psycho wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:53 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:15 am
I agree the above is an assumption subject to justification.
True.
Personally, to me it is not an assumption as I have the justifications.
I only agree it is an assumption for our discussion since I don't want to waste time on the tedious justification process with you.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:15 am
First ALL humans are programmed 'to kill' i.e. end life [any sort], which is very self evident as from the start humans are programmed to kill for food thus survival, in addition to self-defense, etc.
From this 'to kill program' humans has the potential to kill humans which is very evident from the history of mankind.
Such a claim needs a lot of backing.
No. Humans are not programmed to kill. That's just an argument in some low-quality movies.
I implied ALL humans are 'programmed' with the potential to kill, i.e. end life in killing plants, animals for food and self-defense. The expression of this potential to kill is so evident where humans had killed all sort of animals and also humans.
Note veganism where some groups of humans are trying to suppress this potential to kill.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:15 am
"Aggression" is a common reason why people kill humans.
But that is not always the case because humans can kill humans for other reasons, even from love, ignorance, various mental illnesses, etc.
Aggression is not a reason. It is a reaction.
You have a weird way with meanings.
Obviously a reaction is a reason for its related effect.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:15 am
The mechanisms that limit aggression in relation to killing humans is from the inherent moral function.
No. The regulatory mechanisms of aggression occur in all social species.
That is off topic.
Morality is one aspect of human behavior.
The limiting of aggression related to kill or other moral elements is related to morality.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:15 am
Note this;
- The Moral Life of Babies
Yale Psychology Professor Paul Bloom finds the origins of morality in infants
Morality is not just something that people learn, argues Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: It is something we are all born with.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... of-babies/
All human actions and thoughts are traceable to Nature and/or Nurture.
There are a patterns of actions and thoughts that can be categorized as 'moral' [i.e. morality as defined].
There is a serious logical flaw in assuming that empathy is a characteristic capable of distinguishing good from bad behavior and that this would be a biological basis for morality.
Empathy allows me to experience part of the suffering of others. It does not determine anything about the morality of my feelings.
I can empathize with the suffering that my brother suffers from not being able to continue killing indiscriminately because he was caught by the police.
It is wrong to interpret that if the baby calms his neighbor, that is an action generated because the baby determined that it was bad not to calm him or that it was bad for the baby to cry.
If you calm him so that he does not cry, that would threaten the baby's health. He cries since that is his only way of expressing any need.
Having good behaviors says nothing about the morality of the acts.
You propose that babies with strong morals have an inhibitor that prevents them from leaving unattended humans in disgrace?
I did not propose babies has or with 'strong' morals.
The above research point to the evidence that morality is inherent with reference to empathy.
Empathy [related to compassion] is a significant and criterial element of morality as recognized by most moral philosophers, e.g. from since Hume.
In one way, when you have sufficient degrees of empathy [driven by mirror neurons], you will not kill another because whatever sufferings associated with the killing of others will mirror and be triggered within you.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:15 am
I stated there is a trend decreasing numbers of people killed from violence from since 100,000 to the present.
This is very obvious if you just compare number of humans killed the last 50 years to the two World Wars and prior.
I had also posted this research by Steven Pinker;
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,
in this thread;
Violence Has Decreased There4 Morals Increased?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30995
I don't see any information. Only the chapter titles of a book. You can still see that the data (apparently) begin in the year 1200 and it seems to correspond mainly to England and the United States.
Likewise, in your comment you say that Pinker refers to these last years!
You are expecting too much. At least I provided some notes and the chapters of the book. In any typical referencing of a philosophical thesis, paper or article, only the Title, Author, Years, Publishers is provided. The onus is on the reader to read the book.
Point is there is a decreasing trend or murder, killing and violence toward the present in correlation [cause to be justified] to the unfoldment of the inherent moral function within humans.
Re the back to 100,000 years ago, I was referring to the decreasing raw impulse of aggression and passion related to killing humans. Humans are now more aware of the immorality of killing humans as reflected in the actions [protest, laws, self-awareness, etc.] taken to mitigate killing of humans.
Here is some relevant notes to your question re time period of the book,
The discussions that try to do justice to these questions add up to a big book—big enough that it won’t spoil the story if I preview its major conclusions.
The Better Angels of Our Nature is a tale of
• Six Trends,
• Five Inner Demons,
• Four Better Angels, and
• Five Historical Forces.
Six Trends (chapters 2 through 7).
To give some coherence to the many developments that make up our species’ retreat from violence, I group them into six major trends.
The first, which took place on the scale of millennia, was the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years ago.
With that change came a reduction in the chronic raiding and feuding that characterized life in a state of nature and a more or less fivefold decrease in rates of violent death.
I call this imposition of peace the Pacification Process.
The second transition spanned more than half a millennium and is best documented in Europe.
Between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a tenfold-to fiftyfold decline in their rates of homicide.
In his classic book The Civilizing Process, the sociologist Norbert Elias attributed this surprising decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure of commerce.
With a nod to Elias, I call this trend the Civilizing Process.
The third transition unfolded on the scale of centuries and took off around the time of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries (though it had antecedents in classical Greece and the Renaissance, and parallels elsewhere in the world).
It saw the first organized movements to abolish socially sanctioned forms of violence like despotism, slavery, dueling, judicial torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment, and cruelty to animals, together with the first stirrings of systematic pacifism.
Historians sometimes call this transition the Humanitarian Revolution.
The fourth major transition took place after the end of World War II.
The two-thirds of a century since then have been witness to a historically unprecedented development: the great powers, and developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.
Historians have called this blessed state of affairs the Long Peace.2
The fifth trend is also about armed combat but is more tenuous.
Though it may be hard for news readers to believe, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, organized conflicts of all kinds— civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, and terrorist attacks—have declined throughout the world.
In recognition of the tentative nature of this happy development, I will call it the New Peace.
Finally, the postwar era, symbolically inaugurated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, has seen a growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals.
These spin-offs from the concept of human rights—civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights—were asserted in a cascade of movements from the late 1950s to the present day which I will call the Rights Revolutions.