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A major puzzle about our moral psychology is why, as a species, we have evolved to be so sensitive to the abstract notions of right and wrong that we monitor one another’s behavior and even sometimes intervene to punish someone whose behavior we disapprove of.

Even the most impressively prosocial primates, such as chimpanzees and capuchins, only go so far. They have
abilities like empathy, perspective-taking, concern, and self-inhibiting, all of which humans can use while making moral decisions. But those abilities are mere starting points. They provide the psychological basis for being able to make moral decisions, but they are not sufficient to create moral beings. In Frans de Waal’s words, “We have moral systems and apes do not.”
Only humans have community standards that decide the crucial difference between right and wrong.

Matias 8 Mar 7
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5 comments

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Maybe there’s survival value in keeping each other in line. Some behaviors or actions after all can be dangerous to individuals or to the group. As children we are subjected to a lot of corrections by parents, and by older siblings who have picked up up the control mentality.

That control mentality is rampant in government and in society at large, and it can be very irritating when carried too far.

Animals can’t nag and yap at each other because their language is not sophisticated enough. Or I doubt if it is. Dogs bite each other though.

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Yes but that’s not our only feature that’s unique to the animal world. We just have more mental complexity altogether.
(said the human)

skado Level 9 Mar 7, 2019
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Too many people are "thin skinned" finding insult where none was intended.

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I think apes and orcas and others have "community standards", they just aren't nearly as nuanced and sophisticated. And I agree with @josh_is_exciting, human sophistication is probably mostly enabled by language. Language permits much more rapid and detailed and sophisticated communication, so it's rather analagous to the "networking effect" in information technology. Computers became exponentially more powerful when they could communicate in standard, architecturally agnostic ways. I think humans become way more powerful when they could communicate via something other than grunts. Computers provide the primitives -- analagous to empathy, perspective-taking, and other basic capabilities you mention -- and networks (or more exactly, network standards and APIs) provide the ability for those to cooperate, analagous to language.

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So you think ethics is part of our phenotype or our genotype?

cava Level 7 Mar 7, 2019
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