Simon Paynton

Simon Paynton wrote:
https://www.academia.edu/28969590/Religion_and_Morality_The_Evolution_of_the_Cognitive_Nexus

This is an excellent article about religion and gene-culture coevolution.

This article should be required reading for all atheists.  It seems to dissect the formation of big religions expertly.

a closer reading reveals that evolution…

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Unseen wrote:
There’s an overarching universal ethical absolute for you.

True, it’s overarching for people who believe in it, which seems to be most practitioners.  So it’s almost overarching in both senses – personal and universal.

Davis wrote:
Not being stripped of citizenship is a basic human right in most countries.

You’re right, the UK is not willing to risk injury by allowing Shamima Begum back into the country.  But she is attracting a lot of compassion from certain quarters.

I stand by my assertion that an over-arching ethical imperative (for humans) is to treat…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Evidence that you have an ethical absolute of some sort and that it’s worth its salt is that it forces you into decisions that you resist with every fiber of your being and that don’t benefit you at all and may even result in injury to yourself. Do you agree?

If an ethical absolute is respecting people’s dignity and human rig…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
The only over arching ethical rule I think exists is simply to survive at any cost.

I think that human life is a constant tug-of-war between competition (or self-interest) and cooperation (or cooperative morality).  Just like there’s a constant tug-of-war between hierarchy and egalitarianism, or patriarchy and women’s rights.

Unseen wrote:
You can’t have overarching universal ethical absolutes that apply to everyone without something sufficiently like a deity or an extraworldly authority of some sort… …or can you?

An overarching universal ethical principle has to apply in every situation.  That’s what makes it universal and overarching.  A religious person would p…[Read more]

https://www.academia.edu/28969590/Religion_and_Morality_The_Evolution_of_the_Cognitive_Nexus

This is an excellent article about religion and gene-culture coevolution.

_Robert_ wrote:
we ARE apes and apes are us

But we’re different from the other great apes – we have much more compassion, we have fairness, and we have a set of abstract ideals and principles.  Other apes are basically competitive rather than cooperative.

jakelafort wrote:
So that is a norm that becomes a part of the ethics of the group. On the other hand in big cities all over the world is you are down and out you can’t count on the generosity of others. It seems mendicants appeal more to guilt among their targets than to a reciprocal duty between haves and have-nots. Most of the encounters b…

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Unseen wrote:
This doesn’t seem to involve the overarching universal ethical absolutes you seem to agree with in your first-part answer.

I believe those personal inviolable principles are normally called “red lines” or “white lines”, by lawyers.  In theory, we can have both universal over-arching and personal ethical absolutes.

I don’t know abou…

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Unseen wrote:
The hospitality of many wandering folk is well-known, be they Bedouins or Mongols. I suspect it’s because they exist on a knife’s edge from one day to the next, not necessarily being able to trust that there will always be food or water to sustain them, unlike I suspect all of us who can drink from the kitchen tap or shop at a loc…

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Unseen wrote:
So, if we grant that ethics involves applying absolutes, the next question is this: Are there what we might call “overarching universal ethical absolutes” applying to everyone at all times

Like I said: human rights, or human decency.  Helping in response to need, and not harming unnecessarily.  Treating someone as a human being…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
We use each other continuously and somebody gets a better deal at someone’s expense. That is just what apes do, we transact.

But apes aren’t necessarily very ethical.

Benefit and harm as defined by you? them? We already established this is unknowable. I remember a boss telling me our customers didn’t know what was best for the…

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Unseen wrote:
An ethical absolute is an inviolable value or principle by which human choices are made or according to which actions are evaluated.

I think that’s what an ethical absolute is.  I think we behave as if there is one ethical absolute: respecting human rights.  That means, probably among other things: 1) not using others as a tool to a…[Read more]

As I see it, the present state of affairs is a crude lumpy model of a wheel, that doesn’t turn.  The wheel has not been invented yet.

I’ve described morality by its parts, and then drawn conclusions from surveying that landscape.  In doing so, I have produced a fully functioning cart.

_Robert_ wrote:
‘Harm’ and ‘benefit’ are subjective and relative so a slaver can use your logic to do whatever because Africans are beneath him and he is benefiting them in his mind. So ‘benefit’ or ‘harm’ are the just current consensus and hardly absolute.

But like Shermer says, ask the slave what they think about it.  They’re the one who is b…[Read more]

Davis wrote:
the more well discussed moral systems

They don’t seem to help me, when thinking about duty, or the Good, or normativity, or anything to do with morality.  With evolutionary ethics, I can examine those things directly.

Unseen wrote:
any ethical principle involving a duty, it seems to me, is justified in terms of an absolute, namely The Good.

You’re right, the entire point of doing anything is to benefit from it.  But whose benefit?  The self?  One’s team-mates or group?  There are different classes of values depending on which one it is.  There’s also sacr…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
The moment one justifies an action, are they not appealing to a principle and don’t all ethical principles themselves boil down to The Good which is an absolute?

I agree that we justifiy our actions using shared norms – so that in doing so, we reaffirm ourselves to be part of the moral community.  The moral community has its sh…[Read more]

There are no absolute moral principles, although there are absolute, abstract features of morality, like duty.

Situational ethics doesn’t mean that anything goes.  It means that there are many different moral principles, and which ones apply or are useful depends on the situation.

Moral relativism is a strange one.  As far as I know, it means t…[Read more]