Mikaela recommends:
These two links are essential reading today. I've got lots more to say about community being the basis of morality (of course), but ... go read it in full first!
The Onion - 4 Years of Winning in Iraq retrospective issue. Hilarious. Damning. Spot-on.
- Well You Try to Reconstruct Iraq, says Defensive Dept.
- Bush Quietly Rolls Back Death Toll to Zero
- Point: This War Will Destabilize the Entire Mideast Region and Set Off a Global Shockwave of Anti-Americanism / Counterpoint: No It Won't
- And lots more...
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors.
Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies. ...
These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.
As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. “The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare,” he writes. “The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter.”
[So racism can evolve to community! Woo-hoo! Good news, everyone. The war in Iraq is only a matter of glacial time, now! We'll definitely be ready to pull troop out in another 200,000-1,000,000 years. Hang in there, soldiers!]
Biologists are allowed an even smaller piece of the action by Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina. He believes morality developed after human evolution was finished and that moral sentiments are shaped by culture... “[R]ecognition of equal dignity for all human beings … seems to be unprecedented in the animal world.”
Dr. de Waal says, “In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics [and planning, hello!] is deciding who to help and why and when.”
Morality, [Dr. de Waal] writes, is “a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values.” The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies “in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval.”
Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And [morality] has provided people, with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.”[Planners as the ultimate in morality. Wow. Evolutionary pinnacle and all that. Is that why this is so damned complicated?]
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