Humans are the opposite, we survive better when we are cooperative. But again, I stress, we have the choice to cooperate. No other animal is social the way humans are social.
Do we? Neuroscience is showing us signs that many 'choices' are made before we are conscious of them, and this includes moral choices. For example,
Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain, Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze & John-Dylan Haynes.
quote:
There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.
(At least) up to 10 seconds before you have the experience of choosing, the choice has been made - by an unconscious network of unconscious cells.
*
Quite sobering really.
It
is true that no other animal is social the way we are. But then, we aren't social in the way ants are.
Ethics based on self-interest, like Machiavelli or Sartre or Nietzsche or Freud, etc, are naturally wrong if we accept that as a species, it is more advantageous to act for the good of the group rather than out of pure self-interest.
Naturally wrong? What does that mean?
Of course, if we accept that non-self-interested based ethics are right then self-interested based ethics are wrong, but why would we accept that? You are making a qualitative decision, it seems, that we should desire what is advantageous for the species.
But if you increase the size of the group - so we include all mammals, then what is good for the group is that we cease to exist because we are doing phenomenal work in killing the rest of them off (except those that we domesticate), unless we consider it is good for the group that many of its members are eradicated, "
For our Volk they are poison."
A self-interested based ethics can explain non-self-interested actions not in terms of being 'good for the species' but in terms of being self-interested ie., it is in one's self interest to do things which appear to be non-self-interested.
This has some problems, which should be apparent. And I think that a gene-interested view makes sense of both human reactions to moral problems and a suicidal bee 'defending the Queen' (in scare quotes because the bee probably doesn't comprehend that it is defending the Queen. No more than it understands that it defends the Queen because she is the source of genetic continuity.)
*And
here, is a post by Ed Yong, an "award-winning science writer".
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