@Epicurus: You don’t think guilt associated with killing another human being is culturally universal?
Clayton -
Haha, no. Not at all. See, human history. For a more pertinent example, the… Yaninami, or something like that. Yanonami, something. I am sure you can find some resources on them. Killing to them is just a natural part of the culture.
Let me repharse that. There is probably a universal on killing that I am not taking into account. I guess i misunderstood the question. There is probably a universal on killing, but who it is bad to kill and when it is appropriate is not very universal.
Everything we think about how humans cope with killing is wrong. It’s never “acceptable” to your brain* to kill another human being and almost all individuals who do kill another human being (in war) generally experience massive psychological after-effects, including guilt.
Clayton -
*I mean by this that casual killing, i.e. ritual human sacrifice, is never acceptable to the human brain (sociopaths excepted, of course). I would love to see a study into how people cope with killing they did when they were in a genuine defense situation.
I have to go so I dont have time to watch it right now. Do they only take the modernized world into account, or do they study 3rd world and indigenous cultures as well? As far as I know, the Yanonami gain clan pride in their ritual warfare.
Yes, Lt. Col. Grossman discusses (in more detail in his book On Killing) tribal warfare. Tribal warfare is, as you said, largely a “ritual” affair, meaning that there was lots of display of force, lots of spear-shaking, lots of bright colors, big masks, and so on, but very little actual blood. A few people might actually get killed and the whole affair generally ended by sunset. This is a stark contrast with modern warfare, of course, which is a 24x7 all-weather, all-hands affair in which millions can be killed. But research shows that a tiny percentage of soldiers (2%) are responsible for almost all the killing. Modern military training since the end of World War II has actively subverted this “shortcoming” of the human brain and today’s soldiers are much more deadly than soldiers even 60 years ago, as measured by the percentage who will fire their rifles in combat, actively aim for individual enemy combatants and succeed in killing. The long and short of it is that all but a tiny percentage of humans are loathe to kill one another, a “problem” the military has had to actively counteract in order to get its recruits to actually kill in combat.
Clayton -
now that you mention it, I think I remember reading excerpts of this paper in one of my classes. If I remember correctly he, or the movie, reference the Yanonami, since they are such a stark example (their warfare is far from ritual).
I would tend to agree with this, but I still think there are specifics like a person feeling less guilty of killing a black than a white, or things along those lines.
Like I said, little bit nature, whole lot of nurture.
Well, of course there are exceptions… people kill. Whether they kill from a lack of conscience or through conquering the psychological obstacles to killing, they kill. But I disagree with your characterization of guilt as being primarily determined by nurture. If anything, the latest research suggests that (parental) nurture is almost irrelevant to human behavior. Steven Pinker discusses this in The Blank Slate.
Clayton -
I think it is a matter of semantics we are arguing here. I am not saying it is quantifiably this much nature, this much nurture. My position is that nature lays the backdrop of emotions, ethics, morality, etc. Nurture and personal desire decide the specifics.
Studying the biological bases of our “moral” emotions (guilt, empathy, disgust, sense of justice/fairness, etc.) seems worthwhile, because if these factors are near-universal, it hints at there being certain near-universal aspects appearing in emergent legal codes. However, the words morality and ethics carry so much baggage that it seems expedient to choose different terminology entirely. Maybe “social emotions.”
Otherwise every time this comes up we’ll have to re-enact a whole series of threads like this just to reclaim the level of clarity we have achieved here (the forum history shows this to be a recurring debate covering the same ground each time).
Clayton,
I’m going to be that guy who suggests something to read, but who doesn’t really contribute anything substantial to the conversation. That being said, I think that these books will answer your questions, or at least clarity the amoral position. They certainly did for me.
LA Rollins - The Myth of Natural Rights. (A critique of Rand, Rothbard, and their followers. He argues that man’s “needs” and his “rational nature” don’t have any normative implications.)
Richard Joyce - The Myth of Morality. (Argues that moral claims don’t make any sense.)
Care to provide some evidence?
I can’t think of an action that was/is universally condemmed.
Jesse,
Neither of the books you’ve recommended really dispute what Clayton seems to be saying, in fact, the latter book points out that moral claims are rooted in biology.
I hate to be the party pooper here, but this tread is in danger of becoming silly. It is wholly irrelevant if one action or another is genetically abhorrent to a majority of the human population. You are still relying on a majority to determine the truth. This is no more or less valid than simply following the ten commandments. But since Science is so much more appealing to the Humanist than a divine-revelatory ideology, it seems to be considered a much more reliable method of reckoning. Other than for personal preference, I don’t see why that is the case.
Sure, there is no culture that does not hold that murder is immoral. That’s at least one moral which is culturally universal (rooted in our biology).
Clayton -
With the exception of pathological individuals who exhibit a lack of common moral sense, there are many such actions: murder, rape, infidelity, cuckoldry, and so on.
Clayton -
Now that’s silly. Humans build houses because living in the elements is abhorrent to us. We value living in dwellings that shelter us from the elements. Such an observation is not irrelevant to understanding the particulars of human nature anymore than an observation that most birds prefer to nest in trees is irrelevant to understanding the particulars of bird nature.
I think you’re incorrectly characterizing the issue. If you can find a pattern in a population (of any species, not just humans), that pattern must have a cause (otherwise, it wouldn’t be a pattern, it would be random). The fact that humans have a pattern of finding certain actions morally revolting solicits an explanation. How did this moral revulsion arise in the ancestral environment? Of course, I would also like to understand the wider issue of how moral revulsion arose in the first place and why other animals seem to exhibit behavior which is consistent with moral revulsion or even regret.
Clayton -
actions: murder, rape, infidelity, cuckoldry
You’re going to have to provide substantive evidence that any of these things are universal.
And there’s a difference between having a universal taboo, and how the specifics are divided. Murder may be fine, if it is another tribe member. Rape may be fine if it is a member of your houlsehold or one of your slaves. Etc, etc