Brain-Based Values -- "The Ethical Brain" and Evolutionary Biology

[HuckleB]

Brain-Based Values

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/44445

"Envision this scene: Socrates sits in prison, calmly awaiting execution, passing the time in philosophical discussions with students and friends, taking the occasion to inquire into the fundamentals of ethics: Where do moral laws come from? What is the root of moral motivation? What is the relation between power and morality? What is good? What is just?

Ever modest, Socrates confesses ignorance of the answers. The pattern of questioning strongly hints, however, that whatever it is that makes something good or just is rooted in the nature of humans and the society we make, not in the nature of the gods we invent. This does not make moral rules mere conventions, like using a fork or covering one's breasts. There is something about the facts concerning human needs that entails that some laws are better than others.

From the time of Socrates to the present, people have sought to give a natural basis for morals—that is, to understand how a moral statement about what ought to be done can rest on hard facts, albeit facts about conditions for civility and peace in social groups. How can ethical claims be more than mere conventions? How can such claims be rooted in facts about human nature but have the logical force of a command?

Developments in evolutionary biology have helped to explain the appearance of moral motivation in humans and in other eusocial animals—animals that display behavior involving cooperation, sharing, division of labor, reciprocation and deception. In these species, various forms of punishment (shunning, biting, banishing, scolding) are visited on those who threaten the social norms. Ethological studies help us appreciate that, at a basic level, human social behavior has much in common with that of other species.

..."


I'm actually impressed that this got published in this day and age.

[HuckleB]

1. Jumping genes.

[HuckleB]

2. Ethics? Origins? Etiology?

Anyone? Anyone?

[H2O Man]

3. "I am a brother to dragons,

and a companion to owls." - Job 30:29

[H2O Man]

4. "I said in my heart

concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and they might see that they themselves are beasts.

"For that which befalleth the sons of man befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dies, so dies the other; yea, as one breath they are, so that a man has no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity.

"All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

"Who knows that the spirit of man goes upward, and that the spirit of the beasts downward to the earth?"

-- Ecclesiates 3:18-21

[H2O Man]

5. "I am

the walrus." - John Lennon

[HuckleB]

6. Genes are jumping again.