I can understand that there can be an objectively best set of behaviors that people can have to obtain a healthy society.
However, I'm pretty sure there can be more than one such set to arrive at the same result.
Certainly, some elements of those sets will feature in most of them...
For example, "do not cause unjustified harm to others in society" seems to me to be a fairly generalized rule in human societies... The trouble with this rule is... it applies within the society... the in-group/out-group thinking takes over. Anything is fair when the out-group is considered. This we see in every form of patriotism, religiosity... even in cannibal tribes. The rule..... the "objective" rule applies to the in-group... the "objective" rule has bounds... bounds which cannot be ignored.... but bounds which we, in the western world, with our worldwide awareness, tend to forget. As we forget them, the rule appears, to us, as completely objective... it's like it works for all of humanity.
But those bounds are important.... those bounds tell us that the rule became adopted by social animals as a means to keep the family group, the tribe, the society, alive and healthy and to keep going forever.
Perhaps that happened by trial and error, perhaps some social animal, millions of years ago, thought about things and decided to pass on that info to all of his friends... without language
.... Evolution does seem to tend to do things by trial and error, so I'd put money on that.
I see no need to posit an external entity as the giver of the rule. It seems to be a rule that can easily come by, or else, societies do not develop in species... there are still many animal species that do not depend on any form of social interaction, except for mating, so that also works.... it's not like society is the best survival technique.
It's a survival technique that works. And, in order for it to work, it must have some rules.... and there I go back to the beginning... rules arrived at by trial and error as the species develops its social structure, from a state of individualism to a state of society/partnership.
However, I'm pretty sure there can be more than one such set to arrive at the same result.
Certainly, some elements of those sets will feature in most of them...
For example, "do not cause unjustified harm to others in society" seems to me to be a fairly generalized rule in human societies... The trouble with this rule is... it applies within the society... the in-group/out-group thinking takes over. Anything is fair when the out-group is considered. This we see in every form of patriotism, religiosity... even in cannibal tribes. The rule..... the "objective" rule applies to the in-group... the "objective" rule has bounds... bounds which cannot be ignored.... but bounds which we, in the western world, with our worldwide awareness, tend to forget. As we forget them, the rule appears, to us, as completely objective... it's like it works for all of humanity.
But those bounds are important.... those bounds tell us that the rule became adopted by social animals as a means to keep the family group, the tribe, the society, alive and healthy and to keep going forever.
Perhaps that happened by trial and error, perhaps some social animal, millions of years ago, thought about things and decided to pass on that info to all of his friends... without language
.... Evolution does seem to tend to do things by trial and error, so I'd put money on that.I see no need to posit an external entity as the giver of the rule. It seems to be a rule that can easily come by, or else, societies do not develop in species... there are still many animal species that do not depend on any form of social interaction, except for mating, so that also works.... it's not like society is the best survival technique.
It's a survival technique that works. And, in order for it to work, it must have some rules.... and there I go back to the beginning... rules arrived at by trial and error as the species develops its social structure, from a state of individualism to a state of society/partnership.
