Morality

[max-greece]

@Max, sorry I did miss your post.
"Why do you care about Africans starving to death less than you care about poor people in your immediate vicinity is probably a better question"
I don't.

"ancient Roman society regarded empathy as a sign of a character flaw."
Yeah, that's what I've been saying, it seems to hinder survival of the individual not help it, I find it strange that we would evolve with negative traits.("negative" in the eyes of "survival of the fittest")


"Now let me re-raise the question I put to you in my last answer. Why do you feel that this is more nihilist that the concept that we are all basically bad and reliant on an external benign dictator to instil in us the few positive qualities we have. To me one of the most horrific qualities of religion is that it debases us in relation to an imaginary being that is supposed to be all-good but actually behaves incredibly badly."
The problem of evil.. difficult question.. free will? room for evolution? purpose?

I didn't mean you personally care less about the starving in Africa than the poor guy down the road - but overall people do. Look at the spread of charitable donations people make (by value) to confirm this.

"Survival of the fittest " is something of a misunderstanding and isn't really applicable. Fittest means most fit for the environment and applies at a species level, not at an individual level. If you take a simple hunter gatherer society the gatherer's are less likely to be injured or killed than the hunters (as their contact with large wild animals should be less). This implies that the gatherer with the club foot is actually more likely to survive than the fittest, strongest member of the group who will probably die young leading the pack.

This might appear anti-evolutionary as it is the club foot gatherer's genes that will continue but again this is not really the case. The strongest hunter is likely to have already bred prior to his (or her) untimely death.

That some societies regarded empathy as a weakness doesn't make it so. Without empathy, at some level, society collapses but with too much empathy no-one could own a slave - which would have crushed Roman society.

What comes out, therefore, is a creature with a moral, loving and empathetic nature that is balanced by fear, greed and egotism (or variations of those 3) that we call Human.

Still nothing nihilist that I can see.