(September 12, 2013 at 3:26 am)Lunalle Wrote: Cheers! I appreciate the welcome. max-greece, thank you for reposting a welcome, that says a lot. I'll spend some time going through threads here.
For the past 10 years (roughly), I've been reading, and generally trying to figure things out for myself, so I expect to be considered "a bit confused". That's the reason I was looking for a good forum.
I'll give you that it was a strangely phrased question. I'm sure I could have done better, and probably will when it's not 2 am! I'm somewhat of an insomniac, so sleep is random and varied for me. Hopefully it will help if I provide some more information.
I'd like to address this first though:
Quote:Are you bound morally to fucking (or otherwise raping) every person potentially compatible for offspring? Maximizing the PROGENY of 'our genes' would also require raping children who have become pubescent, because if you don't, you are not maximizing your output.
I did not mean in any way that "maximizing output" was a good thing. Although you could argue that is the only way to maximize the prosperity of our genes, I think that's a discussion of its own.
One of the things I took from reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, is that, from an evolutionary viewpoint, we as humans, are merely a "shell" for our genes. That is the basis for me asking this question. If we are just a shell for our genes, are we not then responsible for the continued survival for our genes? If we are, then does that not lead to certain moral obligations?
I'm getting an overwhelming "NO", which is interesting. So I'll leave it at that, but hopefully this clarifies things a bit, and makes the question a bit less strange, and hard to take as real.
OK - that makes a bit more sense. Throwing in the homosexual angle confused things.
I think you may need to look at genetics a bit more. Progeny are not the only way your genetic line survives.
Take for example my wife's brother who is almost 50 and unmarried with no offspring. His direct line may stop there but he shares 25% of his genetic stock with my daughter and 25% with the other brother's son.
That is the same proportion as a grand-parent so if we are driven by our genes he has a strong impulse to support his niece and nephew, as strong as the doting grandparents have.
I don't see a link from any of this to morality - although there should be a link to instinctive behaviour.
There would be nothing moral in obeying the commands of our genetic inheritance. In fact one could argue that deciding not to have children (in a world of 7 billion plus people) could be a more moral decision.
