I hope this is just my cynicism running rampant.

Whenever I see these "You can't REALLY have morality without God" posts, I suspect the poster to be as agnostic atheist as the sitting Pope.

 

No, I think it's a valid point. He did not say you can't have morality without god, he only asked how do you handle a particular moral situation if you cannot rely on the concept of omniscience to be able to find out what you did. It's a standard gamble. Take the risk or not?

My answer is twofold. First, you can never really know that you will never be caught. There's always someone smarter than you, or a group (like the police) who have more capabilities to find out things than you do to hide them. This all depends on how big the crime is, though, and there are cases where you can legitimately expect that the risk is vastly worth it.

Which leads to second; we all live on this same planet and our survival and prosperity depends on us all working together. Since I don't want to live in a society where people steal and murder when they think they can get away with it, then *I* personally choose not to do this either. I think it is better for me, and for society.

There's actually a third justification which I've heard recently. There is no clear definition of 'I'. What am I? My brain, my body, a few neurons, my family, the whole planet? Technically, I *am* part of this universe, and if a part (such as the brain) can claim to represent the whole (such as the body), then *I* can claim to *be* the universe. Techinically it's true. We are all the universe conscious of itself. Therefore, when I steal, I am not really benefitting 'me', I'm perhaps benefitting one biological body, but if I view myself as representing the planet, then I am actually harming myself.

Perhaps.

I admit I get a little nervous when I see the "Since there is no God, what stops from doing whatever reprehensible acts that we put our minds to" types of posts.

I worry a lot more about the Christians who say "It doesn't matter what I do becasue God forgives me and I'm under grace, not under law" 

If you truly are an agnostic/atheist, are you tacitly acknowledging that you have been engaging in theft, murder and rape for the past 35 years, or have only refrained from doing so out of fear of being caught? 

If you have some time on your hands, consider why other species are not engaged in rampant debauchery, without any demonstrated belief in god, punishment/reward after death, hell, or heaven, or religious morality.

Then consider often theft, murder and rape have been sanctioned by religious imprimatur. 

Bear with us - there has been some strange stuff showing up lately on this site.

I think Zarathustra's question is very valid - why DON'T you do those things?  (Or maybe you do and you are posting this from a prison or your hideout in the mountains - I don't really know.)   

Related Sites • An Evolution Primer • The Biological Basis of Morality

ew theories in the history of science have revolutionized an entire field as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has done for biology. Natural selection is the process by which an environment affects the genetic composition of a population over many generations. First, genetic mutations within the individuals of a population arise through errors in DNA replication. Some fraction of these mutations will lead to measurable differences in the traits comprising the affected individual. Those traits that increase their host’s reproductive success will ensure their greater representation in successive generations, thus slowly eliminating those traits that are less able to aid in an individual’s ability to reproduce. As generations pass, this process can significantly alter the relative proportion of traits within a population, causing the population to become more adapted for a particular environment. Despite the overwhelming success Darwin’s theory has had in explaining a wide variety of natural phenomena, great debate continues over the theory’s application in explaining the evolution of an aspect of animal behavior known as altruism.

Altruism is the deliberate sacrifice of a portion of an individual’s reproductive capacity in order to increase that of another. This reproductive capacity is more often described as an individual’s genetic fitness, and is precisely defined as the contribution an individual makes to the gene pool of succeeding generations relative to the contributions of other individuals within a population. Thus, an altruist is defined as an individual who decreases his own genetic fitness to increase the fitness of another. The concept of altruism is best understood through example: an African wild dog voluntarily “babysitting” the pups of a pack, while the pack’s hunters search for food ; a bird giving an alarm call to warn others of an approaching hawk, and thus drawing attention to itself in the process ; a man jumping into a swimming pool to save a drowning stranger. While these acts obviously require different levels of sacrifice on the part of the altruist, on average we can expect all of them to decrease his number of expected offspring.

This is where the paradox of altruism arises. If, by definition, altruism reduces an individual’s fitness, we should expect Darwin’s natural selection to select against the altruistic trait and eventually reduce its representation within a population to zero. Even if a population existed that contained only altruists from the beginning, it would be vulnerable to subversion from within, whereby a single, mutant selfish individual could exploit the altruistic tendencies of his neighbors and eventually drive the altruistic trait to extinction.

Although the problem of altruism was largely ignored by early evolutionary theory, over the past several decades it has risen to become a central issue in the debate over the level at which natural selection operates - whether that be the level of the gene, individual, kin group, or even an entire population. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, several of which are discussed bellow.

---

Group Selection

The first mechanism by which altruism can evolve does so under the process of group selection ^{(see note)}. The following model of E.O. Wilson’s is a good example. Consider a population of N individuals. Within this population, their exists two types of individuals: an altruistic type (A) and a selfish type (S) who exist in proportions p and (1-p) respectively. Due to the altruistic nature of A-type individuals, each member of the population will experience an increase in offspring equal to the product of a value b (a measure of relative offspring gain) and the proportion of the population’s “total available altruism” that the member will benefit from. For S-types, this value will equal b* [Np / (N-1)], while for A-types it will equal b* [Np-1 / (N-1)], the difference reflecting the fact that altruists cannot benefit from their own altruism. If we then assign values to c (A-types’ decrease in offspring due to their altruism) and X (the number of offspring each individual can expect in the absence of altruism), we can then express the average offspring expected, W, of each type in the presence of altruistic behavior.


Since b and c are always positive, and N is always greater than 1, we can immediately see that selfish individuals will always have more offspring within a given population than altruistic individuals. A specific numerical example is shown below using a hypothetical population of 100 individuals in which half are altruistic and half are selfish. N’ is equal to the total number of individuals in the next generation and p’ is the proportion of A-type individuals in the next generation.


In this example, we can see how the total percentage of altruistic individuals will decrease after one generation from 50% to 48%. Iterating this same mathematical procedure over many generations, we can see how the percentage of altruistic individuals within this population will soon become very small. If the population is near its carrying capacity and is at steady state, this example suggests that the altruistic trait within this population will disappear altogether. This is merely a mathematical model to describe the apparent paradox discussed above - how can altruism possibly evolve if nature always selects against it?

This paradox can be resolved with a slight modification of our model. In this case, we have two independent groups of equal size, differing only in their relative proportions of altruistic and selfish individuals. This example is shown here, using the same values for X, b, and c.


Although the proportion of altruistic individuals declines in each group when taken separately, if both groups are examined together, their overall proportion actually increases. This counterintuitive result arises from the condition that the group with the greater number of altruists is also the most productive. Thus, as long as a population contains multiple groups with differing proportions of altruistic and selfish individuals, and the groups occasionally mixed for reproductive purposes, the total proportion of altruists could increase indefinitely. Despite this model which demonstrates how an altruistic trait could increase its representation if already established, group selection theories fail to address the issue of how such a trait could arise in the first place. For this, we must turn our attention to another mode of selection.

---

Kin Selection

One of the great problems of Darwin’s theory of evolution was its apparent inability to explain the development of sterile worker castes among the social insects. How could such a caste evolve if its members could leave no offspring to propagate the sterile worker traits? This problem was overcome by invoking a special category of natural selection known as kin selection. The basic premise of kin selection is as follows: An individual can maximize the representation of his genes in succeeding generations by either increasing his own personal genetic fitness or by increasing the fitness of his relatives, as relatives are likely to share a great number of his genes. To fully understand kin selection, it is first necessary to introduce the terms relatedness and inclusive fitness. The degree of relatedness between two individuals is simply the fraction of genes they are likely to share due to common ancestry. For example, the relatedness between a parent and child is ½ since a child will inherit half of his genes from each parent. The relatedness between two siblings is also ½, between a grandparent and grandchild is ¼, and between first cousins is 1/8. Inclusive fitness is then defined as “the sum of an individual’s own fitness plus the sum of all the effects it causes to the related parts of the fitnesses of all its relatives” (Wilson, 1980). Thus, although a sterile insect may have a zero personal fitness, its inclusive fitness can actually be quite high if it devotes its life to providing for its relatives.

One can then use the ideas of relatedness and inclusive fitness to determine when altruism between kin might arise in nature. For example, suppose you are a blackbird who suddenly notices the approach of a hawk. If you give off a warning call to your neighbors, even if the call alerts the hawk of your location and you eventually perish, your waning could save a reasonable number of close relatives in the surrounding area. Therefore, the gene (or set of genes) encoding for the alarm call trait could still be successful under the pressures of natural selection since your inclusive fitness would be greater than that of individuals who do not warn relatives of approaching predators. But what exactly is meant by a “reasonable” number of close relatives?

W.D. Hamilton solved for this mathematically, deriving what is now known as Hamilton’s rule. Hamilton’s rule states that in order for altruism to occur between two individuals, the condition k>(1/r) must be met when k is the ratio of the relative’s gain in fitness to the altruist’s loss of fitness, and r is the degree of relatedness. In the case of two brothers, one brother will give his life for the other, if that sacrifice will more than double the representation of the other’s genes in the next generation (since r=½). This rule can also be applied to situations involving more than two individuals such that an individual will also give his life to save the lives of two of his brothers, four of his grandchildren (r=¼), or eight of his first cousins (r=1/8). These are extreme cases where the altruist’s personal fitness is reduced to zero (by death), but Hamilton’s rule still holds true for more subtle cases of altruism.

To better understand, let’s take a look at the following example. You are a rabbit searching for food in the woods when you come upon 9 carrots. Let’s suppose that you can only eat 4 carrots, and that each carrot consumed gives the consumer an arbitrary payoff of 2 units. If you keep the discovery secret and consume the carrots alone, your total payoff will be 4*2=8 units. However, if in the vicinity are your brother and your brother’s friend (no relation to you) and you call them over to share in your discovery, now the carrots will be split evenly among all three. Now the total inclusive payoff to your genes will be (3*2)(1) + (3*2)(½) + (3*2)(0) = 9 units. Despite your apparent loss of one carrot, and a non-relative’s gain of 3 carrots, in this particular case, it will still benefit your genes to give the food call and share your find.

One might be tempted to ask, how is it that a rabbit can either determine the complex kin relationships between other neighboring rabbits, or perform the necessary mathematical calculations to determine whether it should or should not behave altruistically in a given situation? The obvious answer is that it can’t. Genes are not clairvoyant and cannot necessarily detect copies of themselves in other individuals. However, they can be programmed to act favorably to other individuals who are more likely to contain copies of those same genes. There are multiple ways by which this can be accomplished. The first is known as the “green beard effect” as coined by Richard Dawkins. If a gene arose in a population that both gave individuals a conspicuous physical trait (such as a green beard) and a tendency to act favorably to others with that same trait, mutual altruism between green bearded individuals could evolve. In this particular case, one can see that it is not necessary for individuals to determine whether their identical genes are due to common descent or simply coincidental random mutation, as such a distinction would be a waste of time from the altruistic gene’s point of view. Although the green beard effect is a theoretical possibility, even Dawkins admits it is somewhat unlikely that a single gene will produce both a very distinguishable trait (such as a green beard) and altruistic tendencies.
Another way by which individuals are more likely to act altruistically to others who were genetically similar is by associating familiarity with kinship. Mothers can certainly know the exact relationships to their children, but siblings can infer the relationships amongst themselves also, since individuals who are raised together are more likely to be kin than non-kin. Related to this method of kin recognition is one dependent on similar location between individuals. For instance, if you are a member of a population that does not move around much, it is likely that many of your neighbors are also kin. Thus, a gene encoding for altruism could act not necessarily on kin, but rather more indiscriminately on any of your close neighbors. This kind of mechanism can be used to explain altruism within troops of monkeys and pods of whales, since any two members in these groups are likely to be highly related.

Although these approximate forms of kin recognition are likely to be the prime forces in kin selection, it should not be ignored that studies have shown that in certain cases closer relatives are sometimes treated preferentially over non-relatives, independent of other environmental factors such as proximity. An explanation of this phenomenon is not yet clear.

---

Reciprocal Altruism

Although kin selection provides a powerful explanation of altruism in much of the natural world, there are occasions (particularly in higher mammals) where this form of selection fails to explain altruism occurring between two unrelated individuals. To understand these situations, Robert Trivers has introduced the idea of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism is the process by which one individual will commit an altruistic act towards another in exchange for the second individual returning the altruistic favor at some later time. The end result of this exchange leaves both with an increased personal fitness.

Let’s suppose a man is drowning, and an unrelated woman from nearby jumps in to rescue him. If not helped, the man has a ½ chance of drowning, as opposed to the woman who has a 1/20 chance of drowning if she attempts to save him. One might be inclined to conclude that she will never attempt a rescue, since the immediate effect would be a decrease in both her personal fitness and her inclusive fitness (since the man is not a relative). However, if at some later point in time the woman is drowning, and the man is nearby, he might be inclined to rescue her in return for her original help at the same personal risk (1/20) that the woman experienced when she saved him. We can now see that both people have exchanged a ½ chance of death for a 1/20 chance. Thus, a population full of altruistic individuals who enter into a series of reciprocal exchanges will increase their total genetic fitness as compared to competing population devoid of such altruism.

A problem with this idea arises however, when one asks why does the man in our above example bother to reciprocate? If his life has already been saved, what reason does he heave afterwards to continue to risk it unnecessarily? In human societies, this answer is simple - the cheater will be punished by both the individual he failed to reciprocate with and also be the greater society. The cheater will experience a greater decrease in fitness due to cheating than he would by reciprocating, and natural selection will select against him. However, in most species, the level of recognition and memory required for this type of selection is not possible, and this is the main reason reciprocal altruism is relatively infrequent in the natural world as compared to altruism due to kin selection.

---

Alarm Calling

Perhaps the most discussed example of altruistic behavior in animals is that dealing with alarm calls. As a predator approaches an area occupied by more than one individual of a prey species, the individual who first detects the predator may give an alarm call to alert its neighbors, drawing attention to itself in the process. As drawing attention to oneself in this situation is obviously disadvantageous, an explanation for this phenomenon has been actively sought. P.W. Sherman hypothesizes that any given alarm call may have one (or a combination of several) of the following six functions:

1.	The alarm call may cause the caller’s neighbors to either aggregate or act nervously, thus actually drawing attention away from the caller.
2.	The call may discourage prey from a pursuit by alerting it that it has been spotted and has lost the element of surprise.
3.	Alarm calling might reduce the probability of later attacks by the same predator, if a predator is more likely to hunt a particular species of prey that has given it success previously.
4.	An individual might give an alarm call if those benefited are likely to return the favor in a form a reciprocal altruism.
5.	Alarm calling might evolve if prey populations consisted of multiple groups with differing proportions of individual with alarm calling tendencies as a result of group selection. (Similar to the previously discussed example.)
6.	Although a caller jeopardizes its own life in the face of immediate danger, if its neighbors consist of relatives, the call may aid in their escape, thus increasing the caller’s inclusive fitness.

We can immediately conclude that theoretical functions 1, 2, and 3 would not classify as altruism because the caller would also benefits from the action. Although function 4 may sound reasonable, Trivers raises several objections to this possibility. First, it is difficult to see how a group of individuals would identify and discriminate against a single non-reciprocating “cheater”. Second, no evidence has been found to support the idea that animals in the wild refrain from sounding alarm calls because their neighbors fail to reciprocate. Function 5 is nearly identical to the mathematical model of group selection discussed above. This leaves function 6 to examine more in depth.

Sherman has shown kin selection to be a powerful force in the evolution of altruism in Belding’s ground squirrels. After studying a population of approximately 1100 individual squirrels over 3000 hours of observation, Sherman found that female squirrels who were currently in their reproductive years were both more likely to give an alarm call than would be predicted by chance alone, and more likely to give an alarm call than a control group of non-reproductive females. Although no significant disagreement was found between reproductive and non-reproductive males, Sherman argues that this is merely the result of both the matrilineal kin structure of Belding’s ground squirrels and the observation that the female is the more parental sex in this species.

---

Food Sharing

As best put by E.O. Wilson, “Other than suicide, no behavior is clearly more altruistic than the surrender of food.” Yet this form of altruistic behavior occurs frequently in a wide variety of animal species. Both gibbons and chimpanzees have been observed to offer food to others after solicitation, and African wild dogs are known to carry fresh meat back to the “babysitter” of their cubs after a successful hunt. One of the most well documented studies of food sharing however was done by Gerald Wilkinson on the vampire bat. Vampire bats feed on blood, and although a single bat will not always be successful in finding prey on any given night, if it does, its payoff will be big, and often bats will suck up a surplus of blood. Upon the bats’ return to the group, it is often seen that the successful hunters will regurgitate blood for the consumption of their less fortunate neighbors. While this sharing of food is often between relatives (usually a mother and child), there are numerous occasions when the two individuals involved in the exchange are not related. Wilkinson hypothesized that such generosity could be the result of reciprocal altruism if the following three conditions were met:

1.	Contact between members of a group of bats must be long enough to ensure many such exchanges
2.	The gain of receiving aid must be greater than the cost of donating.
3.	Altruistic donors must be able to recognize those bats that had previously failed to reciprocate, and refuse to feed them.

The first and second conditions were shown to be true from simple observation of wild bat populations. Wilkinson demonstrated that the third condition was also met. He selectively removed certain bats from the population and starved them. When the bats returned, the population was significantly more likely to feed these bats (who had likely shared food with them in the past) than they were with a control group of starved bats who were introduced to the population despite no previous contact with them. One can therefore conclude that food sharing in vampire bats is at least partly the result of reciprocal altruism.

---

Altruism in Humans

It is only logical that one might now be inclined to take these theories of altruism and apply them to our own species, especially considering that man is the most altruistic animal of all. Altruism pervades every aspect of our society, whether in the form of food sharing, helping the sick, gift giving, or even the sharing of knowledge through education. The use of money may even be seen as the prime example of reciprocal altruism in modern man, as money itself has no intrinsic value other than the assurance that another person will trade valuable goods for it at some point in the future.

It is easy to see how altruism in man could have evolved through kin selection. Bands of early hunter- gatherers during prehistory were almost certainly composed mainly of close kin. Also, through language and an increased mental capacity, early man had a much greater ability than other primates at not only recognizing kin, but also at distinguishing between subtle differences in degrees of relatedness. As evidence of the operation of altruism by kin selection, J. Rushton has showed that humans are more likely to favor not only those they definitely recognize as kin, but also those with whom they share genetic traits. Through a series of extensive studies, he demonstrated that on average there was greater genetic similarity between friends then between strangers, and he also made the remarkable discovery that sexually interacting couples were more likely to share similar blood markers than would be expected by chance alone. The idea that human behavior between two individuals may be governed by genetic similarity is profound, and its implications stretch far beyond a discussion of altruism.

Although there is no doubt that kin selection plays an important role in the formation of altruism in human societies, reciprocal altruism is generally more prominent. Our species easily fits the conditions for the rise of reciprocal altruism: long lasting relationships, an increased memory to distinguish reciprocators from non-reciprocators, and a method of punishing non-reciprocators. It has been hypothesized that some of man’s more complex emotions may have evolved to improve upon the system of reciprocal altruism. Gratitude and sympathy may increase one’s chances of receiving altruism by implying an increased chance of reciprocation, while guilt serves to discourage the non-reciprocator and causes him to demonstrate that he does not plan to refuse reciprocation in the future. On top of the development of emotions, Trivers even suggests that in a complicated form of coevolution, the combined selective pressures of finding subtler ways of cheating one’s neighbors and increasing one’s ability to detect such subtle cheaters may have contributed to the expansion of man’s mental capacities and led to his current state of high intellectual ability.

---

Conclusion

Altruism is one of the great mysteries of social behavior in animals, as it appears to contradict our understanding of natural selection. Even one hundred years after the birth of Darwinism, scientists are still continuing to debate the causes and effects of altruistic behavior. Whether the mathematical models of group selection, the instinctive qualities of kin selection, or the trusting attributes of reciprocal altruism, are the prime explanations of the development of this behavior is still largely unknown. In the end, it will probably be found that it is the combination of all three possibilities that plays a significant role in the natural world.

---

*Note: I have chosen to use the controversial and often misunderstood term “group selection” here for simplicity to refer to any process of selection which operates at a level above that of the kin group. A more precise term to describe the following hypothetical mechanism of evolution of altruism would be interdemic selection, which is also sometimes referred to as interpopulation selection. For further clarification of this distinction, see J. Maynard Smith’s 1975 paper “Group Selection” in the Quarterly Review of Biology and E.O. Wilson’s textbook, Sociobiology.

---

References:

Begon, M, Harper, JL, Townsend, CR. Ecology. 1996.
Barlow, C. From Gaia to Selfish Genes. 1997.
Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene. 1989.
Hamilton, WD. “The genetic evolution of social behavior (I&II)”. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 1964, 7:1-52.
Maynard Smith, J. “The theory of games and the evolution of animal conflict”. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 1974. 47:209-221.
Maynard Smith, J. “Group Selection”. The Quarterly Review of Biology. 1975. 51:277-283.
Rushton, JP. “Genetic similarity, human altruism, and group selection”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 1989. 12:503-518.
Sherman, PW. “Nepotism and the Evolution of Alarm Calls”. Science. 1977. 197:1246-1253.
Simon, HA. “A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism”. Science. 1990. 250:1665-1668.
Trivers, RL. “The evolution of reciprocal altruism”. The Quarterly Review of Biology. 1971. 46:35-55.
Wilkinson, GS. “Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat”. Nature. 1984. 308:181-184.
Wilson, DS. “Levels of Selection: An alternative to individualism in biology and the human sciences.” Social Networks. 1989. 11:257-272.
Wilson, EO. Sociobiology. 1980.

I thought that was the purpose of taxation. Seriously though, it's for two reasons:

1) You might get caught, be branded a thief and therefore socially excluded. Social exclusion in this case can range from being shunned by your peers to... well... death.

2) Because it goes against everything that is ingrained into us as children when we learn the rules under which our society operates. If the vast majority don't follow the rules then society collapses and our quality of life goes down the pan.

Same as above.

Same as above.

Now in terms of religious morality you might want to read Numbers to see what God deems as acceptable. Apparently the arbiter of objective morality finds genocide, murder, rape and theft to be quite acceptable.

 

Daddydoesit, I get your point, but I'm not thrilled about the condescension in your post.  I have no idea what your IQ is, but I'll bet there's someone here who could make you look pretty embecile if they wanted to.

Now that you've gotten your dose of holier than thou out of the way for the day, learn this lesson well:

RRS is here to help theists and atheists alike.  We are here to offer constructive criticism, support, and resources for people who are trying to cope with religion in their own lives.  Your post contained no constructive criticism that I could find, and it certainly wasn't supportive.  I don't know if the OP is a theist or an atheist.  I answered by posting a very detailed article on the evolutionary development of altruism.  You responded by belittling the OP.

Whether he's an atheist or a theist, his opinion of atheists is probably not very good right now, and I can understand why.

Here's your first warning:

Cut that shit out and act like an adult.

 

My first warning you say? People who defend ignorance need a time out. To hell with the warning, you go straight to the corner.

I assure you I will continue to not tolerate theists and pin them for what they are I will do the same to idiots; I used to be great at pin the tail on the jackass as a youngster. The OP did not deserve respect.

I obtained a college degree in 4 years. If someone is unable to grasp the simple concept that "Love, Values, Respect, Kindness. morals and tolerance for intelligent and rational humans without a bully in the sky to throw you into hell and torture you forever" - well that is one thing. I have no problem recommending books or hundreds of articles they need to read. I have no problem discussing the subject. If they still do not get it... Again I have no problem sitting down with them for a second time and trying a different method. To me the OPs message implied he understood atheism as a whole. Yet after 35 years he just can't grasp this one concept? Give me a break.... The pointless ramblings of a moron 35 years later and he don’t get it(idiot alert WootWootWooT). Now the atheist who rushes in to his aide to try to save the moron drowning in stupidity? Now that I have had a moment to think about it.. Not only do you get a time out but a spanking too, come see Daddy.

I do not think we are going to get along. As this is not my forum and you are a high lvl mod I will not understand but will respect if you delete my account.....

 

BTW I have no interest to be a part of the get along gang. I do not wish to hold hands and sing. I come only with complaint not solution. I am still new to the game in general 2-3 years into atheism. I do know the get along gang attiude is silly.

 

 

 

 

--Tony

 

 

Guess what kiddo.  Everybody here deserves respect.  Degree, no degree, high IQ, low IQ.  

You think you've got the market cornered on being angry with theists?  Somebody needs to help you thump that chip off your shoulder.  We have rules here, and among them is no griefing.  Right now, all I'm seeing from you is grief. 

Ok.  You want time out, you got time out.  You're banned until you decide you can come back and play nice.

I have better things to do than trade insults with the likes of you.  Email a mod if you think you can grow up and play at the big boy table.

 

 

 

Dear Free thinkers,

 First of all I want you to know that English is my second language.

[Quotation did not work for me. I used Red color for quotation. Purple is just the highlights and Blue is user ids..]

My answer to my own question is at the bottom of this post. I will love to read your feedback on my explanation.

My answer is essentially the same that Hambydammit said.

Please stay in topic and do not jump into conclusion. Please go deeper than you have every gone before.There are some smart atheists in this forum and there are few green ones’. The half backed atheists at this forum make statements that are essentially based on their faith. I have been visiting about half a dozen of Atheist/agnostic/Free Thinker websites. I was disappointed with the quality of some atheists’ arguments. I have found at least, about half of the so called Atheist/agnostic/Free Thinker, have their foundation on their own faith, similar to that of theists’. That is why, recently, I have started to label myself as “xyz” group instead of atheist or agnostic.

Examples of some of the atheists’ faiths are: “Morality”, “Free Will” and the inability to consider that he/she could be wrong.

On the other hand there are many logical atheists are out there such as Hambydammit and few others. Hambydammit long response and the link he included are superb. Hambydammit explanations perfectly make sense. There is no faith in his explanation. I took time to read and digest those. Thank you Hambydammit.

Followings are my response to some of the poor arguments that are made by some of the poor atheists’. Actually these are not even argument but foundationally, baby atheists’ Faith.

 

“Evil religion” wrote his faith on Morality:….Becasue it’s morally wrong to do so. 

 "Jcgadfly" jump into conclusion that I am a theist....Whenever I see these "You can't REALLY have morality without God" posts, I suspect the poster to be as agnostic atheist as the sitting Pope. 

“Natural” was correct in writing:...No, I think it’s a valid point. He did not say you can’t have morality without god, he only asked….. 

But “Natural’s” following argument doesn’t make sense:...You can never really know that you will never be caught.

Tim’s response: there is nothing 100% guaranteed in life. We make decision on the basis of probability all the time. You drive car knowing there is a chance that you can die in a car accident. There are times that the probability of my getting caught after stealing some one’s something is smaller than that of my dying in a car accident. Yet, I did not steal but drove my car. Other instances I have stolen few smaller things here and there. Although Natural’s following statement is correct in the context he presented but is irrelevant."Natural" wrote: There is no clear definition of “I”…

 "Mrjonno" got following long list of faith:...Slavery is morally wrong.Stealing is morally unacceptable...and the list goes on. 

“Jcgadfly” just skipped my question entirely. He did not ponder on it and started to worry about what Christians’ thinks. 

“MisterDax” got his faith on deist.

“Zarathustra” Faith:If you truly are an agnostic/atheist, are you tacitly acknowledging that you have been engaging in theft, murder and rape for the past 35 years, or have only refrained from doing so out of fear of being caught?  If you have some time on your hands, consider why other species are not engaged in rampant debauchery, without any demonstrated belief in god, punishment/reward after death, hell, or heaven, or religious morality. 

 “Jce” wrote:Bear with us - there has been some strange stuff showing up lately on this site.I think Zarathustra's question is very valid - why DON'T you do those things?  (Or maybe you do and you are posting this from a prison or your hideout in the mountains - I don't really know.)    I did not advocate stealing, killing or raping. I just asked question. Why should it matter to a “Free thinker Forum” where one writes from? Jail, home or a bunker in Utah.

 “Icpeakmetal” wrote:I doubt many people could murder or rape a child and not feel bad about it.I agree.

But some can. There were and are tribes who sacrifice their children in the name of their god and for various reasons and do not feel bad. There are cannibals too. Did you know that US government recently banned the so called “Nature Tourism” – a tourist company used to take Americans to Tasmanian tribal – indigenous culture to watch live, real cannibalism from a distance, passively? This world is a strange place. The things you can say, the things you cannot say, the things you can think, the things you can’t even think of, is happening somewhere in the world. Somewhere, someone is saying it and doing it. Wake up, some of you, half baked atheists. Don’t get me wrong. There are many matured atheists out there. Please scroll up to read “daddydoesit” green atheist. Daddydoesit is so young, only 29, that there is a possibility his testosterone is a hindrance in his logical thinking. Yes, age is also a factor in the development of understanding of laws of nature. Genetic, biology, evolution has a role to play. But I admit, age is not the only factor.

I do not want him (daddydoesit) to be banned from this forum. We can educate him.   

The "Patrician" wrote:1) You might get caught, be branded a thief and therefore socially excluded. Social exclusion in this case can range from being shunned by your peers to... well... death.2) Because it goes against everything that is ingrained into us as children when we learn the rules under which our society operates. If the vast majority doesn’t follow the rules then society collapses and our quality of life goes down the pan.  

1) I was talking about the situation where one concludes that his/her probability of getting caught is very small. A lot of time ones’ probability of dying in a car accident is higher than the probability of getting caught for stealing. Yet, many of us voluntarily do not steal.2) Do you think we do not steal only because we have been programmed by our parent and society not to do so? Why, how and by who are we programmed not to steal in the first place?Is there an evolutionary theory in place?

Yes. See Hambydammit superb explanation/post. 

So what is my answer?

If you use the word “morality” in answering my question in a sense that triggers “good/bad”, or “feel good” or “ I am a better person” or “god” thoughts in your head then your answer is not good enough.The correct answer is:It is mostly instinct, biologically, genetically, evolutionarily programmed into species for social welfare the forces of nature. Yes, we are also programmed by our society. Natural selection figured out that for the survival of individual pure selfishness is necessary and gave it to us.Natural selection also figured out that for the things beyond individual survival but for the thriving species, for the development of consciousness, altruism is more effective. Therefore, nature gave us altruism for thriving just as it gave us selfishness for survival. Keep in mind that selfishness is more fundamental than altruism. Anytime when these two factors are in collision course selfishness will win. Selfishness nature is for short term objective and altruism is for longer term. Imagine a world where I give you all the power and money of the world to you, and you only. Plus, I remove everyone else from the planet. Would you enjoy or like that?Fact is:

"Man doesn’t live with bread alone" is genetically harwired in our psychological makeup. For the very same reason, some of you are correct, that most people will feel bad after stealing and killing.

 In an attempt to take some of our half-baked atheists to the next level I will post few more foundational questions in separate threads. In the process I will learn from few matured atheists of this forum. 

 

Thanks to you all.  

You misunderstand. Most people still suffer from fear of getting caught even if the chance is remote. That's human nature for you.



Pretty much. As for how it developed, that's largely down to the need for co-operation to survive. Hamby gave you a fairly clear explanation on the theoretical development of this so read that. Finally, no, it's not evolutionary in the biological sense.

Oh yeah.. and...

You're not an atheist. No way. You're just another tedious troll wearing a mask of convenience. Now off with you.

EDIT:



Hamby already pointed this out, you cock.

Try downloading (it's free) and using FireFox.  This site works best and displays best with FireFox. 

Seriously, folks, why is everyone getting their panties in a wad and being mean?

Theist or atheist, I don't care. The poster is asking questions, and we're here to answer them. Remember the "Rational Response" part of Rational Response Squad?

And really, the guy has told you that English is a second language to him. Ever consider that it might not be the easiest thing to articulate things 100% perfect in a second language? Why don't we find out what the OP's first language is, and all you folks that seem intent on insulting his intelligence post the rest of your responses in his language. Let's see how close you get to linguistic perfection.

Criminy...

If we're not here to help atheists who don't happen to know all the answers like you fine folks, what are we here for?

Now, to the OP: There is a question on the board right now that I haven't seen you address. JCE wants to know why you don't go around stealing and murdering?

It's not a flippant question. If you're not a sociopath, the reasons you give for not doing those things are going to get you 80% of the way to understanding human altruism (which, if you think about it, is the single most important trait in the development of social systems, and hence, morality.)

 Secondly, here is the line in your response to me that is in error:

"Anytime" is an absolute, and if you just glance through a few psychological studies on altruism/selfishness, you will see that there is not, in fact an absolute measure of which of the two of them will win.  It's a much more complicated formula, which allows for things like "cultural norms" such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, etc, that you mention.

If you're not familiar with "the trolley problem," it's a thought experiment that has demonstrated clearly that there are instinctual "presets" that most people seem to have, and they cross cultural and religious boundaries.  This is the evolution part of morality.  The higher moral dilemmas have more to do with the way that a culture organizes itself, and are not as simple as an instinctive decision.  The variables that go into cultural bias are staggering.

Here's a repost from Wikipedia about the trolley problem.

The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics, first introduced by Philippa Foot, but also extensively analysed by Judith Jarvis Thomson and, more recently, by Peter Unger. Similar problems have traditionally been addressed by criminal lawyers and are sometimes regulated in penal codes, especially in civil legal systems. A classical example of these problems became known as "the plank of Carneades", designed by Carneades to attack Stoic moral theories as inconsistent. Outside of the domain of traditional philosophical discussion, the trolley problem has been a significant feature in the field of neuroethics, which tends to approach philosophical questions from a neuroscientific approach.

Contents [hide] 1 The trolley problem 2 Related problems 2.1 The fat man 2.2 The track that loops back 2.3 Transplant 2.4 The man in the yard 2.5 The Guilty Man and the President 3 Neuroethics and the Trolley Problem 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References

//

[edit] The trolley problem

The problem is this:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

A utilitarian view asserts that it is permissible to flip the switch. According to simple Utilitarianism, flipping the switch would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all).

While simple utilitarian calculus seeks to justify this course of action, some non-utilitarians may also accept the view. Opponents might assert that, since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, flipping the switch constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible for the death (when otherwise the mad philosopher would be the sole culprit). Additionally, opponents may point to the incommensurability of human lives.

[edit] Related problems

The initial trolley problem becomes interesting when it is compared to other moral dilemmas.

[edit] The fat man

One such is that offered by Judith Jarvis Thomson:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Resistance to this course of action seems strong; most people who approved of sacrificing one to save five in the first case do not approve in the second sort of case. This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.

One clear distinction is that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone - harming the one is just a side-effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. ^[1]

So, some claim that the difference between the two cases is that in the second, you intend someone's death to save the five, and this is wrong, whereas in the first, you have no such intention. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that you may take action which has bad side-effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong.

On the other hand, Thomson argues that an essential difference between the original trolley problem and this version with the fat man, is that in the first case, you merely deflect the harm, whereas in the second case, you have to do something to the fat man to save the five. Thomson says that in the first case, nobody has any more right than anyone else not to be run over, but in the second case, the fat man has a right not to be pushed in front of the trolley.

Utilitarians, of course, deny this. But so do some non-utilitarians such as Peter Unger, who rejects that it can make a substantive moral difference whether you bring the harm to the one or whether you move the one into the path of the harm.

[edit] The track that loops back

The claim that it is wrong to use the death of one to save five runs into a problem with "loop" variants like this:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. As in the first case, you can divert it onto a separate track. On this track is a single fat man. However, beyond the fat man, this track loops back onto the main line towards the five, and if it wasn't for the presence of the fat man, flipping the switch would not save the five. Should you flip the switch?

The only difference between this case and the original trolley problem is that an extra piece of track has been added, which seems a trivial difference (especially since the trolley won't travel down it anyway). So intuition may suggest that the answer should be the same as the original trolley problem - one may flip the switch. However, in this case, the death of the one actually is part of the plan to save the five.

The loop variant may not be fatal to the 'using a person as a means' argument. This has been suggested by M. Costa in his 1987 article "Another Trip on the Trolley," where he points out that if we fail to act in this scenario we will effectively be allowing the five to become a means to save the one. If we do nothing then the impact of the trolley into the five will slow it down and prevent it from circling around and killing the one. As in either case some will become a means to saving others, then we are permitted to count the numbers. This approach requires that we downplay the moral difference between doing and allowing.

[edit] Transplant

Here is a case, due to Thompson, where most of us come to the opposite conclusion that we do in the original Trolley Problem:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveller, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no-one would suspect the doctor.

As rare as it is to find someone who does not think we should turn the trolley, it is even rarer to find someone who thinks it is permissible for the doctor to murder this patient and harvest his organs. (A rare few utilitarians, such as Alastair Norcross, think that this might be acceptable under certain exceedingly unlikely circumstances.) Yet both cases seem to involve a choice between one life and five. What, if anything, explains this difference in our judgments?

[edit] The man in the yard

Unger argues extensively against traditional non-utilitarian responses to trolley problems. This is one of his examples:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You can divert its path by colliding another trolley into it, but if you do, both will be derailed and go down a hill, across a road, and into a man's yard. The owner, sleeping in his hammock, will be killed. Should you proceed?

Responses to this are partly dependent on whether the reader has already encountered the standard trolley problem (since there is a desire to keep one's responses consistent), but Unger notes that people who have not encountered such problems before are quite likely to say that, in this case, the proposed action would be wrong.

Unger therefore argues that different responses to these sorts of problems are based more on psychology than ethics - in this new case, he says, the only important difference is that the man in the yard does not seem particularly "involved". Unger claims that people therefore believe the man is not "fair game", but says that this involvedness cannot make a moral difference.

Unger also considers cases which are far more complex than the original Trolley problem, involving more than just two possible courses of action. In one such case, it is possible to do nothing and let five die, or to do something which will (a) save the five and kill four, (b) save the five and kill three, (c) save the five and kill two, or (d) save the five and kill one. Most naïve subjects presented with this sort of case, claims Unger, will choose (d), to save the five by killing one, even if this course of action involves doing something very similar to killing the fat man, as in Thomson's case above.

[edit] The Guilty Man and the President

Dr. Robert Jacobson asks,

"What happens if, on the tracks of one trolley, five men guilty of murder are tied, and on the other, one man is innocent. Should you choose to save the one man, simply because he has committed no crime?"

Jacobson believes that most people will save the innocent man. He also raises this question: Should you save the five guilty men, or the innocent man, who may commit a murder after you save him?

Jacobson again asks a difficult question:

"What happens if, on one of the trolley tracks, the President of the United States has been tied by terrorists, and on the other trolley tracks, five average citizens are also tied up. As in the original Trolley Problem, who should you save?"

"What if the trolley is headed towards five average people you've never met but on the other tracks is your mother?" "Do you flip the switch and save five or save your mother?"

Jacobson, in this instance, is really asking if the President of the United States/your mother is more important than five average citizens.

[edit] Neuroethics and the Trolley Problem

In taking a neuroscientific approach to the Trolley Problem, Joshua Greene under Jonathan Cohen decided to examine the nature of brain response to moral and ethical conundrums through the use of fMRI. In their more well-known experiments, Greene and Cohen analyzed subjects' responses to the morality of responses in both the trolley problem involving a switch, and a footbridge scenario analogous to the fat man variation of the trolley problem. Their hypothesis suggested that encountering such conflicts evokes both a strong emotional response as well as a reasoned cognitive response that tend to oppose one another. From the fMRI results, they have found that situations highly evoking a more prominent emotional response such as the fat man variant would result in significantly higher brain activity in brain regions associated with response conflict. Meanwhile, more conflict-neutral scenarios, such as the relatively disaffected switch variant, would produce more activity in brain regions associated with higher cognitive functions. The potential ethical ideas being broached, then, revolve around the human capacity for rational justification of moral decision making.

 

Once again, let me make this abundantly clear.

The purpose of these boards is to help theists overcome their delusions, and to help atheists strengthen their own arguments. It is not a forum to show off the length of your intellectual schlongs, or to attack people who don't happen to know all the answers. If you're only bashing the OP or calling him a liar, you are not helping.

 

 

Hambydammit said:

Here's a repost from Wikipedia about the trolley problem.

If you really want a link even though HD gave credit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

 

My mistake.  I apparently didn't copy the title with the writer credit.  Sorry for the misunderstanding.   I do try to properly link all my references.  Thanks for catching the goof.

Secondly, I don't think I ever implied that evolution was solely responsible for our morality.  I simply posted an article dealing with one aspect of the OP's question.

If you dig around the site a bit, I think you'll find that my opinions on the complexity of morality are pretty clear.

Properly pasted opening paragraph:

December 1997 The Evolution of Altruism By ERIC STRONG

Related Sites • An Evolution Primer • The Biological Basis of Morality

ew theories in the history of science have revolutionized an entire field as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has done for biology. Natural selection is the process by which an environment affects the genetic composition of a population over many generations. First, genetic mutations within the individuals of a population arise through errors in DNA replication. Some fraction of these mutations will lead to measurable differences in the traits comprising the affected individual. Those traits that increase their host’s reproductive success will ensure their greater representation in successive generations, thus slowly eliminating those traits that are less able to aid in an individual’s ability to reproduce. As generations pass, this process can significantly alter the relative proportion of traits within a population, causing the population to become more adapted for a particular environment. Despite the overwhelming success Darwin’s theory has had in explaining a wide variety of natural phenomena, great debate continues over the theory’s application in explaining the evolution of an aspect of animal behavior known as altruism.

Link to webpage HERE.

 

 

 

One biology fact related to "morality" which looks very impressive to me is "mirror neurons", check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neurons

 

Mainly because I can smell a troll at 50 paces. 

Natural wrote:

 

Well, there is nothing right or wrong in nature.

My question was to see how atheist answer the question.

Following are the two possible ways to respond. you tell me which one implies Faith and which one doesn't. Please see my above post on What is Faith and the relavency of touching the fundamental laws of nature.

1. We do not steal because it is against morality.

2. Because ......See HD (HambyDammit's) response.

 

Obviously, 1 is too simplisitic.

There is no absolute right or wrong, but that does not mean there is no right or wrong. There are things that are demonstrably wrong, given a particular context. The context here is in a human society, we consider stealing wrong. Why?

My answer is that it overall affects the well-being of society in a negative way. What's your reason?

But I'm not talking about your question, I'm talking about your proposed answer.

Neither of these have anything to do with my answer.