Why be good?

[Jenny A]

You forget that I live in and have been educated in a particular society and largely share that societies morality.  So yes I have strong objections to both genital mutilation and burning widows on funeral pyres.  But the people who live in those countries might not, yet they consider themselves to be moral.  Obviously the standard is subjective.

However, a subjective standard does not mean one can't argue that one set of morals is better than another.  It's just the the appeal can't be made to a higher authority such as god.  By the way, you do realize that both of these objectionable practices are at their roots religious practices.

Jenny-

Let's broaden this a bit just for a moment.

Suppose an alien race arrives on our planet with a completely different set of values. 

They immediately rape all earth women in order to impregnate them while killing off all earth males. )BTW - Rape is considered a good thing on their planet because females should be honored to be the recipient of the males attention and seed. You won't mind that now that you can see their point of view, will you?)

Oh, and the reason they've come to earth is to begin farming us for food. So, your offspring, cute little mutants (you'll be bearing a litter, actually), will be consumed by the male who mated with you.

Now, remember, in their culture, rape is not wrong. Nor is the subjugation and consumption of humans.

So, why should this alien race be "good" when it is in their best interest to do otherwise?

Have they evolved differently? Or not at all? Or is evolution really not such an adequate process by which to develop "good" and "bad" behavior?

In case you haven't noticed, "good" is an almost entirely inter-human concept.  We eat other animals all the time, farm them, use them as labor, try to eradicate them when they get in our way.  Do you have moral complaints about my use of an exterminator to rid my house of carpenter ants?  To the extent we have any empathy for other animals it's spillover from the empathy we have evolved for each other.

Is a tiger immoral if it eats a person?  No.  Killer bees?  No.  Dangerous to humans yes.  Immoral no.  They, like hurricanes are outside our moral structure.  Your proposed aliens would be the same.  I would assume that if they made it to earth they must be a very inter-cooperative culture or they couldn't have mastered the tech and assembled the resources to get here.  So they would have a morality of their own concerning each other.  Whether they would have any spillover empathy for us, is another question and the answer is it would depend upon how they evolved. 

BTW just a note about biology that even Genesis gets right:  each according to their kind.  Those aliens would not be able to breed with us and would be very unlikely to be sexually compatible with or sexually interested in us either.  So you can take rape right off the table.  But sure, they might eat us, enslave us, or just plain eradicate us.  And no god would lift a finger. And from their point of view, there might not be anything immoral about it.

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When I've been a member of the forum for 30 days, I'm allowed to begin linking to reference material. And you can believe I will.

What a lame excuse:

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