Kindest Regards, Mandrill!
Thank you for your response!
mandrill said:
This is perhaps being picky about terminology though, as I do understand what you mean - humans tend to know right from wrong and then choose between them. However, I wonder if an infant, never schooled from day one by parents as to proper behavior, would have such a capacity to choose. We might feel that morality is instinctual simply because we began to be taught its basic tenets so early we cannot recall ever not knowing them.
This is valid. Helen Keller comes to mind, and while I am not well versed in the story, I understand it was a challenge up to a point to teach her, and then suddenly it all made sense and she went on to become the woman we celebrate today. The studies I have heard of dealing with separating infants (human and animal) from their mothers and placing them in "sterile" environments with no genuine outside contact seem to end in disaster for the infant. There is so much an infant gains from the tactile sensation of touch, and a "mother's love", that an infant literally withers and dies without it.
Perhaps we'd have to say that the capacity for moral behavior and choosing this course above another is somehow inherited, but perhaps humans have expanded on the basic structure in some way?
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps the basic structure was expanded for us?
I think that loving behavior, or any act of solitation and kindness towards another, is usually thought of as "moral." Love rarely exists in a vacuum that leads to no outward expression .. "love" as a pure feeling though, without conrresponding actions, if we can actually isolate such a thing, would perhaps be something different.
Oh, I agree that love can generate moral action. I just see love as an independent operation aside from moral action. One can love a person, and hate what they are doing or even what they represent. That old love/hate thing. Interesting though, we can (and often do) hurt those we love by immoral action. And we can "hate" something like a chicken, but love to eat it for dinner. A rather profound paradox...
I guess it would be impossible to tell if someone really loves you without their displaying certain behaviors towards you consistently, and not others.
I am inclined to disagree. People that love me often cause me hurt and grief. It is not (necessarily) intentional, but it happens. Humans will be humans. Whereas people who do not know me, and therefore do not know to love me, do not (directly) cause me grief. People who deliberately intend to cause me grief usually make themselves known by their actions.
The only love we can be sure exists before it is expressed in action is what we feel inside ourselves, I would think.
Internal expression of love is the only we have to gauge with. It works in our self, so we know it exists and it works. We can only guess at how it works in others, and on a larger scale (natural/world level, and universal level).
If by nursing you mean we attempt to heal them
Yes. So I am guessing that, like humans, there is an arbitrary factor to morality, even among animals?
However, perhaps here is one more way we can separate true mortality to simply acting in the best interest of one's group, which could be an inherited trait.
Um, did I miss something? I would be very interested in hearing what other way you had in mind.
I don't know that I'd agree that someone who treats members of his own group with special kindness, then thinks nothing of distaining and even killing members of another group as a true "moral" being.
I can see how you might say this, but do you see how this is your individual interpretation? There are those philosophies that hold there are no "good or bad" actions, and there are those philosophies that hold that expediency is the ultimate "good" (a little bad now for greater good tomorrow!), and there are philosophies that range all in between the extremes. No matter the philosophy though, it seems to me (and here I could well be mistaken) that individuals hold within themselves certain internal guidelines for moral behavior. Most act using those guidelines (internal and external), some choose to ignore or subvert them. I think we all, from time to time, give in to our animal urges at the expense of our moral guidelines. But for socio/cultural reasons practically all of us return to our moral guidelines, and for internal reasons we all justify our actions as being moral. This may be a psychological safety valve of some kind, but in extreme situations I would think it creates a distorted view of the world around.
I can see how an individual, especially in the context of a society, would conform to the generalities of a cultural philosophy, but in the details it is left to him/her. Where the detail conflicts with the generality, the individual is in psychological (super-ego) conflict, and for sanity would resolve the situation in whatever manner seemed best. It is in these individual internal interpretations of morality that I see the potential for a universal morality, an "outside" source guiding us.
I have also been struggling with a comment Abogado made a little while back, about the "morality vs expediency" of advertising, specifically inciting internal conflict, creating desire instead of contentment (my words, and perhaps not fully accurate translation). Let us consider; "we" know "right from wrong," but we get a certain pleasure from "wrong." Behavioral psychology is concerned with motivating people to do something; in the case of advertising, to buy a product. A company cannot sell morality, people will not buy. A person who believes they can influence the public to their brand of morality through business is mistaken. A (relatively) good business does not try to sway the public, that is far too difficult. Instead, that business responds to the public, and adapts as necessary.
Why does Hollywood create so many movies that exemplify immoral or unmoral behaviour? Because the public enjoys these forays into their id, there is a certain pleasure in being naughty, in being animalistic. The movies that embrace and promote a moral overture have a really tough sell, and as a rule do not do well at all. We want to see people in moral conflict, and live vicariously through them for two hours at a time. We do not want to see "peace and harmony," peace and harmony do not sell because people do not want to buy. It becomes a feedback loop, Hollywood gives us what we want, and as our children grow up seeing these things (especially if there is no genuine formal moral teaching in the home) they begin to assume that moral conflict is the rule, not the exception. More and more, we tend to embrace immoral behaviour as "natural and normal," and a new standard is created in our societies. Ultimately, we do it to ourselves, Hollywood is merely the vehicle.
Here, I have picked on Hollywood as the example, but truth be told, it permeates Western culture, and through globalism is advancing across the world. Good or bad? time will tell, but it is the course of evolution for humans for the next hundred years or so.
It always troubled me to see our political leaders telling us that "God is on our side" when speaking of going to war with another group, as if this other group were not made up of human beings like ourselves, with the same qualities, good and bad, as ourselves. It always struck me that the true moral choice would be to seek an alternative to killing them .. although that does get complex, particularly when you look at some forms of government that appear to routinely display cruelty to their citizens, and ridding these people of such a government might certainly be characterized as a kindness.
OH boy! I really could go on about this, and ultimately I can agree with you, except perhaps in the details. I would rather not elaborate, please, because I would rather leave the political components out as a courtesy to our host. I do not mind including war in a generic, conceptual sense, but anything more concrete I must leave aside because of a promise I made to myself when I joined here.
I would say that it is the degree of conscious choice involved that separates us, however, rather than in some larger capacity for such behaviors
I can see this, because humans are considered the only creatures that hold conscious, rational thought, so by default this would seem apparent. I am inclined to think that some other animals do have flashes of conscious thought, and not just simians. A dog or cat amusing themselves with a toy, for instance. Perhaps this feeds into what Vaj calls "sentience."
.. the striving for a higher ideal is likely a direct consequence of this complex brain of ours, perhaps in more than one way, as, besides having a greater capacity to think about and, of course, debate such things, we also, many of us, have more leisure time to ponder these issues, not being so preoccupied with the daily struggle to merely survive.
I have been meaning to pull up two pieces of research that intrigue me concerning animal (and by extention, human) social and mental development, but I have been pressed for time.
The one piece was a Russian experiment in which foxes were domesticated. What I was looking into at that time dealt with morphology of domestic dogs, so I laid the research aside and misplaced it, so I am going to attempt to remember the results. At first, the foxes acted as caged wild animals would, being suspicious of the handlers. But over time and a few generations, as the survival requirements diminished (search for food and shelter, as well defense mechanisms), the animals became more and more tame, and began to adopt more domestic attributes. In the space of a few generations, the psychological outlook and temperament changed.
I didn't put a great deal of emphasis on this research until I stumbled upon a piece that suggested that human psychology had a paradigm shift with the advent of agriculture. While the research suggested an addiction to grain as the source, the shift from hunter/gatherer to agriculture created a completely different mindset, effectively domesticating humans. Agriculture provided the means for free time. Since, historically in Mesopotamia and a couple of other places, walled cities and other construction were developed, as well as technologies such as the wheel and cloth, in relative conjuction with agriculture, it would seem to me that rational thought expanded exponentially at that time.
Yet, morality already existed. It was formalized during the advent of agriculture (the Code of Hammurabi being an example), but the requirements of being social animals necessitated some elemental morality long before agriculture. The cave paintings at Lasceaux (sp?) suggest social cooperation, as does simian evolution, both of which suggest an elemental morality. But morality in the formal sense seems to stem from the advent of agriculture.
Here though, it is difficult to equate formal morality with religion. The cave paintings suggest a form of nature worship, implying an elemental religion that predates formal morality. Religion, in some basic sense, existed prior to agriculture. Why? What precipitated human belief that "he" could manipulate the environment around him to do his bidding? It is too easy to blame the frontal lobe. I find it difficult to envision a human simply imagining the concept of spirit, especially in the context of a hunter/gatherer society. Rather, I see some firm example that set a standard so to speak, although I have no idea what that example might have been.
Ah yes .. that argument (anthropomorphization) is always put forth whenever one suggests that humans are not truly unique. All I can say to this is to remind you of the basic facts of genetics .. humans are not so different, genetically, than the great apes or even the other primates.
Actually, I got it from psych 101, which also pointed out the similarities between humans and apes. And it also extrapolated human mental development from animal sources, so I would think the two can co-exist. The idea is to exercise caution in making such presumptions.
I would question the percentage numbers concerning simian genetics, those I have seen from researchers directly involved with the genome mapping project suggest somewhat lower numbers (although still quite high), but to argue that would take away from the discussion at hand.
Oh dear, look at the time .. I think I need to avoid reading this forum before I need to be somewhere.
I find myself in that predicament a lot. This forum is addicting, isn't it?
