Originally Posted By: Stu Farishno idea, but I think the notion that we're all born instilled with decency & morals is self-evidently false.
what I think is moral & what the guy robbing me thinks is moral are clearly not the same thing.
Originally Posted By: swampwalkerWe're not all instilled, but enough of us are. Society wouldn't function at all if most of us didn't do the right thing. Some of us , Small percentage are phycopathic from day one.
Short explanation from a book review. I haven't read the book.
http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2011/06/where-do-morals-come-from.html
The thrust of her thesis is as follows:
Moral behaviour arose in humans as an extension of the biological systems involved in recognition and care of mates and offspring. These systems are evolutionarily ancient, encoded in our genome and hard-wired into our brains. In humans, the circuits and processes that encode the urge to care for close relatives can be co-opted and extended to induce an urge to care for others in an extended social group. These systems are coupled with the ability of humans to predict future consequences of our actions and make choices to maximise not just short-term but also long-term gain. Moral decision-making is thus informed by the biology of social attachments but is governed by the principles of decision-making more generally. These entail not so much looking for the right choice but for the optimal choice, based on satisfying a wide range of relevant constraints, and assigning different priorities to them.
This does not imply that morals are innate. It implies that the capacity for moral reasoning and the predisposition to moral behaviour are innate. Just as language has to be learned, so do the codes of moral behaviour, and, also like language, moral codes are culture-specific, but constrained by some general underlying principles. We may, as a species, come pre-wired with certain biological imperatives and systems for incorporating them into decisions in social situations, but we are also pre-wired to learn and incorporate the particular contingencies that pertain to each of us in our individual environments, including social and cultural norms.
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