Re: ESSAY: Forward Moral Nihilism (EP)

From: m.l.vere@durham.ac.uk
Date: Sat May 13 2006 - 05:31:35 MDT


Quoting Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>:

> At 11:16 PM 5/12/2006 +0100, m.l.vere wrote:
> >Crockners Rules
> >
> >I've been lurking for a while, and the one thing that has really struck me
> is
> >that whilst a (largely commendable) near worship of rationality exists on
> the
> >SL4 list, this has a huge blindspot. Everyone cleaves nearly
> unquestioningly
> >to wider societies superstitious moralism.
> >
> >Why does anyone have morals, or believe that other people/sentients have
> >intrisnic worth?
>
> We evolved this way. You have to understand Hamilton's concept of
> inclusive fitness, but genes have done better that cause us to consider the
> value of copies of our genes in other people. It is a direct mathematic
> relation. Most of our evolution was done in tribes or small bands where
> the others around us were strongly related.

No, we evolved the emotion compassion, and emotional social conformity. We
then built pseudo-rational, artificial, moral systems on top of this.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT