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Ethics & Morality
Theodicy and the Holocaust
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<blockquote data-quote="Quid est Veritas?" data-source="post: 74393159" data-attributes="member: 385144"><p>This is a bit of a flippant answer. Do you not understand English grammar? How it is parsed? Do you not understand the concepts like Empiricism I referenced? Come now, how am I to address your failure of understanding if you refuse to point out what you seem unable to grasp.</p><p></p><p></p><p>This is untrue. In Psychology, Evolution fits very poorly. For instance, why would we evolve a crippling condition like Depression? Why would there be maladaptive responses like Dunning-Kruger? As I said, Evolution is made to fit by assuming it before-hand, and then trying to find excuses for things we can't easily describe thereby. We have to make complex suppositional arguments, or write things off as spandrels or consequence of other assumed adaptations now archaic or maladaptive. If you take Psychologic studies themselves, you can never reach a theory of evolution from it, if you didn't start with the precept.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't consider it flawed. Morality fails in implementation, but people generally know what is right or not - hence, when acting incorrectly, they jump through hoops to excuse their actions, such as when slaves were said to be naturally inferior and thus deserving of enslavement, or the White Man's Burden. As I said, almost all cultures have the Golden Rule in some form. Why we fail to implement it, this was historically associated with the Fall, or you can assume evolutionary mechanisms if you wish. Either way, the concepts of Morality generally stand and man then tries to undermine them to do what he wants.</p><p></p><p></p><p>You are creating a strawman of 'perfect morality as God wants' by equating Morality with agency and ethics. Regardless, your 'regular morality' does not exist empirically - I refer you back to those infant studies. Innate instinctual morality is cooperative; the Us vs Them response seems not to be, but a learned behaviour. Hence children adopt the prejudices of their parents and society, so its socio-cultural effects are clear.</p><p></p><p>So regardless of your thought experiment, a group with 'perfect morality' is more likely to grow and expand, as each would help every other. The strong support the weak, etc. You don't seem very knowledgable on presumed Evolutionary theory in psychology: It takes a few forms, but usually they assume a balance between a group faithful to general rules, a group not, and a group that is mostly faithful but switches between the two. So in Adultery say, you would have a group chronically unfaithful, a group of faithful spouses, and a middling bunch. If too many are unfaithful, no one trusts their spouse anymore and then the evolutionary advantage of cheating, where another man raises your children, dissipates. In general, it forms an equilibrium, and if the 'immoral' behaviour escalates beyond a point, the advantage thereof also disappears and the system becomes unstable. This is often framed by the device of two prisoners that either have to stay faithful to each other for both's greatest advantage, but if the other person is going to rat you out, it would be better for you to rat him out first - this is the Prisoner's dilemma; and the entirety of this type of thinking, of weighing advantage vs disadvantage of a system, of cooperation or trying to cheat your fellows for personal gain, is termed Game Theory. Evolutionarily, complete faithfulness is best for the species as a whole in Group Selection, but a low level 'cheating' would advantage select Selfish Genes. So in order to describe Morality or Psychology in Evolutionary terms, people need to jump from one to the other as they see fit. It is really haphazard and inconsistent, but pop-science and the layman is made to believe it isn't. Even less controversial things like why Bees have sterile drones if genes are supposed to be 'selfish', then run into problems of modelling how this state of affairs could have arisen by Game Theory-esce reasoning to begin with. How you can so confidently assert that Evolutionary modelling so perfectly fits morality and psychology, while seemingly wholely ignorant of the mechanisms this is attempted by, I find decidedly odd.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Daniel Dennett famously said that your Consciousness is as real as your screensaver.</p><p></p><p></p><p>You get materialists that aren't Naturalistic Materialists, like the old Epicureans or people like Voltaire from the Enlightenment. It has to do with ontology and entelechy, mostly.</p><p></p><p>If you assume Consciousness to be only material, then as you stated yourself, everything is determined. Consciousness is then at best a spandrel, at worst a delusion. Everything you have said here was therefore not reasoned, but inevitably you would have said it - you didn't decide what seems more plausible, think over things, decide what was right and what was wrong. It simply is so, whether your statements might have been wildly incoherent veridically perhaps. This is the problem: Sure, you can assert consciousness need not be Supernatural; but the reverse, by asserting it is Naturalistic only, you have negated your ability to reason or make any logically valid arguments at all. Your only method of asserting this was by Reason though, so you have completely cut off the branch you were sitting on and leaving all your arguments incoherent and irrational. People like Sam Harris know this as much as the rest of us do, so they describe Consciousness in terms like a qualitative dimension to a physical system, or terming the Self an illusion, thus expecting people to pretend as if this isn't true in practice while asserting it in theory. Essentially such say that we must ignore our experience and the empiric evidence of daily life, so as to still support the theory that completely contradicts it. Really, how people can think this can in any way be seen as a 'scientific' view is beyond me. Those that simply assert a Mind-Body problem or a 'Hard problem of Consciousness' and leave it at that, are far more consistent. It is not really possible to reduce to either side of the divide, to Idealism or Determinism, without gutting Empirical reasoning entirely.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Quid est Veritas?, post: 74393159, member: 385144"] This is a bit of a flippant answer. Do you not understand English grammar? How it is parsed? Do you not understand the concepts like Empiricism I referenced? Come now, how am I to address your failure of understanding if you refuse to point out what you seem unable to grasp. This is untrue. In Psychology, Evolution fits very poorly. For instance, why would we evolve a crippling condition like Depression? Why would there be maladaptive responses like Dunning-Kruger? As I said, Evolution is made to fit by assuming it before-hand, and then trying to find excuses for things we can't easily describe thereby. We have to make complex suppositional arguments, or write things off as spandrels or consequence of other assumed adaptations now archaic or maladaptive. If you take Psychologic studies themselves, you can never reach a theory of evolution from it, if you didn't start with the precept. I don't consider it flawed. Morality fails in implementation, but people generally know what is right or not - hence, when acting incorrectly, they jump through hoops to excuse their actions, such as when slaves were said to be naturally inferior and thus deserving of enslavement, or the White Man's Burden. As I said, almost all cultures have the Golden Rule in some form. Why we fail to implement it, this was historically associated with the Fall, or you can assume evolutionary mechanisms if you wish. Either way, the concepts of Morality generally stand and man then tries to undermine them to do what he wants. You are creating a strawman of 'perfect morality as God wants' by equating Morality with agency and ethics. Regardless, your 'regular morality' does not exist empirically - I refer you back to those infant studies. Innate instinctual morality is cooperative; the Us vs Them response seems not to be, but a learned behaviour. Hence children adopt the prejudices of their parents and society, so its socio-cultural effects are clear. So regardless of your thought experiment, a group with 'perfect morality' is more likely to grow and expand, as each would help every other. The strong support the weak, etc. You don't seem very knowledgable on presumed Evolutionary theory in psychology: It takes a few forms, but usually they assume a balance between a group faithful to general rules, a group not, and a group that is mostly faithful but switches between the two. So in Adultery say, you would have a group chronically unfaithful, a group of faithful spouses, and a middling bunch. If too many are unfaithful, no one trusts their spouse anymore and then the evolutionary advantage of cheating, where another man raises your children, dissipates. In general, it forms an equilibrium, and if the 'immoral' behaviour escalates beyond a point, the advantage thereof also disappears and the system becomes unstable. This is often framed by the device of two prisoners that either have to stay faithful to each other for both's greatest advantage, but if the other person is going to rat you out, it would be better for you to rat him out first - this is the Prisoner's dilemma; and the entirety of this type of thinking, of weighing advantage vs disadvantage of a system, of cooperation or trying to cheat your fellows for personal gain, is termed Game Theory. Evolutionarily, complete faithfulness is best for the species as a whole in Group Selection, but a low level 'cheating' would advantage select Selfish Genes. So in order to describe Morality or Psychology in Evolutionary terms, people need to jump from one to the other as they see fit. It is really haphazard and inconsistent, but pop-science and the layman is made to believe it isn't. Even less controversial things like why Bees have sterile drones if genes are supposed to be 'selfish', then run into problems of modelling how this state of affairs could have arisen by Game Theory-esce reasoning to begin with. How you can so confidently assert that Evolutionary modelling so perfectly fits morality and psychology, while seemingly wholely ignorant of the mechanisms this is attempted by, I find decidedly odd. Daniel Dennett famously said that your Consciousness is as real as your screensaver. You get materialists that aren't Naturalistic Materialists, like the old Epicureans or people like Voltaire from the Enlightenment. It has to do with ontology and entelechy, mostly. If you assume Consciousness to be only material, then as you stated yourself, everything is determined. Consciousness is then at best a spandrel, at worst a delusion. Everything you have said here was therefore not reasoned, but inevitably you would have said it - you didn't decide what seems more plausible, think over things, decide what was right and what was wrong. It simply is so, whether your statements might have been wildly incoherent veridically perhaps. This is the problem: Sure, you can assert consciousness need not be Supernatural; but the reverse, by asserting it is Naturalistic only, you have negated your ability to reason or make any logically valid arguments at all. Your only method of asserting this was by Reason though, so you have completely cut off the branch you were sitting on and leaving all your arguments incoherent and irrational. People like Sam Harris know this as much as the rest of us do, so they describe Consciousness in terms like a qualitative dimension to a physical system, or terming the Self an illusion, thus expecting people to pretend as if this isn't true in practice while asserting it in theory. Essentially such say that we must ignore our experience and the empiric evidence of daily life, so as to still support the theory that completely contradicts it. Really, how people can think this can in any way be seen as a 'scientific' view is beyond me. Those that simply assert a Mind-Body problem or a 'Hard problem of Consciousness' and leave it at that, are far more consistent. It is not really possible to reduce to either side of the divide, to Idealism or Determinism, without gutting Empirical reasoning entirely. [/QUOTE]
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