Members of our species, a while back, during the time that was known as The Inquisition, would tie a “heretic” to a stake, and burn him or her alive. The ones who did this were respected members of society, and many people would come out to watch this spectacle, as even today people will come out to see some severe, viscous one-on-one violence; or maybe only a boxing match; …wondering how it will end.
e used to sacrifice young boys and girls, in an effort to appease God, on the altar; at least those who had the power would do so. It was an established practice. Abraham is said to have ended this practice when his own son was due to be the next sacrifice.
Coming forward in time, it was customary, due to the influence of the tobbaco growers, to encourage and tolerate cigarette smokers …even when they blew smoke in one’s face. This was as recently as the 1930s and 40s. It was a very common practice; and every movie showed respectable people smoking. It was the traditional, customary thing to do - and there was no stigma to being a tobbaaco addict nor to blowing the smoke anywhere and everywhere. It was fasionable. It was an established institution. We as a human species grew out of it, although a few smokers linger on.
Now, as any environmentalist or ecologist can tell you, there is a practice to toss waste plastics into our oceans, no matter what harm to life that lives in the sea it does. Perhaps we will eventually grow out of that practice.
And we still do other things that cause a Climate Crisis for ourselves. Hence we see a plethora of forest fires, severe hurricanes, icebergs melting, tsunamis, flooding we did not have so much of before, etc. We see less birds, and less of the insects that they eat. It is due to Global Warming which, in turn is due to the 'Greenhouse Effect. This is caused by carbon emissions way out of control. All this is largely taken for granted as unavoidable given our lifestyle. We are not working that hard to change this attack on our habitat, the planet Earth. We take it for granted.
In the U.S.A. especially we see lots of violence; mass murders, several a day, have become common. This is due to our gun culture. Politicians are reluctant to take on the N.R.A., who job it is to sell munitions and bullets, and all kinds of guns. This violence has become an established institution.
What is the next stage in our evolution?
I would argue it is to have more ethical individuals - who renounce violence, and the disparagement, and the dis-valuing of one another
This sounds rather visionary at the moment. [This takes us to place where Moral Philosophy and Political Philosophy intersect.] Ethical persons would campaign for, mobilize and organize for, goals such as Never have another war. Settle differences some other way! Or Health as a societal goal: what are its ingredients? How focus on achieving vigorous, glowing health? A proper diet and some exercise would help us get to this goal.
And caring for the less fortunate among us: how help them 'climb up a rung on the ‘Ladder of Opportunity’? Share with them your success secrets, so to speak.
Who among us is opposed to these goals?! Virtually no one.
…So the issue becomes: How get a world with more truly-ethical individuals in it? Is it even possible? I argue in the following essay that it is very possible. This brief, concise paper discusses this topic.
Check it out. …a safe-to-open link to it is offered here: myqol.com/wadeharvey/PDFs/Ho … ianism.pdf
Editorial update: Since the pdf file was created, please make this change as you peruse the article: Where is says “shall be…” or “shall”, substitute the phrase: “may need to be reminded…”
After you have had a chance to read this tiny document, let us know what you think on any of its topics. Make constructive comments as to how it can be improved. That will be much appreciated. Thank you in advance!
I think ethics can in some ways revolve around happiness.
Making the self and the other feel joy and positive emotion.
Emotion enhances meaning and purpose.
It deepens and intensifies meanings.
Ethics revolves around positivity.
The “Good” in senses.
Positivity also = productivity.
Productivity has to do with getting good things done.
Human sacrifice was something we “evolved” away from, at least insofar as we personally have to witness it. We are still quite comfortable knowing humans are being sacrificed halfway around the world so long as it’s to sustain our own quality of life. And many people are still quite comfortable with sacrificing millions of unborn human beings every year. Even the babies mothers don’t seem to care about that mass human sacrifice.
As for smoking, cultural shifts in how smoking was perceived was a result of propaganda and warfare. Some of the early successes of the media machine and their ability to directly program the populace. Which coding ability is pretty much perfected at this point. It has nothing to do with evolution and everything to do with a lack of evolution. Because humans at least in the first world are no longer subject to purifying natural selection, if we are sick there is medicine, if we can’t see there are eye glasses and eye drops and surgeries, if we are fat and dying there are insulin injections to save us, if we are born disabled someone cares for us for the rest of our life and we in any of these situations might even have kids of our own someday.
A lack of natural selection means we “evolve” only in the sense of a slow collapse away from our previous phenotypical optimizations, including the coordinated epigenetic social epistasis patterns that developed naturally in societies to help maximize and sustain that optimization. Now because of a LACK of evolution we see everything on the rise which represents sub-optimal traits and behavior: physical health is worse, mental health is much worse, critical thinking is non-existent, IQ has been declining by 1 point per decade since the peak of the industrial revolution in the late 1800s.
Yeah, because there is no law governing that and because any regulations that do exist don’t matter very much compared to how easy it is for plastics to get into oceans. Also because of the incredible opportunity cost associated with curtailing our use of plastics, which are nearly essential in basically every facet of our lives now.
The problem of plastic will get solved when someone smart enough invents a new kind of plastic that dissolves into naturally occurring non-harmful substances and is at least as cheap to mass produce as normal plastic is. Until then it’s probably not going to change.
Social and political change usually occurs not because we have suddenly “evolved to be better” but because of new technological innovations that come along. The feudal age didn’t end because humanity evolved into a higher level of consciousness and realized it was stupid to have one king and a dozen rich lords tyrannizing over everyone else and hoarding all their stolen wealth in unbreachable keeps and castles; rather, someone invented gunpowder and suddenly those keeps and castles weren’t unbreachable anymore. The conditions of the physical world changed and human societies just adapted right long to those changes and the new possibilities they created.
There is no climate crisis.
Lol. What on earth are you talking about? You blame the common person for these things? Why not blame those who really cause this stuff?
All these severe forest fires and hurricanes and droughts beyond what is normal are part of engineered weather warfare conducted by governments against their own people, and against people in other countries (China and the US target each other for example). Global warming is a hoax, even if the planet were unnaturally warming up that is exactly part of the agenda of those who run these governments in secret. It is global terraforming. Why do you think they spray chemtrails all over the place for 30 years, trapping more heat and sunlight in the atmosphere? Well yeah they need to make sure there are enough aluminum and other metallic particles in the atmosphere so installations like HAARP can create the weather changes they want, like steering hurricanes in any direction they please by heating different areas of the air around it.
Gun violence… oh you mean how almost every one of these mass shootings is a false flag planned and executed by these same nefarious actors? All to get you to become emotional about how bad guns are. Meanwhile the safest cohort of Americans are lawful gun owners, and even despite all the gang violence in “progressive” demonrat areas like chicago and new york and even despite the many false flags conducted by crisis actors and fake news, it is STILL the case that guns are used far more often LAWFULLY to prevent a crime than they are used UNLAWFULLY to commit a crime. This is just basic crime stats, you can look it up.
“Gun culture”, have you ever been to a shooting range? Do you realize how responsible, mature and polite lawful gun owners are? You basically have to be considering you are carrying around a weapon that could accidentally blow your own head off if you’re not careful, or accidentally discharge and kill someone else and then your life is over and you go to prison.
But please, keep watching CNN and NPR so you can continue to educate us about whatever the current fear campaign and corporate media emotionally-manipulative psyop is trending on twitter today.
Clearly we need to reverse the kind of degradation and decline that has been going on for 150 years now, and which you yourself seem to example at least when it comes to the category of low IQ bad thinking and blind conformity simping for supposed authority figures and not even being able to realize he is being manipulated.
Humans do indeed need to evolve, or re-evolve. They need to evolve a functioning brain again.
Doesn’t it get tiring and become embarrassing, virtue signaling like this? Being a social justice warrior was so 2018.
Ethics requires logic, critical thinking, the ability to recognize reality, and the intelligence needed to be able to notice when you are being manipulated. So until those conditions get better (I’m not holding my breath) there isn’t going to be a while lot of “ethics” going around. Just some crying and sperging out over fake issues created by billion-dollar corporations to confuse your brain and turn you into a docile, reliable obedient sheeple. Which seems to be working, as far as I can see.
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I think that humanity needs to re-balance, and become more inline with nature again.
Science and technology are guiding nature/Us, not nature… it is not a good idea/wise, to become dependent on them, or we will lose what made/makes/will continue to make Us, human.
It’s all good and well to imagine upward human evolution, however one thinker comes to mind:Malthus may become relevant again. Some say overpopulation is an exaggerated phenomenon, look how the numbers have become staggering from ancient polis of a few hundred thousand to megapolis counting tens of millions, the world population stunning billions. Add the miracle of medical science and even if Elan Musk denies it, technology is putting workers out of jobs, and major industrial nations can be appraised by their levels of poverty, homelessness and expanding social inequity.
The trend was supposed to go with third world countries upping standards of living to match modern western industrial models, but the opposite appears to be taking place/ the slippage of the West falling to come close to the Spenglarian trend , as the decline predicted. Looking more like third world countries as never before.
Then how would it come to be, that politics leading social welfare through economic opportunity, when those opportunities do not bare out the facts?
Talk about ethics, when morality and violence knows little to none about the rules of behavior as they should apply to what really is going on across the board in all levels of society,
Theories based on hypotheticals are simply an inaccurate predictors of real life, as day to day unexpected events shorten planning on an accelerated pace, preventing appropriately longer range planning to account for the rate that population appears to
Increase.
I agree with Dan when he writes that ethics is about “Making the self and the other feel joy and positive emotion.”
And I definitely agree with those who point out that the human species needs to work to achieve a better balance with nature. I am not sure that the size of the population is the cause of our problems; I would argue that it is our lack of education, or miseducation, as to the basics of Ethics is the problem; and the failure to make the field more precise and exact, and well-presented. We need to reduce the vagueness and get straight to the point that we are to create value in our interactions with others. They then, if educated well, will have an attitude of joy and gratitude, etc.
In other words, they will know “which way is up.” They will know their values. See for details the References below; read through them, and give us your comments on them.
Our tendency to stereotype one another is another way of being unethical. It is also known as “prejudice.” Those who feel prejudice are fearful of diversity. That is an empirical fact. Here is a relevant quote [published in the Edmonton Journal, Toronto, Canada] on that ethical mistake, in an article praising diversity written by Irshadd Manji. The article is entitled “Don’t Label Me!”
"Labeling drains diversity of its unifying potential. ‘Out of many, one’ (e pluribus unum) is the symbol of The United States of America …a unity out of diversity. " ----------------------------Irshad Manji
In that article, a beautifully-written letter to her daughter, she is affirming that diversity is valuable; it has positive value for us. It does NOT have to divide us; instead it can unify us!!
It seems to me that she is affirming in her words, the brilliant moral insight of Dr. Martin King, in his “I have a Dream” speech, that we are to judge individuals by their tcharacter, not by their skin color.
So a good moral principle to add to your repertoire is: When encountering another individual, in deciding whether one is confronting a good person or a bad person, go by the color of one’s character not by the color of one’s skin!!!
To understand the potentials for the net stage of evolution on must understand the forces that govern selection.
For this you must ask what is it that we now do that causes people to fail or succeed in the task of reproductive success. Reproductive success is any practice which leads to the success of viable progeny.
It is this and only this consideration: whatever is distinctive about those that achieve reproductive success will be preserved in the gene pool, and that which leads to the failure of reproductive success will be removed.
This is the stage upon which we all walk. There may be no “stage” in the terms understood by the thread title since such changes are very small and gradual.
Since there is little pressure upon our survival and reproductive success it is highly unlikely that humans will achieve any significant change, and we are much the same species as we were 100 thousand years ago.
The advent of culture and civilisation has also made us immune to the daily forces of nature. We have adopted an extra-somatic means of change and evolution which means that there is no biological selection.
Stereotypes and prejudices exist because they are useful for survival. They reflect real conditions in reality you should probably pay attention to. God/evolution gave us instincts and intuition, so use it.
Yes of course you should also be smart enough to realize that not every member of a group will conform to stereotypes about that group. Judge individuals, but don’t ignore your intuitions and instincts either, they were crafted in eons of natural selection and they exist for a reason. The evolutionary crucible of group survival is a real bitch.
Pretending all prejudice and stereotyping is bad/wrong is WAY stupider and WAY worse than accepting that some (not all) of it is quite justified and accurate.
HumAnIze tells us that the human species does not evolve, but that technologies evolve. I’d like to know who it is that produces this advanced technology. …whether it is a better wireless bra; or a windowpane that captures energy from the sunlight and converts it into electricity for us to use; or whether it is a new improved method of designing, and imparting knowledge …say, Open Source AI.
Who innovates, who invents, who creates? Human beings do that.
This is one way they evolve.
He also tells us that stereotyping and being prejudiced are beneficial and positive. Would a shift in his thinking be a kind of evolution?
Oct 12, 2022
International Climate Science Coalition Executive Director Tom Harris discusses how he was once a climate alarmist but now sees it as a scam
I disagree; and rely on genuine climate scientists, not quacks who get on so-called news shows that are really propaganda outlets of stupid billionaires who have some dysfunctional agenda. See credentials for one ofmy sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
See some real evidence presented, instead of quackery:
Check out the evidence for yourself, as to what humans are doing to the planet Earth! We will pay for our neglect, and for our spewing out of CO2 gas (the Greenhouse Effect) and for the damage to the quality-of-life already done …and what yet might be done.
How shameful that a major power company in Alabama relies only on coal for its power. Lately we witness a number of formerly relatively-rare but now simultaneous climate events, such as severe hurricanes, sudden flooding, polar cold ['polar vortices] in the USA, along with the accelerated melting of glaciers in Greenland and in Glacier National Park in Montana, the diverting of The Gulf Stream, the release of Methane from our oceans, etc., etc. Wake up!!
These events are very expensive. We are paying now. Great waste of true wealth that could do a lot of good if spent elsewhere. The next stage of human evolution will be to have more-enlightened, more-ethical people. And more of them.
If you mean that humans directly change their environments to be more suited to their own needs and preferences, then yes of course. I’ve said that here before. If you want to call that a form of evolution, ok. It’s not really evolution in the strict sense, but I don’t see a problem with including the term as long as we maintain the distinction between evolution proper (natural selection, adaptation and random mutation) and this aspect of evolution you raise regarding how humans are capable of directly changing their own environments rather than merely adapting to them or not.
I don’t remember saying it that way. Are you being deliberately dense or disingenuous? Just scroll up and read what I already wrote so I don’t need to repeat it.
No idea what you mean. What shift in thinking, and how would that be “a kind of evolution”?
Please try to be more clear and precise in your meanings.
HumAnlize said: “be more clear and precise in your meanings.”
I agree with that. It applies to everyone - especially to anyone who writes here at a Forum on Philosophy.
And while we at it, let’s not claim that ‘some stereotyping is justified. and that (even some) prejudice is okay, or appropriate.’
If those who believe that would shift their thinking over to an opposite view, they would find that life goes better for all …and thus for they themselves. They would become more ethical.
Prejudice is defined as taking one attribute, one feature, of a person and then generalizing from there to an entire group who may possess tthat attribute.
Some stereotyping is justified, and some prejudice is ok.
What are you, some kind of oddball social justice warrior? I thought this was a philosophy forum.
Literally no idea what this is supposed to mean, sorry.
False. You have it backwards.
Prejudice is defined as recognizing the FACT that a certain group of people are statistically more likely in reality to act in certain ways, and therefore it makes logical sense to increase the expected likeliness that a random member of that group would manifest those same type of actions/behaviors/etc. more so when compared to someone not in that group or compared to a random member of the population at large.
It doesn’t mean you stop judging people as individuals. It simply means you recognize the basic fact that, for example black people are more likely to commit violent crime compared to non-black people. This is just true, you can cry about it all you want but facts are facts. So it makes sense to keep this in mind as a potential evaluation metric for when you meet black people, not saying you will ASSUME every black person is going to commit violent crime of course.
And when you are walking down a dark street at night and you see a black man walking toward you, if you use your prejudice to cross the street to where there are white people walking, you just statistically decreased your likelihood of being violently attacked or robbed or assaulted. Simple fact. Or like if you have a choice to live in a majority black neighborhood or a majority white neighborhood. This type of basic pattern recognition when applied over many iterations is going to yield positive results in your life, just like your failure to recognize and respect these basic patterns will, over time and over many iterations, yield negative results in your life.
You are really arguing against a complete straw man here, as every SJW does. Their own position is so utterly black and white that they expect everyone else’s positions to be like that too. Smh.
I do NOT have it backwards. The previous writer while attempting to give reasons for his position actually succeeds in displaying prejudice. He is wrong, both factually and morally. He says we are not to judge individuals; yet that is exactly what he is doing with that scenario where a person who has a dark skin, or seems to, is walking down the street towards him. To assume that party will commit violence no matter how you respond to his presence, or greet him as a brother, is an example of prejudice – and as W. S. Gilbert would write: “…a good one too!”
And, yes, I do care about social justice. And, no, I am not a warrior. I am a campaigner, a Conscientious Objector who did time for it I find in my research to develop a systematic framework for ethics, the theory and the practice, that nonviolent direct action is confirmed as the best policy that will result in the least cost of human life. Hence it confirms what I may know about Ethics.
That young whipersnapper who thinks he knows it all, and who too-rapidly jumps to conclusions, ought to judge others by the color of their character, not by the color of their skin.
Poor, desperate, people are perhaps more-likely to take to a life of crime, which includes readiness to commit violence, than others are. That is a truth.
There are good characters and there are bad characters among those of all shdes of skin clolor, and all subcultures.
