. Now short of working through the complexity of this topic, I would simply say that whether it is a case of presence/absence, or whether it is something which ‘we all have, but learn to repress’, is either;
(a) Not an interesting question, because it is two ways of looking at the same thing, in so much as the conclusions drawn from either analysis have the same use.
OR
(b) A question which cannot be resolved at this level of analysis.
Both (a) and (b) are true.
Regards,
James
imp, good topic and post;
absolutely not, infact christianity - gluttony (unhealthy diet and smoking) is a sin.
In some states smoking bans have gotten stricter and stricter, it won’t be long before this takes effect:
seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20 … 051103.gif
in washington we’re too moral to be within 4 ft of strippers, 25 ft of smokers… soon 50 ft limit for fat people and fast food restaraunts?
I still think you’d be hard pressed to show how homosexuality harms the individual or society, but eh what do I know?
Imp wrote
Right off, I have to tell you that the aphorism “might makes right” does not mean that might is a means to an end. That’s not at all what the phrase means in common usage. It means that might, alone, determines what is right. It doesn’t mean that might is a means for enforcing what has been judged by other means to be right.
As a moral declaration, the phrase is read, “might ought to make right.” This, because moral statements don’t merely say how the world seems to be (the task of journalists and sociologists), they say how we think the world ought to be (the task of moral philosophers). So, when you declare that “might makes right” in a thread about morality, you’re telling us how you think the world ought to be.
Imp, if ever on a dark street, some dude cracks you on the back of the head with pipe, takes your watch and wallet, and runs away Scot-free; if and when you slowly regain consciousness, I want you to remember that this isn’t just the way the world is, it’s the way you think the world ought to be.
But supposing, for the sake of argument, that “might makes right” actually meant that might is a means to enforce a preordained “moral standard,” I’d ask where in your two-step moral system (definition followed by gunplay) does this “moral standard” arise? A standard is arrived at by a deliberative process. And you can’t answer that it’s entirely up to the power-wielder to determine his standard; not, that is, without infringing on your assertion that “undirected power means nothing.” In other words, if he chose to flip a fair coin - mentally or otherwise - in order to determine which direction to unleash his superior firepower, then his might would be directed at random, or to use your word, undirected.
Finally, Robert Nozick wrote (Philosophical Explanations, 1981) that in The Republic, when Socrates began to question Thrasymachus, Thrasymachus should have grabbed Socrates by the beard and beat his face into puss. Nozick is spot-on; is there anything more idiotic than to sit around and argue that we ought to fight rather than argue?
Michael
Hi all!
I wonder, is there really any tangible relationship or has anyone ever finally discovered some truthful correlation between choice and what actually happens?
Just what role do we with all our arrogance play in that whole process we put in ‘moral’ brackets?
I am inclined to think we really have very little say in matters moral.
We are dreamers and sleepwalkers and we pretend to see.
Sorry about the pessimism!
Peter
lol… yes, but the argument is a type of fight… and yes, had thrasymachus smashed socrates’ face plato’s writing career would have been shorter… I am going to quote myself: “If Socrates had the mental strength to convince the judge and jury of Athens that he was in fact correct and that the city was unjust, his strength would have prevailed. As a demonstration of the power of the city over Socrates, Socrates ended his own life. In a sense, via the power of the city, Thrasymachus was shown to be correct.”
symposia.ilovephilosophy.com/lau … ustice.htm
-Imp
Hello F(r)iends,
An illustration of arguments about “might makes right”.
-Thirst
I disagree that some have compassion, and others do not. Everyone has compassion, it’s a very useful trait to be able to put yourself fleetingly in the shoes of another, and gaze briefly, however inadequately, at life through their eyes. No-one steps over the beggar, without experiencing a slight twisting in their belly. No-one sees the starving child on the TV, without their TV dinner losing some of its flavour.
Some choose to act on their compassion, others do not.
Well it takes some much energy to act with compassion! You can’t expect people to start working against entropy can you?