Morality...

[nadia]

Imagine the world without morality. Do you agree that we would start acting like beasts? Or may be even worse than the beasts? In his novel Lord of the Flies William Golding describes a situation in which a group of school age boys have been left stranded on a deserted island, where they, outside a context of a civilized society and its moral and legal norms, degenerate into selfish, envious, resentful, and brutal primitives. Do you think such a pessimistic view of our nature is justified? Or is there some inherent goodness in us, which would prevail even in the most desperate circumstances?


This was a question from my philosophy class. I think that humans are, in fact, immoral by nature. Without morals and rules we would be savages.

That's just my opinion though.

[king arthur]

I do not quite agree, I will explain.

I think most astrals or human are born kind. Just the society and how they were brought up gave bad influence.

Those kids in the wild which 'Lord of the Flies," that is a different case, because those kids have to fight to survive and they had to protect themselves.

If kids are born with well suited family, most of them are cheerful and well manners.

I know most human use that book to generalize all human, which is wrong.

The kids are or were born in heaven and kingdom of the gods, they have no enemy, they do not fight to survive. Thus, those theories about human do not sustain.

It all depends on the environment you live in.

[king arthur]

I would say, somethings cannot be all changed is... love and selfishness, these are possible.

But the rest, depends on the environment.

[dmoney]

if we could do anything and everything we wanted, then we would. if there were no repercussions, there's no telling what people would do. there'd be 24/7 murder, rape, robbery, every one would be on drugs doing the worst possible. we'd be worse than beats. people don't really need other people to survive like animals do, so they'd be disposed of more often.

[nadia]

kingarthur said:

I do not quite agree, I will explain.

I think most astrals or human are born kind. Just the society and how they were brought up gave bad influence.

Those kids in the wild which 'Lord of the Flies," that is a different case, because those kids have to fight to survive and they had to protect themselves.

If kids are born with well suited family, most of them are cheerful and well manners.

I know most human use that book to generalize all human, which is wrong.

The kids are or were born in heaven and kingdom of the gods, they have no enemy, they do not fight to survive. Thus, those theories about human do not sustain.

It all depends on the environment you live in.

They didn't really have to fight to survive. If you recall.. they began a structured "society" but when they realized that there were no REAL authority figures they began to do what they wanted. They were all normal children and there were no outside influences besides eachother.

[krashlanmar]

It all depends on your definition of goodness or morality. Everyone will have his own variation of good or moral. It also depends on WHEN you decide to judge a person by whether or not he is good or moral. If you judge him when s/he is dying, there will be a different answer, perhaps, than when s/he is a teenager or a child. It's all in the eyes of the beholder so to speak. As the topic in question is birth, the last sentence was null, but I decided to say it.

This in mind, I think all people are born with certain inherited characteristics (either from past lives or from genetics) and they grow and learn as time passes and their environment changes and the like. As people grow up, their initial characteristics grow or disappear depending on their personality, which is also a dynamic essence.

What I'm trying to say is that whether or not they are BORN good is not only completely irrelevant and in itself unable to be found out, but too complex an issue to even deal with.

Human beings are rather complex things. There's no way to ever find out how somebody will react to a situation unless they are presented with this situation in the first place. And, after being faced with the situation, a human can change his reaction to something more (or less) suitable.

So I think people are born generally neutral, though, in true scientific philosophy, people actually range from "GOOD" to "EVIL" if you will depending on chaos (amount of randomness, if you will), genetics, and, if past lives exist, past life experiences. Then the environment (present stimuli) and their own ever-changing personalities change how they react to future stimuli. This is to say there is no humanly attainable way of predicting HOW someone will react, though in theory it is possible if enough valid information (I have no idea what information this may even be. Perhaps exact positioning of all atoms and forces (and energy) in the universe would be exactly the valid information necessary) were processed over and over and over again in an almost infinitely complex model of a generic human (or maybe universe; in this case exactly infinitely complex model) with a speed that is probably unattainable in our universe then we'd be able to predict if someone was inherently "good" or "evil."

... if we back-fed this data into another complex model that would mimic a human being's ANTIGROWTH, so to speak.

If ever calculus was needed in any science it is philosophy. If I'm to say this in calculus terms, we'd have to take the derivative of the baby almost an infinite amount of times, and then when we have the proper data, take the antiderivative back to the original human. =]



EDIT: This entire process even if done to model a few NANOSECONDS of real-spacetime would take an infinity to complete.

[king arthur]

dmoney said:

if we could do anything and everything we wanted, then we would. if there were no repercussions, there's no telling what people would do. there'd be 24/7 murder, rape, robbery, every one would be on drugs doing the worst possible. we'd be worse than beats. people don't really need other people to survive like animals do, so they'd be disposed of more often.

This is when the 'Law' comes in. ;D