Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 4:52 am
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 10:36 am
Agreed. All VA can say is that 'killing your own kind' is 'evil', and should therefore be avoided.
Why it should be avoided - and
why any species should survive - are just 'givens', with no justification. It's a kind of cognitive calcification.
What I am saying is the 'killing your own kind' is embedded as a physical algorithm [thus an objective fact] in ALL species and especially the existing species.
Theoretically, Rationally and in principle, 'oughtness not-to-kill-own-kind' has to be inherent in all individuals, else, a species will be in a self-destruction mode.
Nope. Ths is an oversimplification. There certainly is a tendency in most species not to kill one's own species much of the time. But in many species, from complex to simple, members kill each other some of the time. So, to be objective, these species have an overall objective morality - if we use VA's methodology - where sometimes killing other members of your species is objective moral fact. There are species, not ours, that almost never do this or have never been seen to do this. There objective moral facts do not include murder. But for many species, it is included.
You don't get to just wish this away.
This is self-evident by all normal human beings who are aware they do not simply go out to kill another human.
Hypothetically, via biology, we can infer there must be something [inhibitor system] in the brain that is inhibiting normal humans from killing their own kind.
This can be tested, verified and justified, i.e. when people are brainwashed to loosen that 'oughtness not-to-kill-humans' they will kill or if their inhibitors are damaged or weakened to various reasons.
Nope. First of all there are cultural pressures to be violent and to not be violent. Humans have always been bathed in both. Some people kill, some don't.
VA is cherry picking AGAIN.
We have aggressive and empathetic tendencies. Unlike some species we murder our own sometimes. We have neurons invovled in patterns of aggression, including murder. We have neurons involved in patterns of empathy. Then we experience life. Sometimes this leads to murder, generally it does not. But you don't get to label some experiences brainwashing - which implies and organized attempt to change someone's mind - and not notice that there are organized attempts to make people less aggressive.
It is a fact that unlike some species our species and many others murder.
In your case, you do not have any objective bearings to enable moral progress while accepting with resignation that it is naturally within humanity, evil is inevitable, e.g. for your babies and children to be tortured and killed for pleasure, where the only hope is for the law to punish the culprits; where after one is caught, there will be others doing the same evil till eternity.
And this is a strawman argument. One can believe there are no objective moral facts, but still argue in favor of policies that reduce behaviors one does not like. One can argue for parenting approaches, schooling approaches and more that reduce murder.
VA does not understand that he cannot focus on batch of neurons A and say they demonstrate objective moral fact X, but refuse to grant that these aggressive neurons over here would then, logically, entail the different kinds of violence, including murder, being objective moral facts also.
That is by definition cherry picking.
Second, he would need to explain why humans should not, according to his own schema, be considered objectively moral murderers, given that some species murder and some do not.
Third, he cannot cherry pick the experiences/parenting/subculture patterns that lead to increased violence as brainwashing, while not calling experiences/parenting/subculture patterns that are consciously aimed at reducing human violence also brainwashing.
He assumes, based on nothing, that anyone pointing out the fallacies in his arguments is hopeless. This is
ad hominim arguing and a fallacy of assumption.
He also doesn't want to look at how shaky his LUCU argument is given that murder is part of the natural, unbrainwashed behavior of many species.
So VA here is engaging in cherry picking, fallacies of assumption, ad hominim and strawman arguments.