RCSaunders wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 2:06 am
[]individuals in nature.]
Really. I'm assuming you mean by, "nature," everything except human beings.
Why? Were human beings fabricated off-world and dropped here? I was assuming evolution.
In fact a great many organism are solitary, especially some of the great cats.
In fact, the vast majority of solitary organisms have very little brains - insects and reptiles - or none at all - microbes.
After they reach maturity, and if female, only until giving birth. Until maturity, the mother, and sometimes older sibling(s) taught them how to live.
https://www.fatherly.com/news/how-an-ac ... -her-cubs/ And humans not only have a very long maturing period, but are also intensely social, as a rule. Very few choose to be solitary; some become ill if long deprived of contact with other people.
But it doesn't really matter since human values are not determine by what animals do.
Then by what? We
are animals: we need to breathe, drink and eat, fight/flee/hide for safety, find shelter, find mates, and most importantly, co-operate with other human beings for mutual protection and security. It is this need which makes a commonly-held code of conduct necessary.
[Humans don't choose a way to live until after they've been taught how to live. ]
Well, speak for yourself.
For myself, I could not have survived without first learning the communication, interpersonal and life skills, information and work skills I needed for the world in which I was expected to operate. For myself, I've never met anyone who sprang full-grown from a god's forehead.
Most other human beings go on learning long after their initial teaching by parents
Of course. I didn't say learning
ends at maturity; I said independent choice
cannot begin until they're able to fend for themselves. By then, much learning has already taken place, over the content and slant of which the child had no control.
and other authorities,
Those don't all go away when you finish school. There are legal systems and employers, at least; for a ridiculous number of people, the authority of a 'spiritual leader' is still very strong; then there are the entrenched hierarchies of social and political rank.
once they have discovered how to learn and think for themselves,
What percent even try? Nobody succeeds 100%: we are products of our culture and our times, and weirdly prey to illusions and delusions.
Of course this will not be true if you never learn to think for yourself. Every successful human being makes his choices based on his own knowledge acquired by using his own mind, not on what some authorities have attempted to cram down their throats.
Successful at what? By whose standard?
So long as you assume the business of politics concerns "social organization" i.e. social engineering,
I don't know what you mean by "social engineering" but I'm suspicious of the phrase, because it's generally used in a negative - but unexplained - sense. Social organization is
not synonymous with social engineering, in any sense. It means exactly that: the organization of individual members of a species into a functional social unit.
you are bound to hold these collectivist views.
Oh. I see.
These collectivist views. I've been labelled.
What is a feral child.
That's a human child who was abandoned or orphaned very early in life - they may have acquired language, but with nobody to talk to, lose it again, and have no understanding of how to relate to others of their kind. A wild youngster, who didn't choose this life.
Since all human beings must consciously choose what they do,
Choose from among what? The menu is always finite; for the majority of people, it's limited by all kinds of factors; for many it is
very limited.
and successful choice is not possible without knowledge,
There is that word again. Successful. A subjective but undefined value-judgment. But of course, everyone has knowledge - it's just not all the same quality or amount or applicability for all the people all the time.
how does this imaginary "feral child" who "has no concept of right and wrong,"know what to do to survive?
Kill something. Eat it. Something wants to kill you, run and hide. No ethics; just pragmatics.
He would not know whether it was right or wrong to jump off a building, or drink poisoned water, or set himself on fire.
Fortunately, as in most human lives, the choices are more limited than this. He has no buildings, only trees. The water isn't poisoned, because there are no buildings and he's never learned about poison; he very likely doesn't even have fire. What kind of instincts do you think animals have that would prompt them to do such things, anyway?
And what has self-destructive stupidity to do with morals?
