Perceptive Inauguration of Stupidity.
As a species and me included we have tremendous potential to make mistakes. Some fatal and some cumbersome for the next generation.
Genocides, Wars, Famine, Man Made Environmental Disasters are just a few.
On the other hand we also have the potential on an individual and cohesive whole to perform great deeds of humanitarianism as well.
Is this unequivocal balance of good and bad an inherent human trait or is something that can be tackled towards higher human ideals?
If so what steps would you take to accomplish this?
N.b Not exactly asking for utopia either but an improvement on the current state of things.
Genocides, Wars, Famine, Man Made Environmental Disasters are just a few.
On the other hand we also have the potential on an individual and cohesive whole to perform great deeds of humanitarianism as well.
Is this unequivocal balance of good and bad an inherent human trait or is something that can be tackled towards higher human ideals?
If so what steps would you take to accomplish this?
N.b Not exactly asking for utopia either but an improvement on the current state of things.
Comments (34)
I like that.
My point is that intellect and morality are not intrinsically linked.
The misuse of high IQ for example has produced some of the US most prolific serial killers.
It's worse. Interject is an amplifier of evil.
I define evil as seeking ones own benefit at the expense of others. Evil is a constant, but Intellect amplifies it's power. Worse, with technological sharing it enables the evil of the led intelligent. The ingenuity of the gun enables the killer to murder in mass. The ingenuity of nuclear weapons enables a wounded narcissist like Putin to murder a country or the planet.
A trait that channeled correctly can produce a half decent CEO. Still doesnt answer the question of how things can be improved as a psycho CEO obviously wouldnt give a damn about the damage he does to the environment as long as he keeps his shareholders, his job and income healthy.
:up:
Then, please elaborate on a soldier who does the same on a battlefield to the typical serial killer.
Make sure to includes things like obligation to the government he serves etc.
Nice label, but is there really any coherence in its definition other than people doing things that seem to be in severe violation of social norms? It seems mainly to serve as rationalization of the assumption that there is such a thing as an objectively determinable definition of suffering. See , there must be because of the existence of individuals who are allegedly constitutionally incapable of empathizing with others suffering.
If we could neutralize greed, then we can start looking towards higher human ideals. Until then, it's a fight to the bitter end.
Good point. It is greed that is one of the big factors of the rationalised and unrationised aspects of ego.
Primitive in its form and found in almost every animal its of course holds the species back but also keeps it in check as self/preservation is the fear of perishing which stops the next madman with trigger fingers from blasting our whole progress back to square one.
Unless of course labels like greed are our attempts to blame others for our failure to understand situations that seem justified from the greedy ones vantage.
And an example of this is...what?
Conquest, the transfer of values through empire building and wars served us well but with nuclear weapons at our disposal we certainly need to evolve.
Or collectively perish.
Quoting Deus
I.Q. is not the measure of social intelligence you need in order to see the correlation between what we call
morality and intellectual development. Ever notice how so many of the practices we label immoral are associated with older, traditionalistic cultures?
You ask rhetorical questions without giving hints as to what I should be contemplating here.
Quoting L'éléphant
I would argue that every time you use the word greed to describe another you are failing to see how they legitimately justify their actions based on their perspective and personal history. For instance, greedy CEOs see the world through the value of what they produce. It is what they know best and that biases them in favor of rewarding themselves and building an ever more powerful empire that seems to them to be a gift to mankind. Greed is really a kind of tunnel vision
You should be contemplating the correlation between level of cultural development and what we call morality.Cultural development brings with it greater insights into how others unlike ourselves see the world , and this allows us to engage with them in ways that are less violent, hostile and punitive. In other words , in more moral ways. Once we have achieved a certain level of development , we turn around and accuse others who havent arrived there yet of being immoral,
Many serial killers grow up in home environments very different from our own , and this can produce a kind of social intelligence that has profound gaps.
Some have extolled the message that greed is good. What they mean by that is the ability to accumulate wealth is associated with creativity and innovation that benefits society. They are praising the productive powers of self-interest and would insist that this is the only reliable way to produce wealth that makes its way to an entire nation. I dont personally support this neo-liberal view, but they believe it is an eminently moral position rather than a form of destructive selfishness.
You're watching too much movies.
An example of that is monopoly, which is still very much alive today but hidden behind, for example, exclusive contracts and technological "obsolescence".
There are few who view themselves as explicitly immoral. There is always a way to rationalize. But this fact does not impact the legitimacy of our own judgements of them.
"Is this worth suffering for?" to make less horrible decisions.
Suffering will happen no matter what choices are made.
And if something is not worth suffering over, it's not of much worth to an individual.
We all suffer, but if we suffer over something worthy, the suffering doesn't have to be for nothing.
Perhaps you meant to post your ideas here
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13531/the-purpose-of-suffering
But since youre here anyway let me address your point, if the cause is seen as noble and worth suffering for then why not?
The legitimacy of our own judgments goes only as far as the normative framework we buy into, within which the others actions appear immoral. But such normative
frameworks specify a certain way of interpreting the meaning of situations( the so-called objective facts), and do not take into account that the facts may appear very different from a different normative interpretive framework . This is because for many moral systems there is assumed to be only one meta-normative framework. As a result , we end up assuming that the other understands the facts just as we do , and it is their intent that is to blame. We say they rationalize to themselves or to us, which is another way of saying they know what they do and why they do it , and they are lying about this. By confusing immoral intent with a different interpretive understanding of the world, we justify our condemnation , punishment and even violence against them, but we never succeed in understanding how differently their world looked to them than to us.
Quoting Joshs
I think this is a helpful insight.
You've lost me.
Mon dieu!
We are not confused here. The attribute of greed can be very much understood by the smallest to the biggest individual. I'm leaving out the small-time greedy -- unfair cutting of cake so that one gets a bigger piece than the other. That's boring. I'm talking about those in power, whether in an organization or the whole country.
Do you ever wonder how different things might look to you if you were the one in power?
Ive lost you ? The train of thought goes something like this humans have both the capacity for good/evil. Greed and other more explicit forms of immorality should be self assessed by each individual to live in a symbiotic relationship with nature. By nature I include your fellow human being by for example not taking his land because you think the grass is greener over there. Nor dumping toxic material in the ocean as sometimes by oversight or cost cutting some large corporations do
If you want to modify the behaviour of a large number of people, you must study how to modify the behaviour of a large number of people.
Asking me to do that is futile. I can't modify my own behaviour, for crying out loud.
Can you modify your own behaviour? Can you give three examples where you modified the behaviour of several people at once, let's say, the behaviour of seven or more people?
Modifying human behaviour is beyond the range and domain of human behaviour. Only religions, laws, and wars can accomplish that. And, of course, peer pressure, but that's not done by one leader, but by a community.