Distinct Upper Planes

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DrPraetor
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Post by DrPraetor »

Kaelik - either I was phrasing that poorly/confusingly (which is possible), or you are dead wrong.

http://www.economist.com/node/8881470?story_id=8881470
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/healt ... brain.html

Seriously, the empirical evidence for a common, biological origin for basic human moral faculties - the notion of "fairness" chief on the list, but also the moral preference to inflict *passive* harm in favor of inflicting *active* harm - is so strong as to be overwhelming. At this point, disbelieving in a common biological component to morality is like disbelieving in evolution or a spherical earth.

Also, "dont hurt cute and helpless things". You really believe that this is something that humans have to be taught? There are contrary impulses in other mammals, and those impulses may exist in humans as well; the resolution of those contradictory impulses is probably learned/acquired/cultural. But saying that humans don't have an intrinsic sense of fairness is like saying that humans don't have an intrinsic sense of hunger; it's just wrong.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

DrPraetor wrote:Kaelik - either I was phrasing that poorly/confusingly (which is possible), or you are dead wrong.
Well it depends on what you are trying to say. Firstly, when you claim that X is intrinsic, there is a strong connotation of universal, which is of course, not true. It is not intrinsic to all people, it might be that the majority of people have a preference in some directions, but using "intrinsic" seems to be more than that.

Secondly, when you say it's a moral sense, it sounds like you are trying to bridge the is/ought gap. If you want to say that people have some feelings, sure, I might quibble about what actually is felt and to what degree, but that's at least a defensible position. But usually when people say moral sense, they mean that it's actually right and shit.

Your next problem is that your articles don't actually support your premise. Of course there is a part of the brain that is responsible for social emotions and they go away when you damage it. That doesn't imply that everyone has exactly the same social emotions absent them being cultivated. I'm sure if you destroy part of someone's brain they get worse at math too, but that doesn't mean they understand math without being taught.
DrPraetor wrote:Also, "dont hurt cute and helpless things". You really believe that this is something that humans have to be taught? There are contrary impulses in other mammals, and those impulses may exist in humans as well; the resolution of those contradictory impulses is probably learned/acquired/cultural. But saying that humans don't have an intrinsic sense of fairness is like saying that humans don't have an intrinsic sense of hunger; it's just wrong.
Any time you say, "People intrinsically feel X, even though lots, perhaps all of them also feel not X, but X is still an intrinsic universal moral sense." You are full of shit.

If they have X and not X as feelings, and which one they end of following is based on how they are taught then they don't have an intrinsic moral sense. They have the potential to give a shit about babies and the potential to murder babies, and which they do is based on how they learn to process these conflicting impulses.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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DrPraetor
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Post by DrPraetor »

Kaelik wrote:it might be that the majority of people have a preference in some directions, but using "intrinsic" seems to be more than that.
I'm saying that it's intrinsic to human beings in the same sense that wanting to avoid danger is intrinsic to humans, or having limbs.
But usually when people say moral sense, they mean that it's actually right and shit.
People have an intrinsic - that is, arising from our DNA over the course of normal development - sense of what they think is actually right and wrong, which differs slightly from person to person but is largely conserved (again, in parallel to human languages - all of which are far more similar to one another than they are dis-similar.)
I'm an existentialist - I don't think that right and wrong exist in any sense outside of our experience of them, in the same way that nothing is "objectively" scary.
Any time you say, "People intrinsically feel X, even though lots, perhaps all of them also feel not X, but X is still an intrinsic universal moral sense." You are full of shit.
Well, no. People intrinsically feel both anger and calm, to take an obvious example.

The way that those two impulses play out is going to vary tremendously, from individual to individual and for the same individual from circumstance to circumstance; this is especially true as regards any opposition between those two impulses. "People intrinsically feel anger, even though lots, perhaps all of them all feel calm, but anger is still an intrinsic universal faculty".
If they have X and not X as feelings, and which one they end of following is based on how they are taught then they don't have an intrinsic moral sense.
So you're saying that if I run away from someone I despise, it's because I don't have an intrinsic sense of anger?

Again, the resolution of a conflict between the fear impulse and the anger impulse, in any given situation, is going to be driven by my upbringing and circumstances. Likewise, the resolution between my selfish impulse, say, and my moral impulse, is going to be driven by these factors.

That doesn't mean that humans lack a moral impulse. Furthermore, that moral impulse is intrinsic (arising from our biology), and surprisingly constant, in the sense that almost-everyone is afraid of bodily harm; you could say that humans are equipped with an intrinsic/biological sense of danger. Likewise, almost-everyone is reluctant to hurt person A in order to prevent harm to persons B&C; but almost-everyone is willing to passively allow person A to be harmed in order to prevent harm to persons B&C. This is part of an intrinsic moral sense in the same way that not wanting to be stabbed is part of an intrinsic self-preservation sense.
They have the potential to give a shit about babies and the potential to murder babies, and which they do is based on how they learn to process these conflicting impulses.
So now I'm not sure if we actually disagree or not.

Those impulses are themselves intrinsic. There is an intrinsic impulse to run away from knife-wielding sociopaths because they are scary. There is an intrinsic impulse to avoid taking credit for someone else's work, because it is wrong.

Right and wrong are up there with safe and scary in terms of the basic structure of human cognition, and don't need to be "taught", although they can be refined by experience.

Therefore, getting back to my original point, religious people will engage in "morality mongering" (accusing the enemy religion of infanticide) with more-or-less the same content as "fear mongering" (accusing the enemy tribe of being wanton criminals.) Some forms of morality mongering - such as blood libel - are near-universally effective, in the same way that threat of being stabbed is a near-universally effective form of fear-mongering.
Last edited by DrPraetor on Wed Apr 18, 2012 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

DrPraetor wrote:I'm saying that it's intrinsic to human beings in the same sense that wanting to avoid danger is intrinsic to humans, or having limbs.

...

arising from our DNA over the course of normal development - sense of what they think is actually right and wrong

...

that moral impulse is intrinsic (arising from our biology), and surprisingly constant... Likewise, almost-everyone is reluctant to hurt person A in order to prevent harm to persons B&C; but almost-everyone is willing to passively allow person A to be harmed in order to prevent harm to persons B&C.

...

There is an intrinsic impulse to avoid taking credit for someone else's work, because it is wrong.
Yeah, that's all completely wrong. Especially the part where you think that almost everyone is reluctant to hurt person A in order to prevent harm to B and C. That's directly fucking contrary to every empirical study ever, unless you think 60% is almost everybody.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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DrPraetor
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Post by DrPraetor »

No, 90% is almost everybody. Greg Miller did a much larger followup study but it's behind a paywall; the upshot is the same, around 89% of people answer the trolley problem: switching tracks is okay, pushing the fat man on the tracks is not.

Here's a fluffy sumarry: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/ar ... cience.pdf.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
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Foxwarrior
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Children are more willing to vivisect healthy people than adults are? Interesting.

Also, 8 years old is pretty old in this context: I have the impression that a fair bit of basic moral education occurs as early as 4. "Learning to share" in kindergarten, and all that.
Last edited by Foxwarrior on Fri Apr 20, 2012 4:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

DrPraetor wrote:No, 90% is almost everybody. Greg Miller did a much larger followup study but it's behind a paywall; the upshot is the same, around 89% of people answer the trolley problem: switching tracks is okay, pushing the fat man on the tracks is not.

Here's a fluffy sumarry: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/ar ... cience.pdf.
The trolly problem is obviously flawed, and any time you ask the same question in a plausible fashion, you get different results.

If you ask someone if they will kick a baby in the head until it dies so that a person in Africa doesn't get aids, you get a different result than if you ask people about separating conjoined twins.

You get those results because people know in the back of their heads that kicking babies has nothing to do with aids. Likewise, everyone knows that trollies just run the fuck over fat people and keep going if they are capable of killing five people on the track.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

That "removing organs" thing seemed to make sense, though..
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Well, the "back of their heads" theory seems like a decent explanation for why adults think the surgery problem is more obvious than children do. Adults tend to tell children that going to the doctor is good for you, but as they get older they discover how finicky and unreliable medical care really is.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

...You Lost Me wrote:That "removing organs" thing seemed to make sense, though..
The problem is that utilitarians don't even consider that a good thing, because it discourages people from going to the doctor. So the fact that kids who don't think that far ahead pro carving up healthy people. Of course, we also know that you if you take away a guys kidney, he loses 20 years, and if you give a guy a kidney transplant he gains ten years while taking immuno suppressants.

I would not be surprised if adults with brain damage picked not carving people up.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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