The Euro crisis explained..

[Hermit]

The moral absolute regarding self-defense and defense of one's family is genetically-based, you see. it's built into our DNA, which makes it a moral absolute. If it weren't, if we (like all other vertebrates and higher animals) did not have the instinct for personal and family survival, none of them would have survived.

LOL. How quaint. You do realise that you are employing a formal fallacy here, don't you, Seth? G.E. Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy. It's the attempt to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties.

Nice try, but no cigar.

[MrJonno]

Plenty of older cultures where infanticide was common, in fact it is still far from uncommon in a few modern ones as well.

You won't find a guide for what is good or bad in nature, in fact even determining what is 'natural' when it comes to human beings as our values are far more determined by memes than genes is far from easy

[Svartalf]

The moral absolute regarding self-defense and defense of one's family is genetically-based, you see. it's built into our DNA, which makes it a moral absolute. If it weren't, if we (like all other vertebrates and higher animals) did not have the instinct for personal and family survival, none of them would have survived.

LOL. How quaint. You do realise that you are employing a formal fallacy here, don't you, Seth? G.E. Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy. It's the attempt to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties.

Nice try, but no cigar.

Protection of family is genetically wired? Well, that's a new one... That sure explain Sows eating their own piglets and lady great cats doing nothing to protect their cubs from the murderous wiles of would be alpha males...
Not that chimps and other primates do much better.

[MrJonno]

Its the whole libertarian atheist crap, no absolute authority in a god and these people can't cope with being alone so they turn to what is basically another absolute 'nature'.

Sensible people realise that life is generally not black and white and morality does change

[Seth]

The moral absolute regarding self-defense and defense of one's family is genetically-based, you see. it's built into our DNA, which makes it a moral absolute. If it weren't, if we (like all other vertebrates and higher animals) did not have the instinct for personal and family survival, none of them would have survived.

LOL. How quaint. You do realise that you are employing a formal fallacy here, don't you, Seth? G.E. Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy. It's the attempt to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties.

Nice try, but no cigar.

i disagree that it's a fallacy. I believe that what is "good" can be, in part, defined by what enhances individual or species survival. Ethics is basically the study of intelligent choice, but intelligence does not necessarily separate us from our basic nature as living creatures who are subject to instincts and behaviors that are part of our genetic makeup.

We may do A or B, and whether either is "ethical" depends on how it affects the individual and mostly how it affects others. But that's a function of our sentience alone. Lions do not worry about the ethics of eating the springbok.

The definition of "good" is, in philosophy, very flexible, as you point out. However, there are, in my view, some fundamental, objective definitions of "good" that are directly connected to biological fact.

It is a natural property of living organisms that they have an instinct for survival, that they will defend their own life, that they will seek out and take exclusive possession of resources necessary for survival, and that they will attempt to reproduce.

Those are objective "goods" because they result in the continued survival of the organism. Are there times when organisms do other things, resulting in death? Yes, of course, but this does not change the nature of the organic goods.

[Seth]

Plenty of older cultures where infanticide was common, in fact it is still far from uncommon in a few modern ones as well.

You won't find a guide for what is good or bad in nature, in fact even determining what is 'natural' when it comes to human beings as our values are far more determined by memes than genes is far from easy

But WHY was infanticide common? It was not random or total infanticide, it was very specifically aimed at enhancing the survival of one or more other persons. It might be related to defects in the child that would cause the child to be too much of a burden on the family to support it, or that resources were scarce and another mouth to feed would have jeopardized others.

Genetic forces are powerful for a reason and may affect the individual negatively while still being aimed at protecting the lives of others.

No society that has endured engaged in universal infanticide, for obvious reasons. Indeed, no species that does so continues to exist.

You will indeed find a guide for what's good and bad in nature. What's good is what enhances the survival of the species, at the most basic level.

[Seth]

The moral absolute regarding self-defense and defense of one's family is genetically-based, you see. it's built into our DNA, which makes it a moral absolute. If it weren't, if we (like all other vertebrates and higher animals) did not have the instinct for personal and family survival, none of them would have survived.

LOL. How quaint. You do realise that you are employing a formal fallacy here, don't you, Seth? G.E. Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy. It's the attempt to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties.

Nice try, but no cigar.

Protection of family is genetically wired? Well, that's a new one... That sure explain Sows eating their own piglets and lady great cats doing nothing to protect their cubs from the murderous wiles of would be alpha males...
Not that chimps and other primates do much better.

Do all sows eat all their piglets? No. Do female lions "do nothing" to protect their cubs? No. What they do is try to keep their cubs away from males, and they occasionally fight with the males to protect their cubs. Not all self defense is active defense. Sometimes it's passive, and lions protect their young in many ways. Do all chimps kill all baby chimps? No. Social order in the animal kingdom is very complex, but the core behavior is identical; all organisms will try to defend their own lives. All organisms will seek out the resources necessary for survival. All organisms will seek to reproduce. Those are organic goods.

[Geoff]

Social order in the animal kingdom is very complex, but the core behavior is identical; all organisms will try to defend their own lives. All organisms will seek out the resources necessary for survival. All organisms will seek to reproduce. Those are organic goods.

Still not so, Seth. All organisms will aim to maximise their offspring that survive to breed. In evolutionary terms, it is irrelevant what happens to the organism subsequently, and indeed many die during or after the reproductive act, where they would have survived had they not mated. It's also common for animals to fight, often risking injury or death, in order to attempt to procure mating opportunities.

An organism that survives, but does not reproduce, has failed, in evolutionary terms, and those genes that it carried will thus reduce in frequency in the gene pool (ignoring exceptions like social insects, who all carry the same genes anyway).

[MrJonno]

What has increasing your chances of survival got to do with morality? . Oxygen is needed to survive but that doesnt make breathing a good act or even oxygen a good gas?. What a person wants out of life is hardly the basis of morality

Infanticide is illegal in China and India but hardly uncommon, neither societies are on the brink of collapse in fact they are becoming superpowers. I and I would hope most people on these forums would thining killing children is a bad thing but none of us live in a world where the birth of that child would mean death by starvation for an adult (through I'm sure if libertarians got their way that would be the society we would live in)

[Hermit]

The moral absolute regarding self-defense and defense of one's family is genetically-based, you see. it's built into our DNA, which makes it a moral absolute. If it weren't, if we (like all other vertebrates and higher animals) did not have the instinct for personal and family survival, none of them would have survived.

LOL. How quaint. You do realise that you are employing a formal fallacy here, don't you, Seth? G.E. Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy. It's the attempt to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties.

Nice try, but no cigar.

i disagree that it's a fallacy. I believe that what is "good" can be, in part, defined by what enhances individual or species survival.

Yes, it can indeed, you are right, but that does not make it absolute. The morals deriving from it are conditional on the value judgements that self-defense and defense of one's family is a good thing. Just because we may be unanimous on this (and that has not been established, though that in turn is irrelevant anyway) does not make it unconditional, that is to say absolute. Further, saying that it is a moral absolute because it is built into our DNA, does very clearly make it as shining an example of a naturalistic fallacy as that kind of fallacy can be expressed. Still no cigar.

[Robert_S]

If a person has an irresistible urge to rape and murder in his DNA, would raping and murdering then become a moral absolute hor him/her? What if 10% of the population had that gene, 50%, 95% 100%?

Seeking moral absolutes depending in DNA seems like a dead end to me. Actually it sounds like making some kind of religion out of a twisted version of evolution. Has that ever happened before?

I'll have to be going now, I hear the Godwin Police approaching.

[MrJonno]

If a person has an irresistible urge to rape and murder in his DNA, would raping and murdering then become a moral absolute hor him/her? What if 10% of the population had that gene, 50%, 95% 100%?

Seeking moral absolutes depending in DNA seems like a dead end to me. Actually it sounds like making some kind of religion out of a twisted version of evolution. Has that ever happened before?

I'll have to be going now, I hear the Godwin Police approaching.

I would say rape and murder is probably in our DNA, its common in other animals so presumably it is in us. What we have is a culture and training to try to overcome our base urges. We can't stop them but we can redirect them into competition in work, in peacefully choosing mates, sport. There is nothing 'good' about nature is anything I would define the best civiliisations are the ones that can overcome nature.

Or to put it another way nature is shit lets try to do better