RE: What would be the harm?
November 30, 2018 at 3:33 pm
(This post was last modified: November 30, 2018 at 3:34 pm by bennyboy.)
(November 30, 2018 at 1:08 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:(November 30, 2018 at 10:54 am)bennyboy Wrote: If we want to look to evolution, I'd go a step further, and say that the sense of individual agency is an illusion, and that we ourselves are each a kind of community which arrives at rules by a process of negotiation.
"That fucking bitch wouldn't put out even after I paid for that expensive dinner" is an expression of the perfectly natural subjection of rationale to the libido.
"What am I even saying? Jesus, man, I'm better than that!" is an expression of the equally natural social instincts for acceptance.
"Given the state of modern contraceptive techniques, my best chances of reproduction depend on going to school and getting a paying profession" is an expression of the rational mind, if it's aware enough of what the rest of the community has made as its goal.
It seems to me that each of us is a set of archetypal homunculi struggling for control over the same dummy.
This raises a side of the issue that I tangentially explored with my questions about empathy. If our morals are a product of evolutionary processes yielding determinative conclusions about the right or wrong of a thing based upon our contingent history as biological beings, what do we do once we realize this and can hypothesize answers that lie beyond the dictates of our biology, and on what basis do we make conclusions then, released from their mooring in our evolutionary history? Can we out think our biology, and if so, how?
Again, it depends which ones of those archetypal demons are most at work, either in people's natures or by training to match perceived societal norms.
I'd say in general we seem to have some kind of homeostatic mechanism-- one generation tilts toward anger, outrage and war, the next tilts toward peace and restraint. Surely one generation cannot suddenly have a superior moral mechanism than its immediate predecessor.
I think the freedom you are talking about leads to another set of philosophical problems: if self-realization of evolved moral instincts frees us from them, then what next? Do we go full-on Machiavellian / Ayn Randian / LaVeyan? Or do we develop a much greater capacity to understand, forgive, and cooperate with others?