Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Esquilax]

Certainly I believe in a moral law giver Esquilax. Sorry if that was not clear from my earlier posts. But I don't divorce that from actions or consequences; I don't see how we could.

Law givers are easy to debunk: if your law giver came back tomorrow and announced that a previously immoral thing is now moral, does that make it so? Some people dodge this by saying it would never happen, but just engage with the hypothetical for a moment: are morals dependent on the say-so of this external force, or not?

But I still don't agree that evolution explains 'good' and 'bad'. There's nothing in science that says happier = better, using your guide to good behaviours. You have to import that notion from outside of science to try and make the jump from behaviours to morality, to go from descriptive to prescriptive. You need to borrow from the philosopher, or acknowledge a presupposition (we all have them).

Oh, you can't see one? Funny, because I can see two. To start off simply, psychology is linked to physiology; happy people tend to be healthier than depressed ones. Hence, happy people live longer, which is a definite benefit from an evolutionary perspective, making happiness better for members of social species like humans are.

Also, happiness being a positive emotion that people enjoy, being happy and being able to provide happiness to others (and even being able to derive your own happiness from the enjoyment of others) is something that makes you popular, or at least more likely to be tolerated; you are literally handing out the good times, after all. If you can make people happy, ingratiate yourself with them, then you've put yourself at the center of the social group, and given yourself a better chance of charming a mate. It's a reproductive advantage and thus an evolutionary one, so from a physiological and sociological perspective, happier does equal better. Conversely, the more negative emotions you invoke in people the less popular you'll be, so it's also true that less happiness equals worse.

Typical evolutionary evaluation; I think that sums up how I feel about “moral law” sometimes (as I mentioned earlier). But I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’m missing something here, something simple. I think my contention lies with the fact that it’s simply taken as a matter of fact that “no other society like ours could thrive without our set of moral intuition.” (intuition, standard, call it what you want). I can’t help but feel like this is somehow reasoning in circles.

I can’t put my finger on it, but time will tell I suppose?

Bolding mine. Absolutely not. Our society is in no way optimal, and the easiest way to demonstrate that is to show the gradual improvement and changes to morality over time; we had to learn that burning people as witches was wrong, we had to learn that slavery was wrong, etc etc. Our moral sense is constantly changing and improving with the input of new evidence: there is no presumption that we have it right, or even the best we could possibly make it.

Ooh! This brings us to an interesting point. I wonder whether we should pick this conversation up else where because it seems to be a HUGE tangent to the current topic. How would you feel about a private correspondence?

Tangent away: some of our longest running threads are nothing but a series of tangents, after all.

The psychopaths have the potential to function like an ordinary human being but have a mental deficiency making them unable. Children have this potential but don’t have the mental wherewithal to act it out. The point is that whether or not you have the ability doesn’t mean that you should; compulsion is not derived from capability.

My point is that the compulsion itself doesn't exist absent education by society at large. Even in your example with your nephew, he had to be taught not to perform an action via negative reinforcement. Now, though I do hope his moral upbringing consists of more than operant conditioning, the fact remains that your nephew didn't feel any compulsion to avoid the immoral act; there is no morality switch inside kids that gets flipped to "on" once they grow to a certain age, this stuff has to be imparted to them. Kids model behaviors and morals they are taught, they aren't just waiting for the moment their adult moral sense turns on. There's a vast library of child psychological study to verify this.