How do you personally reconcile the notion of humans having this intrinsic quality?
Personally, I feel that humans have an intrinsic capability to develop a "moral sense"--the terms of that sense, however, are undetermined.
Both the innate capability and its plasticity, I believe, are rooted in evolution, since the cohesive group improves the survival chances of all its members, and complex behaviors have evolved to maintain that cohesion. The human development of culture--including widely disparate cultures, where the basic terms of allowable sexuality, applications of lethal force, etc. vary widely--provides another layer of complex flexility between us and the environment.
All the examples I have seen offered to demonstrate an innately determined moral sensibility involve the same behaviors seen in other social mammals: that food is mine, that mate is mine, that position in the social hierarchy (and around the kill) is mine...both the individual and the group will enforce these distinctions, but no one claims that the wolf possesses an innate morality.
As far morals being different from culture to culture and from time to time, I'd say that the only thing relative is what people constitutes murder, for example. Everyone is in agreement that murder is "wrong." What they differ in, is what constitutes murder and what constitutes jusifiable homicide.
I think it's important not to start this chain of reasoning with the word "murder" which already incorporates the notion of a moral judgment. Rather, all cultures mediate our sense of which killings are appropriate because killing is both a fundamental response to threat and a threat to social cohesion.
History has amply demonstrated that humans can be socialized to accept the killing of any class of persons for reasons that vary from religious difference to ideological choice, even when that culture has long established mores to the contrary. When an individual transgresses the socially determined boundaries of acceptable killing, that society calls it murder--but the norms vary enormously. Killing is the real universality here, not the existence of proscriptive boundaries.
No one needed to be taught that. A child who sees a vicious murder has never known such attrocities exist. He/she is innately horrified by such acts.
I think you are blurring two things together--the instinctive distress prompted by a bloody killing of one's group and the socialized response: both are amenable to mediation by the cultural environment.
I agree that most young children will be traumatized by watching a bloody killing, but that is true whether their society sanctions that killing or not: to me, this argues not for a universal moral sense but for an instinctive distress at an act of predation. The moral distinctions are cultural, and children can quickly learn to accept the most awful sanctions.
In some societies, a child will be horrified to witness the killing of an animal; in others, children participate gladly in group activities of that sort. Most American children would be horrified by bear baiting, but just a few centuries ago they would have accompanied their parents to that same entertainment. Most of us would consider it abusive to bring children to a public execution; but only decades ago in America, hangings took place in a carnival atmosphere that included entire families of enthusiastic onlookers. Some Ameican Christians advocate a return to public executions by stoning for their edifying effect, but most of us find that prospect horrific. Some Buddhist societies consider all killing murder, whether one is killing insects or persons, whether for self-defense or food. Cattle become quite alarmed when one of their number is killed, but we do not ascribe a moral sense to cows. Agitation in the face of one's "kind" being killed makes obvious survival sense.
All these considerations indicate to me that, yes, killing is a significantly fraught stimulus to most species, especially social species and including ours, but the response is too plastic to support any universal conclusions beyond that.
Jean Piaget found what he felt was the emergence of moral sensibility in witnessing toddlers cry when an object was broken, theorizing that the destruction of form triggered a sensation of wrongness--but only once the brain had developed far enough to contain a mental representation of the object.
If one can create the same distraught reaction by breaking a vase or a head, that reaction hardly seems to support a universal morality.
God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ”Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’
--Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01
Save lives! Click here!Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC!---------------------------------------
™ Version 4.2
