(January 30, 2019 at 9:27 am)Acrobat Wrote:(January 30, 2019 at 8:58 am)pocaracas Wrote: I'd say that's a brute fact of society, not reality.
Society is an intangible thing that arises from the interactions of several individuals, hopefully, to make life easier and more prosperous to every individual within the group.
This doesn't seem to be the case at all.
Actually, it does.
(January 30, 2019 at 9:27 am)Acrobat Wrote: Even if every other person in my society claimed that torturing innocent babies just for fun is good, they would be wrong, just as they would be if every other person in my society claimed the earth is flat. Societies or people might recognize a fact, but they themselves are not the authors of it.
The "rules" of society, like I hinted at in my previous post, are those that lead to the betterment of individuals in the group.
In your hypothetical case, the outcome would be a generation of dysfunctional people and, ultimately, extinction. As such, if such a trait were to appear in a population, either that population would disappear quickly, or the trait would be selected against, by having those individuals with that trait made unable to propagate it through jail or capital punishment.
The wrongness you now perceive towards such a behaviour hints that, at some time in the past, in human (or very likely pre-ape) populations it was selected against, as it was deemed that the group would suffer from it... And probably did suffer.
(January 30, 2019 at 9:27 am)Acrobat Wrote: You can take an infant, a baby, put on a puppet show where one puppet is cruel or mean, and they seem to recognize that there's something wrong about that behavior, that this level of recognization is not dependent on external social influences telling him that it is.
Yes, we do have some innate sense of morality. Like all other social species on this planet.
If you haven't yet, I advise you to watch this Ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_...anguage=en
