Music Banter - View Single Post - Is Meat Really Murder?
View Single Post
Old 11-21-2011, 01:12 PM   #974 (permalink)
Guybrush
Juicious Maximus III
 
Guybrush's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Scabb Island
Posts: 6,525
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by lucifer_sam View Post
This is EXACTLY the reason why morality is subjective. Had I not to see those children suffering on the telly, I probably wouldn't harbor those same feelings.

You talk about having human experience from the subjective perspective, but all of your arguments seem to allude to a moral basis which is true for everyone.

I'd like to start a new thread on this, it's far more interesting to me than the "eat meat, don't eat meat" subject of discourse.
What I'm saying is that most of us tend to feel similarly in similar situations. If someone steals from you, you get upset. We don't like it if our romantic partners cheat on us with someone else. We don't like the idea of having children with our parents or siblings. We don't like it when a friend breaks a promise. This manifests itselfs as feelings, perhaps of anger or disgust which again guide our moral judgment.

These feelings which motivate our behaviours have evolved. That doesn't mean we all possess the optimal behaviour for any situation as evolution creates diversity and the optimal strategy is ever changing. But, it does mean that most of us are somehow inheritors of successful feelings and behaviours from the past, successful meaning that the people who possessed them generally managed to have fertile children who survived long enough to have children of their own.

On a related site note, the animal kingdom is full of societal norms. A starving vampire bat begging another bat for blood may not recieve any if the bat being begged to recognizes the beggar as someone who didn't return the favour earlier. In a wolf pack, a wolf may not be allowed to approach a kill before the alpha wolf has had the first pickings. A chimpanzee society is full of societal norms. Most would agree that these animals probably don't reflect on their behaviour, but rather just react to their environment. As social mammals, it just doesn't make sense that we don't have these kind of behaviours.

If you want an easy read, you can check out some of this : Evolution of morality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

edit :

You should also realize that this understanding of morality is, compared to the history of moral theory, quite fresh. People like Nietzche didn't know the modern science of behaviour which has come a long way the last few decades.
__________________
Something Completely Different

Last edited by Guybrush; 11-21-2011 at 01:17 PM.
Guybrush is offline   Reply With Quote