Good and Evil

[emjay]

But that was my fault for doing what I usually do on this forum, and which never goes down well, which is to a) talk about brain processes and expect people to understand or even care what I'm talking about, neutrally, in those terms...I was explaining an emotional brain process...

Or care about it neurally, perhaps?  

I think the brain process angle is fascinating because it shows the gulf we insert between emotion and reason is artificial. Formal reasoning does have mechanistic rules allowing arguments to be structured on paper, while the rules underlying the computation and generation of emotional states by the brain are poorly understood. Yet it's almost certain they are there; the brain, including its emotion computers, can be unreliable but it doesn't operate in a willy-nilly or stochastic manner-even if individual neurons do to some extent.

I've held on this thread that emotions are a form of intelligence.

The main problem under discussion, of whether "the good" also follows necessarily from deterministic laws, seems unresolved to me. As if ethics can be neither subjective nor objective, having features of both. If no subjective self existed, we wouldn't even need to discuss a notion of "the good." Yet principles for ethics don't arise in a willy-nilly way either; reasoning must be used to make ethical arguments.

Actually this was the one in a million time when I did mean neutrally rather than neurally   As in 'objectively' or 'matter-of-factly'. 

I've got to go to work now. I'll reply properly later.

Editing from work:
I don't know much about the neural basis of reason but I do know a fair amount about emotion and have quite a lot of theories of my own. Emotion is an incredible form of intelligence but it only summarises information and allows for intuition. The same goes for the processes of stereotyping and bias (ie prejudice) - they are both the most natural things in the world to a neural network and serve as a means of making quick judgements based on very little information... judgements that err on the side of caution and could have saved lives in ancestral times. But in these modern days those features of the brain, impressive though they are from an neural network perspective, are not too helpful and need to be overcome with reason if we want to be fair to all. That was the essence of my post.

Another part of my post dealt with what I believe to be an innate aversion to causing senseless harm, whether mental or physical, to other sentient beings, human or animal. By senseless I mean that which has no self-justification or excuse. For instance if you physically or emotionally 'kick someone when they're down', it feels awful and leaves you with a very strong feeling of guilt/shame that is qualitatively different from other forms of guilt and shame, and which stays with you forever. I think that feeling is innate and since it applies to all kinds of hurt, even just an unkind word, I see no reason why that shouldn't be a good basis for your morals - one that comes from within rather than without. I don't mean to say that you can't learn more or benefit from outside sources, such as law and ethics, but just that this is IMO what comes built in, as it were, by nature and which has, also IMO, the strongest emotional appeal precisely because it is innate.

As for your second question I'm afraid the heavy duty logic and formal ethics under discussion is way above my level of understanding. So rather than pick a side in ignorance of the arguments I'll just leave you guys to hammer it out. As I said my post was more about psychology than ethics so I shouldn't really have posted it here in the first place. My apologies.