Ok. and? Again you said nothing I didn’t know. And you can become aware of what is “unconsciously” happening with you as the interaction of biology and environment happens. Not saying you will become totally aware consciously either. This seemed like a discussion that you’ve been wanting to get off your chest for some time. But I don’t really see how you said anything I didn’t know, but then again you said some things that I didn’t get either. So we’re discussing to see what we’re each saying. (a little reflection on what I see happening, but I’m good with it, no quarrels).[:)]
Wilderness,
I don’t want to have to define “reason” in order to avoid what you claim are misunderstandings. However, I will take a chance.
Do you need reason to learn how to walk? Certainly not, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Similarly, you also don’t need reason to learn how to talk. In fact you can use pure reason to reach that conclusion if one was very serious in examining the scientific evidence.
A child does not consciously learn how to talk. He picks up the vocabulary, accent, and grammar to almost perfection by age 3. By age 18, the average HS student has a vocabulary of about 50,000 words. That’s about 1 new word every 90 minutes from age 1. Try to memorize a new phone number every 90 minutes. This is a purely unconscious process, particularly for the child. I don’t see why you think that “reason” is part of this process. Language is clearly an instinct.
I clearly didn’t say it was all genes. What I said was that the environment certainly matters, but it is not a matter of “cultivation”. What this means is that you cannot have any predictable influence on the type of character an individual will grow up to be. Taking it to the extreme, as you have, showing that an individual that is completely isolated from the environment does not properly develop doesn’t not refute what I say. There is clear evidence on this matter from Behavioral Genetics.
I’m talking about the part of language development that you learn. It’s why Chinese people speak Chinese and Japanese - Japanese. You’re talking about we have the the language ability. Our genes give us the ability to know Chinese, but our genes are not giving a Swedish child the ability to speak Chinese. There’s nurturing/cultivation going on.
I don’t know, if you “clearly didn’t say it was all genes”, then we agree. I clearly didn’t say it was all cultivation. Numerous times I’ve repeated our genes play a role. Are we done yet?
The mere presence of a child in a typical human speaking environment is all that is required for the child to acquire his Chinese or Swedish.
If that is your definition of nurturing/cultivation then wemayindeed be in agreement now. But the quality or even quantity of that “cultivation” is not very important, just as long as it is present.
We have not argued about whether there is an interaction between environment and genes, because clearly there is. The debate is clearly about HOW this interaction takes place, especially in universal human traits such as empathyand language. My disagreement with you was about how you perceived that interaction to take place.
yes, I never said otherwise
yes that’s my definition, but I’m sure you can agree there’s less skilled and more skilled teachers.
I never disagreed with how you perceived it, as I’ve been saying, so if you disagreed with me, then you disagreed with yourself.[:)]
I agree, if you had used “justify” in the descriptive sense of the term. You meant that Christians still believe in their faith even though Christianity holds no biological arguments. If you meant it by this sense of the term, then I will buy it.
You had just mashed a series of claims into one small, meager sentence. Some claims seem unclear to me. So let us break your complex sentence into a few parts, and then analyze each. This makes it easier to find the potential problems of my biased assumptions in your statement.
As you know, not all self-described “libertarian anarchists” hold the same views. For instance, some libertarians support animal rights, some oppose abortion, some criticize retributive punishment, and some others support some parental authority. Those views conflict and compete with one another to attract attention.
As we have said previously, one could interpret the non-aggression principle in about a gazillion ways. Some anti-abortionists might feel cognitive dissonance, and thus interpret abortion as a form of aggression. Likewise, some others may interpret retributive punishment as a form of invasion against the criminal. Let us recall the problems of interpreting the non-aggression principle.
Libertarians define “individual sovereignty” as a state in which no one commits aggression against any individual. So far so good.
However, as we recall above, the word “aggression” has arbitrary interpretations. As a result, “individual sovereignty,” which depends on the definition of “aggression,” also has arbitrary interpretations. I found your usage of “self-ownership” in you elucidation above, therefore, as problematic.
As a consequence, we should only establish the definition of “libertarianism,” “non-aggression principle,” and “self-ownership” only prototypically. By “prototypically” we meant the prototype theory of classification. Libertarianism does not have any clear-cut “essence,” and so does not “aggression” and “personal sovereignty.”
Let us go to your second claim:
Let us say that a coward has a preference for rape. He values rape, but does not have any right to satisfy his right to act on “his own system of valuation.” Ultimately, we should place limits on the right to valuation. For example, serial killers should never have any right to seek his valuation through the employment of aggression (I know that the word “aggression” has ambiguity, but we do get the point here).
Thus, some valuations among a group of individuals may conflict with one another. This may spark violence. So clearly, you might want to revise this statement.
However, I will leave a possibility that I may have misinterpreted your statement. You might have meant that it may “prototypically” at best enable individuals to have his own system of valuation, although not in the absolute sense such as rape and murder.
You had made a typo. I will assume that you had meant something along the lines of “maximize utility” or “maximizing eudaimonia” when you ascribed “maximize humanity.”
However, even with “maximize utility,” it can also have potential problems. You might have opposed “utilitarianism,” whatever you had mean by the term. Indeed, I may agree or disagree with your opposition of utilitarianism, depending on the context of the word.
Suppose that libertarianism would create vast inequalities of wealth, much more than the current system. We, as libertarians, know the fallacy of this statement. However, statists will believe in this.
If one maximizes his preference, it could result as either a gain or as an expense from others. For example, free trade benefits both parties by definition. However, in other situations, such as the rapist or serial killer, the aggressor maximizes his preference at the expense of others.
If you oppose “maximizing humanity as a group,” as you have said, then this might imply in maximizing the preferences of certain individuals – rapists, serial killers, bankers, business executives, etc. – at the expense of everyone else.
If libertarianism officially prescribes the belief of “not seeking to maximize humanity as a group,” this would probably scare the daylights out of statists. The statists would probably see libertarianism as an ideology benefiting business executives and corporations at the expense of the majority. No wonder why many statists label “libertarianism” as a form of “free-market fundamentalism.”
And, finally, why limit biology with ethics? Why should we never accept human biology to ethics? Did it came from our belief of the blank slate? Did it came from Christianity?
Biology has explained why we label the rapist and the serial killer as “immoral.” Precisely because we have empathy for the victims and we feel contempt against rapists and serial killers. We feel these emotions because of our instincts. Nothing else. No such logic can deduce the “immorality” of rapists and serial killers, without grounding them with our empathy and contempt.
And this demonstrates that all these assumptions can lay hidden under one sentence.
DD5, it’s not a good idea to copy and paste from a wordprocessor into the forum. It breaks the forum display.
If you use a text editor like Notepad, that is better. Word and Wordpad add a bunch of code that break the post borders. I normally fix those posts, but it’s not possible to fix every post and then every quote of that bad code. It’s very time consuming.
If you need another workaround, let me know. There are settings you can change on your profile that can allow you to copy paste from work without adding code to the forum.
