Morality without god

GDR writes: If you take your argument to its logical conclusion you would say that individuals at war would not try and kill the enemy.

Dogmafood writes:From this really interesting articleOnly 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hidein many cases they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages. They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.
quote:By the time a soldier does kill in combat, he has rehearsed the process so many times that he is able to, at one level, deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being.You have to remember that with these war scenarios everybody is going out of their fucking mind. We are kind by nature.

Straggler writes: What do you think you have falsified exactly? because I very much doubt that you have falsified the established evolutionary explanation for altruism and sacrifice. It's all to do with slefish genes. It's all in the genes man.

He has very effectively not only removed himself from the gene pool and the society but it also means that he is now unable to pass on his genes to the society and the gene pool.

I just don’t buy it. I understand the argument is that it is about the society and the gene pool so that every act of altruism is fundamentally based on selfishness. To go back to the proverbial guy throwing himself on a hand grenade to save others, he not only dies himself but also any descendants that he might have. He has very effectively not only removed himself from the gene pool and the society but it also means that he is now unable to pass on his genes to the society and the gene pool.

In your scenario, that individual would not be contributing to the propagation of the altruistic gene, but if the other 9 out of 10 people that have it are then it could still get selected for.

Straggler writes: No. I said that God could have created a world without evil at all. Where indifference was the worst we would be capable of.
So (for example) rather than actually desiring to hurt others the worst someone could do was not care that someone was coming to harm. Thus eliminating the Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world whilst retaining freewill.
Imagine a scale with evil on the left, good on the right and indifference in the middle. God has apparently chosen to calibrate the morality-scale scale such that evil does exist when logically it doesn't need to even for freewill to exist. He could have shifted the whole scale rightwards and eliminated evil completely.
But he didn't. So (if he exists) it appears he desires us to have the capacity for evil for some reason.

Straggler writes: I didn't say it was. But our brains are things that evolved. And our capacity for compassion and empathy and love and sympathy and self-sacrifice, and all those other things which provide the basis for morality, are evolved traits.
In our close-knit hunter-gatherer ancestral environment all of these things aided survival at the genetic level (rather than the individual level - which is where I still think Dogma is going wrong here) - This is why they evolved.
What alternative evidenced explanation are you putting forward for the existence of of empathy, compassion etc. etc.....? Do you agree that they evolve d (in which case there must be an evolutionary explanation)>
Or are you suggesting they didn't evolve and got sort of magically inserted by God at some point?

In that example it would seem that Natural Selection is filtering out altruism then?

Dogmafood writes: Fine. Will you concede then that my position is falsifiable while yours is not?

Dogmafood from another post writes: No CS. What I have said and maintain is that at the root of all action is some self serving motivation. When I use the word selfless I mean zero benefit for the actor.

Rahvin writes: But his combat group survives.
Individuals possessing a willingness for self-sacrifice do not have a reproduction advantage.
Groups containing individuals with such traits do.
And the heritable trait need not necessarily be genetic at all; social structures evolve as well, and are similarly influenced by natural selection. Societies that consider murder to be immoral will be more likely to survive than societies that consider murder to be just fine, for example. The social traits are pas sed down through social instruction rather than genes, but the end result is similar.
It's not that every action is "selfish;" it's that we all have an internal sense of priorities and responses to various stimuli. Much of this is unconscious (we make many of our decisions without ponderously thinking about them). If John wants his buddies to survive more than he wants himself to survive, he's obeying his own internal priorities and doing what he wants to do (being "selfish" in the way some are using the term), and his action in throwing himself on a grenade is simultaneously "selfless."
We only ever do what we want to do. Our actions are always dictated by our personal set of priorities; since we are ultimately the only ones who decide on our own actions, this is the only way it could ever be. But that doesn't mean that what we want is always about improving t he self at the cost of others; often, we want others to be happy and healthy even at the expense of our own happiness or health.

Presumably you would say that he is doing what he wants to do because he wants to do the right thing, but my point would be that in order for him to do the right thing he has to overcome what he really wants which is to survive.

CS writes: You don't have to have every single individual behave that way in order for it to evolve, you just have to have enough to have positive selective pressure. Its a stats game, not something that everyone with the gene has to do.In your scenario, that individual would not be contributing to the propagation of the altruistic gene, but if the other 9 out of 10 people that have it are then it could still get selected for.Make sense?

What you are saying though does not negate the point that sacrificing his/her life and future genes is a selfless act.

Rahvin writes: What he really wants is for his friends to survive. He places their survival above his own.You're confusing our ideal wishes with what we want to do given unfortunate circumstances. Our ability to choose a course of action is always limited by our extant circumstances, and sometimes our choices are all unwanted.But if the hero did not want to save the lives of his comrades more than he wanted to save his own life...he wouldn't throw himself on the grenade. Certainly he'd rather be somewhere else where he didn't have to make a choice like that...but his options are limited by the fact that he is where he is, and there's a live grenade and his friends nearby.We can only ever do what we want to do, in the end. Every single choice you make is a matter of choosing the most preferable outcome according to your internal priority system. Sometimes the most favorable outcome is not what benefits you the most, and that's what we call "selflessness," but you can only ever make a choice like that if you want that outcome more than you want the alternatives.

Rahvin writes:The naturalistic perspective on morality, social evolution, and the like are simply explanations for how it all works and where it came from. Even the underpinning decision theory behind how we make choices, moral or otherwise, doesn't for an instant remove the heroism of self-sacrifice for a worthy cause.

It makes sense although I’m not convinced that there is an altruistic gene.