But there are penalties for not eating. There aren't any penalties for not being empathetic (while also not being bad).
It is not an ability and a motivation.
Penalties are irrelevant. Read this, from
here:
quote:
Experiment shows good impulses such as altruism are basic to the brain like food and sex.
Shankar Vedantam / Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- The e-mail came from the next room.
"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other.
The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as St. Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.
Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.
No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.
What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time.
The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.
The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal responsibility.
Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.
Apparently, empathy and general altruism are, in fact, tied to the same primitive centers of the brain that respond to hunger and pleasure.
And did you notice the rat experiment? How even a rat, if given a lever that gives him food but shocks another rat, will actually
stop eating at his own detriment to avoid shocking the other rat?
I think the idea that, without some deity, we would all convert into selfish, immoral anarchists is complete horseshit.
Nah. That's too much causation, you got it backwards. We lived in social groups therefore we evolved empathy. But it doesn't require hard-wrining. People could just fake the empathy to stay in the group.
That's certainly the case for some sociopaths, and it is, as you said, why we have a system of laws. And I'll agree that religion, with its additional penalties, can also help to convince inherently immoral sociopaths to "play nice." And you're right - evolution doesn't work in that order. But the evolution of empathy IS, in fact, what allowed society to form, despite the fact that it seems the trait evolved long before humans were walking around.
That's bullshit. There are a lot of non-sociopathic people that are not empathetic and are only good because there are penalties for the bad behavior.
You got rose colored glasses.
Actually, I'd say ALL people who possess no ability to feel empathy are, in fact, sociopaths. Being a sociopath doesn't mean that you disregard penalties - those are just the ones that wind up going to jail.
I think you're just afraid to call people who feel no empathy sociopaths because, by your own admission earlier, it may in fact make you one of them.
Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.
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