Re: ESSAY: 'Debunking 'Hippy dippy moral philosophy'

From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Sun Jun 20 2004 - 16:29:57 MDT


At 01:03 PM 20/06/04 -0800, John wrote:
>On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 "Keith Henson" <hkhenson@rogers.com> said:

snip

> > I make the case that objective morality, that is a
> > morality that is more or less common across the
> > human species, exists.
>
>If that were true history would be a lot less bloody.

History is bloody in direct relation to how much humans overload the
environment. As EO Wilson puts it, we are just incredibly lucky that over
some threshold of wealth women drastically reduce the number of children
they have. Otherwise wars would have killed upwards of two billion more in
the last century than they did.

>Now I agree most
>people think murder is bad, but there is a troublesome minority who
>think its great fun.

Worse, it is a direct outcome of morality, it not being moral to let your
kids starve if you can kill the members of another tribe and take their
resources, *and* it being moral to kill those who are attacking you. Where
it has been studied, the percentage of people (mostly males) who died in
primitive societies is much higher than seen in relatively civilized societies.

I would venture to bet that you would get close to 100% agreement that it
is more moral to kill an attacker than to kill a fellow tribe member.

snip

Keith Henson



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