(January 31, 2019 at 9:37 am)pocaracas Wrote: Wrong.
When you speak of wrongness, you speak of an emotion, which is an "inner biological state".
No, speaking of wrongness, or saying something is wrong, doesn’t equate to you telling me your emotions, or expressing to me your feelings, or describing your inner biological state. You’re not actually say something about you at all, you’re saying something about something else. When saying the holocaust is bad, you’re not telling me how the holocaust makes you feel, you’re saying something about the holocaust itself.
Imagine, you drop your wallet, I keep the money in it and discard it, I have conflicting emotions I feel negative emotions like guilt, I feel pleasant emotions because I get to buy something nice. I tell myself, there’s nothing wrong with what I just did, it’s just some negative emotions, caused by a mix of environmental and social factors, but it’ll pass like a tummy ache over time.
Such a person, whose account of his emotional state is accurate, reducing the wrongness of what he did, to dismiss it like any other temporary biological discomfort, would be akin to a sociopath.
Only a sociopath would operate and live, as if the wrongness of things, is reducible to his emotional states, as if the wrongness of things losses it’s wrongness, if our emotional reactions to it decline.
Quote:Ah... Hitler... the holocaust... it happened because the "others" were seen as inferior.
Evolution provided us with tools to deal with our own group, our tribe... others are always some form of enemy.
Nowadays, with out awareness of the whole worldwide population, some of us can extend this inner tribe to somehow encompass this global population. But most people still can't do that. Let it evolve... it will take hundreds of years if not millennia.
The holocaust arose in large part by the human capacity of scapegoating, scapegoating, like other cognitive defense mechanics like, confirmation biases, are features selected for by evolution. The Jews became the scapegoat for all the problems of German society. When societies scapegoat the targets are often those seen as lesser or weaker, minorities, etc..
This capacity was selected for by evolution, and your belief that somehow this element has been eradicated as time goes on is, is just nonsense.
It’s also a fairy tale, to think that people have extended their once deep rooted devotion to their tribes to societies. As if the devotion you feel for those intimately in your life, has been extended to the faceless, nameless members of your society.
I care far more about my child, my wife, my friends, my small community, than I ever will yours. And this is not because I posses some archaic biological makeup that you don’t.
Quote:But this "moral reality" is being imposed by the desire to live in society.
Even if it's not immediately visible (and I can tell that you're not seeing it), it is this desire (which is an actual need or dependency) to live in society that drives us to have moral behaviors.
Behaviors you might label as “moral”, are not the same as “moral beliefs”. Apes may display behaviors we would label as moral, but they lack any moral system of beliefs, they’re not moral realist, moral subjectivist, moral nihilist etc... they don’t have an ontology of morality. Or if they do, it would remain forever unknown to us.
Our beliefs are not reducible to our biology, particularly when they're not reflections on our inner states and processes. They often pertain, particularly when it comes to our moral beliefs to an external reality.
To say wrongness is merely a feeling, to me, is similiar to claiming that things I see in front of me, are just in my head, and not out there, as I perceive them to be.
Perhaps you believe that, are a moral subjectivist in this regard, good and bad, is sort of like your taste in music, or food, where goodness and badness are merely expressions of subjective preference. But it doesn’t even seem that most atheists here accept that, and tend to be averse to when people like myself try and reduce their moral views as such.