(October 24, 2016 at 3:08 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: On what basis does someone know they are being wronged? Being angry or feeling aggrieved may be an evolved instinct, but that doesn't make it accurate or true.
How do we know? Pain. Literally. It's a clear indication that something isn't right and requires a response, be it attack or avoidance. Our respective ancestors possessed pain-detection traits of sufficient efficacy that they survived and raised progeny that eventually led to us, here.
Somewhere along the line, probably as primate brains developed sufficiently to allow processing of abstract ideas, physical pain and emotional pain seems to have gotten muddled together in the neurological system. We also have mirror neurons and empathy playing a role. When someone else is suffering, this triggers an empathetic reaction in the average person. If the situation of the suffering individual is perceived as unjust from a social POV, anger enters the picture as well. It may well be that the earliest laws were crafted at the tribal level to ease the pain and rage we feel when someone is being hurt.
Again, this is not objective morality but subjective, driven by emotion and bodily sensation.
