Obviously not. You asked why the situations are different, I gave an answer.
In that case, you didn’t give me what I asked for.
Let me remind you that the question we were discussing with this was whether the same moral urges are preponderant; it was not whether moral urges existed in the first place (you yourself admitted to having them).
So you think all induction is NOT invalid then? Because you said it was, before.
Reactions make up morality in action, not ethical theory. You said before that subjective valuations influence our ideas of what is natural. But our ideas of what is natural are part of ethical theory, not human morality. I’m not saying that moral men subjectively regard things as moral or immoral according to whether they are natural or unnatural. Man doesn’t need Aristotelean nature theory to have morality. I’m saying that the ethicist can objectively discern whether certain aspects of the psyche are natural or unnatural.
I didn’t say that. In fact, I said that I was not saying that: “I am not contending that killing is natural or unnatural”
Here, I misspoke. Thank you for catching that. What I ought to have said was, “A person in a lifeboat who accepts, and even commits, “necessary evils” is not necessarily natural or unnatural.”
This does nothing to elucidate why certain ends are “right” or “wrong”. Perhaps he holds an extremist view of original sin and desires to end the carnal man using the means of the state “for their own good”. Can his ends be shown to be wrong? Is he inhuman because his moral impulses differ from the greater body of men?
I tried to post this on my break today, but the site was down. I am not very lucid at work, and even less so now.
Lilburne, are you speaking of amoralism (moral impulses don’t exist) as being untenable? It seems lam and Freiheit are arguing against any sort of apriori or apodictically universal ethic, which is a very different thing.
From my essay:
Morality may not be the product of the top-down order present in human reason. But it is not chaotic. I believe it is the product of the**emergent order present in natural selection. There is a burgeoning school of thought in evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences (led by Marc Hauser and Steven Pinker) which contends that morality is not just cultural artifice, but that it is an intrinsic feature of the human mind which evolved over the countless millennia of humans living together. As I concurred with Rothbard, loosely speaking there ARE factual needs for flourishing which are common to man. There is an overwhelming general need in the human species for self-restraint and fellow-feeling if it is to flourish. It only makes sense that this overwhelming general need would mean that familial groups who tend to have certain highly-functional moral feelings would end up prospering and propagating their genes, while familial groups made up of individuals who were constantly killing and plundering each other would have died out.
Needless to say, original sin doctrines would not be a product of natural selection.
Insofar as they are arguing that, I agree with them. However lam has said that morality simply doesn’t exist at all.
This doesn’t answer the question. Whether something contributes to selection in nature or not is irrelevant. Even if something doesn’t have an evolutionary purpose (contribution to survival), that does not make it unnatural.A narcissist remains a Homo Sapien, unless you are using a very particular categorization.
Then we agree.
No, I was speaking in a conditional statement.
Doctrines regarding original sin are not moral impulses that are intrinsic parts of human nature in the way that impulses for protecting young or against making others suffer are. I suppose it would be more accurate to say such doctrines are non-natural, as opposed to unnatural. Unnatural means “counter to nature”; non-natural just means that it is not an intrinsic part of nature.
I have read all of the exchanges in this thread and have particularily enjoyed the exchanges between you, laminustacitus, and others. I have also read your quotes and material on the blog; insofar as you are stating that humans are not amoral creatures, but that they have innate moral impulses and this is your foundation of “natural rights”, I agree with you; however I would not state that these are natural rights, since the term itself implies rights that are innate to nature, whereas we are speaking of rights that are derived from human behavior.
I would also say that humans have an innate sense of morality, at least, most do; this does not mean that morality is itself natural or unnatural to the human condition since we are part of nature; it really depends on what youre definition of unnatural is, since as part of nature everything we do is “natural”. “unnatural” could simply mean that something does not follow the majority of humans and how they behave, or it could mean a behavior that runs contrary to natural selection which seems to be how you’ve postulated it, unless I’ve misunderstood you. How much of a person’s sense of morality that is comprised of instincts, education, culture, is up for debate. When I said “worldview” in my original post, I should have elaborated on what’s included in there - it includes a person’s personal beliefs on the way things are and the way things ought to be, and it also includes a person’s culture, knowledge, and instinctual behavior. Another term might be more appropriate here.
In my original post I was refuting the possibility of there being a universal ethic or standard by which man is judged by; this can only exist if there is an external entity to judge us. Otherwise, the standards themselves are invented by man; to say it is wrong to kill, for example, is a subjective standard that just happens to be held by the majority of the human population, but why? You believe that it’s innate to humans as a “moral urge”, but that is debatable. Is it instinctual? Is it learned behavior by the majority of the world’s cultures? Is it a result of all of the accumulated knowledge over time that is passed down to us and taught from parent to child, which tells us that “killing is wrong”? Even if most of the people believe in a moral tenet, does not make it universal or “natural”; it simply means that a majority of the humans currently alive currently hold this value, but it doesn’t tell us about the source of this value.
I think some people here were confused about my original post: I’m not arguing whether morals or rights exist or not (yes, I believe I have certain rights unlike what a couple of the early posters who misunderstood my post implied); I’m arguing whether any particular set of values or beliefs can objectively be valued as better or worse than others. Since we subjectively come up with the tools of comparison themselves, the tool of comparison itself also has a subjective value, which can be different for different people.
I think this is something that’s very important for us to understand, as it can help us to understand some of the reasons why so many masses of people, throughout history, have committed so many acts of murder, aggression, and fraud against one another. It can help us to understand why, even after the horrors of the result of giving governments too much power (Hitler, Stalin, Mao in recent history), people still think we’ll improve our society by strengthening government and redistributing wealth.
We, “we” being the people on this forum and elsewhere that want more liberty, less aggression, and less deception in our own lives and in the world around us need to understand this if we want to change things.
If we approach this problem with the belief that there is a universal ethic and that morals are objective, we make the very real mistake of disregarding the reasons why people are not currently choosing liberty over their current state of affairs; we may be hoodwinked into thinking that they are simply deceived, and running contrary to their “natural nature” due to the aggression of the state or whichever reason we would like to believe. Note that this line of thinking isn’t that far off from the line of thinking that most fundamentalists use in pushing their belief, whether it be Christian zealots from the inquisitions or Indian missions, or the ideologists that pushed communism in more recent times.
If we approach the problem with the belief that morals and values are subjective, and even yardsticks of comparison such as “happiness” or “economic progress” may also be subjectively valued, then we can approach the real reasons, and look at the impact that instinct, physical makeup of a person, culture, religion, education, knowledge, etc… all have to play in the decision making process of which set of morals we decide to value over others.
If liberty and non-aggression were truly innate to humans, there would be no need to fight these battle of ideas with others; just as there would have been no holocaust in WW2, no mass murder by Ghengis Khan or countless others so many centuries ago, and no need for the vast amount of weaponry and aggression currently deployed around the world. The truth is, they are not innate to humans, or if they are, they are certainly able to be easily overpowered by other priorities (which is why I reject the lifeboat thesis since we would then had to have been in a lifeboat all of our history, which makes the idea meaningless).
There’s a reason why some people may say that they believe in less government or a change of government, but when it comes to the voting polls votes are often made differently, and government has been able to intrude more and more into our lives. In a democracy, it isn’t just because the “ruling class” is corrupt, but also because we bring it upon ourselves. Therefore, the real change must be made in the minds and hearts of the millions of people that make up the world.
Thanks for taking the time.
Since the moral impulses are a part of human nature, the “rights” implied (and I agree with AJ that “rights” is an awkward, confusing term) are innate to human nature. I don’t see why my conception is less appropriately called “natural rights” than the aprioristic, rationalist conception promoted by most natural rights folk here.
A thing’s nature is not just any tendency: it’s an endogenous tendency, as opposed to exogenous. In other words, as opposed to “nurture”, in the classic “nature/nurture” divide. Cultural norms are “non-natural”, though not unnatural. Natural morality consists of instinctive selfless impulses.
I imagine myself standing over the dead body of a man I just killed in two different contexts. In one context it was over road-rage. In another, I had just seen the man gun down a little girl. I strongly believe that in the former case, I would involuntarily feel overwhelming regret, not just out of fear of repurcussions, but out of a pure feeling that he simply did not deserve that, and my act was horribly wrong. In the latter case, I would worry about repurcussions, but I would feel assured in my heart that he obviously did deserve it, and that I did nothing wrong. There is something primal about human feelings in those situations. I’ve been told my whole life that not believing in god is the worst possible sin you could “do”. Nonetheless, that notion never did become an ingrained part of me. When I once saw an evangelical church play, one of those in which people go to hell after dying gay or having done drugs, I never got that primal feeling of “they deserved it” the way I do when I see murderers get brought down in movies, even though the cultural notion that those gays and drug “abusers” deserved it was taught to me my whole life. There are cultural norms that comprise a superficial stratum of human “morality”. But I strongly suspect those are largely rationalizations and proxies for other non-moral impulses which have run riot and taken on moral garb, and that a few of those cultural norms are pale emanations of an underlying, instinctive stratum of “true” morality which is an endogenous part of human nature.
… I’d say that even all humans have a sense of a morality. Just not everyone has the same moral principles according to which they live or standards which they adhere. Morality is not a fixed thing but develops biographical or within a social context it develops historical. In my opinion morality is even more important and powerful then formal laws or political power.
As for natural rights - I see this as a social construct as well not something that really exists, but something that makes to some degree sense. Personally I don’t think there is something like “general rights” they would be just as granted (contracted) like special rights or priviledges. I rather work on a contract basis (mutally agreement), mutual respect or on moral obligations then on a code of “self evident” or “state granted” rights. It is rather from grace or a mandate that one should work, then one has not to bother about all the possible claims others may have or not.
“Natural Rights do not exist” http://www.spectacle.org/0400/natural.html
Please note that Lilburne and freiheit only “reject” ‘natural rights’ in the metaphysical sense. This thread conflates the ‘metaphysical’ rejection of ‘natural rights’ with the ‘practical application’ of ‘natural rights’. The former ‘rejects’ ‘natural rights’ descriptively, not prescriptively. This has nothing to do with the application of morality.
Indeed, if we come up with rules or “rights” then they should be justified because of what they would do or how they would improve the human condition, not because they are “inherent” or “derived from human nature”. Then the debate comes down to which sets of rules or rights are “better”… I think this is why the ideological wars have not ended and may never end. Even today plenty of people are in love with Stalin and Mao and plenty of people like to hate on capitalism and they extend that hate to the whole idea of freedom and markets in general… why? Is it because communism just sounds better in theory if not in practice?
We have no firm ground to stand upon except a ground which we subjectively value as being desirable, such as freedom or prosperity. We need to frame the ground to stand upon so we can stand our ground upon it, even if it is only subjectively valuable in our eyes… after all, plenty of people around the world have proven that security and reduced risk are more desirable than freedom and liberty. Then we can only try our best to show other people why freedom would work out better for them even in their subjective universe (if it’s true that freedom increases prosperity, and prosperity increases security, then we should be able to argue this point).
I guess I’m trying to figure out how to justify my beliefs to myself… and then, to other people as well; after all, if it turns out that what I believe has no firmer ground than my own opinion, then I’m no better than the marxists, communists, or anyone else. I’m now coming to the understanding that it doesn’t really matter what’s defined as natural; what matters is how to improve my own life and others around me. If freedom, liberty, anarcho-capitalism are more successful in increasing prosperity and happiness than other systems, then we should frame the debate in this way and not in the way of saying that they are superior because they are the only justifiable systems and that’s all there is to it.
uh oh. So you are not really convinced that you should not steal, kill and the like. Great - we need more people like you.
What a joker. [*-)] In general, of course I don’t think we should do either. I’d still steal if it meant starving to death otherwise, I’d still kill if it meant dying otherwise, etc…
I was referring to more abstract ideas such as the basis and foundation of morality and rights when referring to “justify my beliefs”.
What a joker you are, yes.
Yes, your utilitarianism is no better than marxism.
Oh boy is this boring.
I’m fairly certain he is speaking of whether or not his beliefs are epistemically justifiable, which is a bit more difficult than whether or not you feel something is right or wrong.
But lets circle the issue some more instead of taking the fact/value dichotomy head on. Maybe this thread can reach as many pages as the other ones.
What dichotomy ? Oh, did you manage to find the page in Hume’s holy scriptures ?
I don’t remember mentioning Hume. Are you capable of discussing concepts or are you incapable of abstracting away from the he said/she said, which is irrelevant?
Of course it’s easier to assume I’m simply a dogmatic follower of Stirner/Hume/whomever.
I opened this thread for discussion and learning, and you replied to me first; I’m waiting to hear more about what you have to say, if you have anything to say beyond your one-liners.
Yes, thanks for saying it better than I was able to myself.
By the way, interesting discussions in this thread as well: I want to see Rothbardians defend a puppy getting its ears and tail hacked off