but if it comes down to a simple choice of you or many other people, it just depends how much you like those people. im probly forgetting something but whatever anyways im an atheist, I hope you who reads this, gets laid
well religion does change the rules, because I mean without fear of eternal damnation and as long as I don't get cought by the cops. I can do whatever the fuck i want. for animals with no religion there is no right or wrong, they just try to survive and make babies. But we are "group" animals and we are designed to help eachother out. the rules in nature are live and fuck. our rules are (i dont want to use the word "mostly") to protect other people. religion creates fear wich creates controle...
@paenitet7nullum Control? Look at how much anarchy religion has coused throughout human history! An extream version is the attacks on September 11th and July 7th where innocent people became victims of people expressing religious views. That is not controll!
@datnotfair wich is why they should be able to simply take information in the cynical way of the scientist, or whatever else is uh.......cynical? idunno, think of something
2. They are of course individual and group differences in how the foundations work. As a liberal (I'm liberal myself, btw.) the ingroup/loyalty foundation may not guide most of your moral judgments on, say, immigration laws; however many liberals like sports, want their teams to win, may have prejudices of other teams' fans, and even moralize things you can do "for" your team, such as chanting during the game, and so on.
I think that there is a vast difference between wanting one's team to win and allowing one's moral decisions to be influenced by ingroup pressures. Perhaps I should say that I think that there *ought* to be a vast difference. I'm not saying that we do not all experience the influences that Haidt names, just that we ought not to place undue weight on irrelevances. Unfortunately many people are emotional "thinkers" who deify "gut" reactions.
@musekiteer Ingroup bias and group thinking are hugely extended. Sports are just one metaphorical way to exercise them. I too hope people would think better their moral/political judgments. BTW, Haidt doesn't deny human capacity for rational moral thinking, he says that it's not the most common way we come to moral judgments. There are some interesting discussions about these issues here: watch?v=sBsXIBEm8Ug (you can check other related videos in that channel)
@musekiteer Are you familiarized with the work of Jonathan Haidt? He has a very compelling theory on the universal foundations of morality (harm+care; fairness+reciprocity; authority+respect; ingroup+authority; purity+sanctity). I have some minor reservations on it and it certainly needs a LOT more evidence IMO, but it's still very coherent and MUCH more advanced that these interpretations of the trolley dilemma. Check it out!
Yes, I'm familiar with Haidt's work. The important aspect of his work is the fact that conservatives emphasize criteria (ingroup, disgust) that liberals consider irrelevant. He does not, as far as I know, claim that these are "universal foundations of morality."
@musekiteer Well I suppose that depends on what you consider "universal" and certainly that's one of the aspects that needs a lot of more evidence. He specifically claims that these are not the only aspects behind ANY given moral judgment and that societies have different ways to prioritize and give shape to the social products of these foundations. I think however that Haidt expects to find moral products of these 5 foundations in any society. That's, I think, a form of universality.
Doesn't every assessment depend on how we define the parameters? In acknowledging that different societies have different criteria, you are admitting that moral judgments are *not* universal. You might choose not to see this, but it is logical: different = not universal. I think that Hauser's results come closer to addressing the underlying, culture-independent aspects of moral decision making.
@musekiteer My point was simply this: that According to Haidt, societies (and eve groups) may have different laws and promote different virtues, but these 5 foundations (moral intuitions) are expected to generate MOST of the moral diversity that you see. Eg.: you may see expressions of fairness, ingroup, authority and purity in Leviticus, Roman Law, the Nazi Germany or a modern democratic constitution. The products themselves may vary a lot but the underlying principles/intuitions are the same.
I don't think that Haidt claims that ingroup loyalty, for example, actually generates moral judgments. Rather, such to-me-irrelevant considerations impact the way in which some conservatives evaluate the relative value of moral pronouncements. These are the types who would downplay a moral evaluation made by an outgroup individual, while applauding a faulty moral pronouncement made by an "innie."
The worst example of this that I have seen recently was on a right-wing blog. The blogger pronounced that it was okay for Larry Craig to be hypocritical about homosexual sex so long as he officially attacked the practice. I am quite confident that the blogger would have been outraged if a Democrat had publicly decried gay sex one minute and then sought a homosexual encounter in an airport washroom in the next.
@musekiteer As I understand MFT, (I may be wrong but I’ve read many articles of it) Haidt thinks that these foundations DO play a key role in moral judgment, even at the most concrete level. They operate as INTUITIONS that people have (given by evolution and further cultivated by culture) that allow a person to have a moral judgment even when they are judging extremely difficult subjects, such as immigration laws, or moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem. ...cont.
just finished reading moral minds and this is an easy way to explain to others instead of launching into a hume/kant/rawls lecture and then describing the trolley/organ situation :)
i didn't see it in your videos, but i particularly liked hausers scenario in the book advocating reasons why one should donate and how we haven't evolved long-distance altruism yet despite the obvious reasons to do so
You should tie a slipknot around your neck and hang yourself from a rafter
Your god I Am is a homosexual who preys on young weak minded boys much like yourself. I piss in the eyes of your false idol. You are doomed to a hopeless unproductive life as long as you worship non-existent imagined beings in the clouds.
Go read your Bible stories and get to bed. Your Catholic priest wants to penetrate your ass tomorrow.
@musekiteer I beg your pardon. The "your god" was an inadvertent slip, no doubt because I just came from a vehemently Christian discussion. My comment was a follow-on to the exchange between you and buddybleau. He considered morality vis-a-vis religion, you referenced innate morality, and I, with my head filled with Christian smugness, added an ill-considered ps to my thoughts on evolutionary based morality.
No problem. Your apparent confusion had confused me.
A "vehemently Christian discussion" --- ugh, I've been frustrated by lots of those! I think that many of the more irritating Xians are part of the subset that is motivated by the arrogant belief that they can conquer atheists. Instead, they display their intimate acquaintance with fallacies of logic.
There is no morality in religions. Is it moral to behead a man? Is it moral to have a Spanish Inquisition? Is it moral for priest to molest the children. I repeat, there is no morality in religions.
I agree that the worst excesses in religious prescriptions are utterly immoral. That's one of the reasons that I am anti-religion.
However, the research addressed the moral *instincts* of individuals -- and *those* did not differ between the religious and the non-religious.
Actually, the only surprise in that finding was that I have observed that religious nutters are less moral than atheists. However, I don't take YT's self-appointed religious crusaders to be representative.
Out of curiousity, would you throw the fat guy under the trolley? Being a heavyset man I'd like to know just in case our paths should ever cross near a trolley track
Have no fear, depending upon personality and values, of course, I happen to like heavyset men ;)
I think that in this scenario one "should" sacrifice him to save 5. However, in real life, one could not be assured that it would work -- unless he was way too heavy to shove! Besides, I slam on the brakes for traffic-challenged squirrels, so I couldn't live with myself if I killed him, particularly if I increased 5 to 6!
I agree. However, some of the fundies around YT and in fundie churches leave me with a bad taste in my mouth -- they are moralistic, but I think that their "moral" attitudes suck dishwater.
Murdering doctors for performing abortions on high-risk pregnancies, or even early low-risk pregnanices?! Kill homosexuals and transgender people?! Disgusting self-appointed "gods"!
You *know* I agree with you. The only thing I hear him saying is that basic human morals are as innate as our ability to speak language and to do so within certain widely similar grammatical rules.
I think the case could easily be made that secular humanists are actually *more* moral than the religious dogmatist, contrary to their claim that we "can't have morals without god".
I definitely do think that we have a fast-response, almost entirely innate system -- at least for the vitally important moral categories such as killing. I have not inherited an evolved reluctance to kill mosquitos, though!
I think that secular humanists are up at the top of Kohlberg's scale, whereas many fundies are arrested at an "immature" reward-punishment level. So, yes, secular humanists are *more* moral than dogmatists.
However -- this is why I added an editorial comment in brackets -- the fact that cultures practice moral relativism does indicate that the "grammar" is modulated by learning (just as our grammatical system is learned -- eg, German word order is "foreign" to English speakers). This is also why I emphasized "universal, not absolute".
I suspect that many fundies *arrest* at immature Kohlberg levels because they are trapped within dogmatic iterations.
We atheists all know theistic distortions so well that we can anticipate them!
The realistic alternatives would be that we evolved do-not-kill-own instincts just like other animals (true) or "God" designed it into all humans (false).
Since it serves their purposes theists conveniently equate "God" with religion and belief and not with our "designed" psychology.
Theists are *logic-limited* because they start from an incorrect conclusion.
Because this left some important questions unanswered, I plan to make a video about this.
Basically, yes. We know that cross- and intra-cultural moral relativism obtains. We also know that those who would never naturally kill will do so in war and under threat.
Kohlberg's work demonstrated that responses in non-killing moral dilemmas mature as individuals age.
So, I think that the sequence runs instinct - emotion - cognitive analysis ---and not just for morality.
Many decisions and actions, I think. It makes survival sense as well as neuro-anatomic sense.
I watched a man interviewed about his surviving a disastrous fire on an oil rig. He described running and jumping (25-30 meters?) into the sea. His description was somewhat akin to a depersonalized, out-of-body automatic reaction. A similar mechanism, I think, to dissociation. Except to escape a fire, nobody in their right mind would decide to jump 25-30 meters into the sea.
but if it comes down to a simple choice of you or many other people, it just depends how much you like those people. im probly forgetting something but whatever anyways im an atheist, I hope you who reads this, gets laid
paenitet7nullum 10 months ago
well religion does change the rules, because I mean without fear of eternal damnation and as long as I don't get cought by the cops. I can do whatever the fuck i want. for animals with no religion there is no right or wrong, they just try to survive and make babies. But we are "group" animals and we are designed to help eachother out. the rules in nature are live and fuck. our rules are (i dont want to use the word "mostly") to protect other people. religion creates fear wich creates controle...
paenitet7nullum 10 months ago
@paenitet7nullum Control? Look at how much anarchy religion has coused throughout human history! An extream version is the attacks on September 11th and July 7th where innocent people became victims of people expressing religious views. That is not controll!
datnotfair 7 months ago
@datnotfair wich is why they should be able to simply take information in the cynical way of the scientist, or whatever else is uh.......cynical? idunno, think of something
paenitet7nullum 7 months ago
2. They are of course individual and group differences in how the foundations work. As a liberal (I'm liberal myself, btw.) the ingroup/loyalty foundation may not guide most of your moral judgments on, say, immigration laws; however many liberals like sports, want their teams to win, may have prejudices of other teams' fans, and even moralize things you can do "for" your team, such as chanting during the game, and so on.
cristianfcao 1 year ago
LOL I can't stop making typos! make that first word a "There", sorry :-)
cristianfcao 1 year ago
@cristianfcao
I think that there is a vast difference between wanting one's team to win and allowing one's moral decisions to be influenced by ingroup pressures. Perhaps I should say that I think that there *ought* to be a vast difference. I'm not saying that we do not all experience the influences that Haidt names, just that we ought not to place undue weight on irrelevances. Unfortunately many people are emotional "thinkers" who deify "gut" reactions.
musekiteer 1 year ago
@musekiteer Ingroup bias and group thinking are hugely extended. Sports are just one metaphorical way to exercise them. I too hope people would think better their moral/political judgments. BTW, Haidt doesn't deny human capacity for rational moral thinking, he says that it's not the most common way we come to moral judgments. There are some interesting discussions about these issues here: watch?v=sBsXIBEm8Ug (you can check other related videos in that channel)
cristianfcao 1 year ago
@musekiteer Are you familiarized with the work of Jonathan Haidt? He has a very compelling theory on the universal foundations of morality (harm+care; fairness+reciprocity; authority+respect; ingroup+authority; purity+sanctity). I have some minor reservations on it and it certainly needs a LOT more evidence IMO, but it's still very coherent and MUCH more advanced that these interpretations of the trolley dilemma. Check it out!
cristianfcao 1 year ago
@cristianfcao
Yes, I'm familiar with Haidt's work. The important aspect of his work is the fact that conservatives emphasize criteria (ingroup, disgust) that liberals consider irrelevant. He does not, as far as I know, claim that these are "universal foundations of morality."
musekiteer 1 year ago
@musekiteer Well I suppose that depends on what you consider "universal" and certainly that's one of the aspects that needs a lot of more evidence. He specifically claims that these are not the only aspects behind ANY given moral judgment and that societies have different ways to prioritize and give shape to the social products of these foundations. I think however that Haidt expects to find moral products of these 5 foundations in any society. That's, I think, a form of universality.
cristianfcao 1 year ago
@cristianfcao
Doesn't every assessment depend on how we define the parameters? In acknowledging that different societies have different criteria, you are admitting that moral judgments are *not* universal. You might choose not to see this, but it is logical: different = not universal. I think that Hauser's results come closer to addressing the underlying, culture-independent aspects of moral decision making.
musekiteer 1 year ago
@musekiteer My point was simply this: that According to Haidt, societies (and eve groups) may have different laws and promote different virtues, but these 5 foundations (moral intuitions) are expected to generate MOST of the moral diversity that you see. Eg.: you may see expressions of fairness, ingroup, authority and purity in Leviticus, Roman Law, the Nazi Germany or a modern democratic constitution. The products themselves may vary a lot but the underlying principles/intuitions are the same.
cristianfcao 1 year ago
@cristianfcao
I don't think that Haidt claims that ingroup loyalty, for example, actually generates moral judgments. Rather, such to-me-irrelevant considerations impact the way in which some conservatives evaluate the relative value of moral pronouncements. These are the types who would downplay a moral evaluation made by an outgroup individual, while applauding a faulty moral pronouncement made by an "innie."
... contd.
musekiteer 1 year ago
2.
The worst example of this that I have seen recently was on a right-wing blog. The blogger pronounced that it was okay for Larry Craig to be hypocritical about homosexual sex so long as he officially attacked the practice. I am quite confident that the blogger would have been outraged if a Democrat had publicly decried gay sex one minute and then sought a homosexual encounter in an airport washroom in the next.
musekiteer 1 year ago
@musekiteer As I understand MFT, (I may be wrong but I’ve read many articles of it) Haidt thinks that these foundations DO play a key role in moral judgment, even at the most concrete level. They operate as INTUITIONS that people have (given by evolution and further cultivated by culture) that allow a person to have a moral judgment even when they are judging extremely difficult subjects, such as immigration laws, or moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem. ...cont.
cristianfcao 1 year ago
Great Video!
watkins2323 1 year ago
@watkins2323
Thanks. It was an interesting talk.
musekiteer 1 year ago
thanks for putting these videos online!
just finished reading moral minds and this is an easy way to explain to others instead of launching into a hume/kant/rawls lecture and then describing the trolley/organ situation :)
i didn't see it in your videos, but i particularly liked hausers scenario in the book advocating reasons why one should donate and how we haven't evolved long-distance altruism yet despite the obvious reasons to do so
sauronjag 1 year ago
@sauronjag
This segment is the tail end of a short presentation that he made. As such, its content was constrained.
musekiteer 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@musekiteer
Atheists post these on my page just for my name
You should tie a slipknot around your neck and hang yourself from a rafter
Your god I Am is a homosexual who preys on young weak minded boys much like yourself. I piss in the eyes of your false idol. You are doomed to a hopeless unproductive life as long as you worship non-existent imagined beings in the clouds.
Go read your Bible stories and get to bed. Your Catholic priest wants to penetrate your ass tomorrow.
Morality? WHAT?
atheismisbad 1 year ago
Evolution supplies all that is needed for the development
of codes of conduct that preserve and facilitate
survival and co-operation,
which is precisely what these "laws" do.
Such sensitivities in no way support your particular god.
In fact, as Christians believe that their most heinous acts
will be magically vanished and forgotten via human sacrifice,
they actually have very little incentive to act in a moral manner.
Hmmm..
That just might explain a hell of a lot.
Imaginefree69 1 year ago
@Imaginefree69
To whom are you addressing that comment? Whose "particular god"?
If you addressed me, you have mistaken me for a theist.
musekiteer 1 year ago
Imaginefree69 1 year ago
@Imaginefree69
No problem. Your apparent confusion had confused me.
A "vehemently Christian discussion" --- ugh, I've been frustrated by lots of those! I think that many of the more irritating Xians are part of the subset that is motivated by the arrogant belief that they can conquer atheists. Instead, they display their intimate acquaintance with fallacies of logic.
musekiteer 1 year ago
There is no morality in religions. Is it moral to behead a man? Is it moral to have a Spanish Inquisition? Is it moral for priest to molest the children. I repeat, there is no morality in religions.
buddybleau 2 years ago
I agree that the worst excesses in religious prescriptions are utterly immoral. That's one of the reasons that I am anti-religion.
However, the research addressed the moral *instincts* of individuals -- and *those* did not differ between the religious and the non-religious.
Actually, the only surprise in that finding was that I have observed that religious nutters are less moral than atheists. However, I don't take YT's self-appointed religious crusaders to be representative.
musekiteer 2 years ago
Out of curiousity, would you throw the fat guy under the trolley? Being a heavyset man I'd like to know just in case our paths should ever cross near a trolley track
TheMudbrooker 2 years ago
Have no fear, depending upon personality and values, of course, I happen to like heavyset men ;)
I think that in this scenario one "should" sacrifice him to save 5. However, in real life, one could not be assured that it would work -- unless he was way too heavy to shove! Besides, I slam on the brakes for traffic-challenged squirrels, so I couldn't live with myself if I killed him, particularly if I increased 5 to 6!
musekiteer 2 years ago
Yeah, I kinda wondered about the physics of that one myself. I'm pretty sure the only result would be to make the mess that much more gruesome!
TheMudbrooker 2 years ago
@TheMudbrooker
When it comes to real life and social psychology questionnaires, never the twain shall meet!
musekiteer 2 years ago
Of course I don't disagree with him in the slightest on this conclusion.
AncientAtheist 2 years ago
I agree. However, some of the fundies around YT and in fundie churches leave me with a bad taste in my mouth -- they are moralistic, but I think that their "moral" attitudes suck dishwater.
Murdering doctors for performing abortions on high-risk pregnancies, or even early low-risk pregnanices?! Kill homosexuals and transgender people?! Disgusting self-appointed "gods"!
musekiteer 2 years ago
You *know* I agree with you. The only thing I hear him saying is that basic human morals are as innate as our ability to speak language and to do so within certain widely similar grammatical rules.
I think the case could easily be made that secular humanists are actually *more* moral than the religious dogmatist, contrary to their claim that we "can't have morals without god".
AncientAtheist 2 years ago
Ha, and you *know* that I agree with you!
I definitely do think that we have a fast-response, almost entirely innate system -- at least for the vitally important moral categories such as killing. I have not inherited an evolved reluctance to kill mosquitos, though!
I think that secular humanists are up at the top of Kohlberg's scale, whereas many fundies are arrested at an "immature" reward-punishment level. So, yes, secular humanists are *more* moral than dogmatists.
musekiteer 2 years ago
However -- this is why I added an editorial comment in brackets -- the fact that cultures practice moral relativism does indicate that the "grammar" is modulated by learning (just as our grammatical system is learned -- eg, German word order is "foreign" to English speakers). This is also why I emphasized "universal, not absolute".
I suspect that many fundies *arrest* at immature Kohlberg levels because they are trapped within dogmatic iterations.
musekiteer 2 years ago
Too bad many theists will say " We all have a universal moral grammar, morality comes from god, therefore god exists"
TheMudbrooker 2 years ago
We atheists all know theistic distortions so well that we can anticipate them!
The realistic alternatives would be that we evolved do-not-kill-own instincts just like other animals (true) or "God" designed it into all humans (false).
Since it serves their purposes theists conveniently equate "God" with religion and belief and not with our "designed" psychology.
Theists are *logic-limited* because they start from an incorrect conclusion.
musekiteer 2 years ago
"Some aspects of our moral psychology are driven by a universal moral grammar and reasoning and emotion follow from those."
So, the basics are there in all of us, then there are culture diversifications.
dewinthemorning 2 years ago
Because this left some important questions unanswered, I plan to make a video about this.
Basically, yes. We know that cross- and intra-cultural moral relativism obtains. We also know that those who would never naturally kill will do so in war and under threat.
Kohlberg's work demonstrated that responses in non-killing moral dilemmas mature as individuals age.
So, I think that the sequence runs instinct - emotion - cognitive analysis ---and not just for morality.
musekiteer 2 years ago
I will gladly watch a video from you about that.
You say it so well "the sequence runs instinct - emotion - cognitive analysis." What do you mean not just for morality, what else?
dewinthemorning 2 years ago
// what else? //
Many decisions and actions, I think. It makes survival sense as well as neuro-anatomic sense.
I watched a man interviewed about his surviving a disastrous fire on an oil rig. He described running and jumping (25-30 meters?) into the sea. His description was somewhat akin to a depersonalized, out-of-body automatic reaction. A similar mechanism, I think, to dissociation. Except to escape a fire, nobody in their right mind would decide to jump 25-30 meters into the sea.
musekiteer 2 years ago
Do you know, I have seen this exact programme (some time ago), where this man was interviewed. I know what you mean.
dewinthemorning 2 years ago