orthogonal said:
Hi Cyperium,
Tack sa mycket for those good thoughts.
You are
valkommen! or more specifically:
varsagod
Of course, I tend to see things a bit differently. I stress the notion that humans have created the idea of justice. There is no concept of justice at play when a lion kills a newborn Thompson's Gazelle. It is not moral; it is not immoral; instead, it's an amoral situation. The same could be said of chimpanzee violence.
"Chimpanzee gang murder is “...marked by a gratuitous cruelty – tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood – reminiscent of acts that among humans are regarded as unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.” Wrangham & Peterson, Demonic Males; Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
I certainly wouldn't (or couldn't) disagree that chimps behave in this way, but we must bear in mind that chimpanzee gang murder is only murder because we humans call it murder. I similarly read that packs of male dolphins commonly gang-rape lone female dolphins. It may well sound horrible to us humans, but my point is that these male dolphins are not rapists. Neither are female spiders (that chew the heads from their sexual partners) sex-murderers. All these creatures are amoral.
Despite the fact that humans commonly inflict upon each other the worst evils, the fact remains that we're the ones who have invented the word evil. If humans had not created morality then there would be no such thing as benevolence or wickedness. We've invented this game; we decided what the rules are and we decide who is playing by the rules and who is not.
You are right in most of that, but I disagree that we actually invented the game, we have
reasons why the rules were "invented".
As long as there is a reason why we do things, then it isn't a invented game, cause the reasons itself, aren't invented by us.
Here you may disagree simply because one of the reason may be that someone used a loophole in the law, and we had to change the law accordingly. Though if no one used the loophole, there would still be one - so the one that used the loophole, can be said to have found the loophole, not invented it. Also the one that fix the loophole must
find the correct method to cover it. Though this may seem to be a invention at first, the whole of the law, will take a form of which it had to be (since it is adapting to be better and better), thus the whole cannot be said to be invented. If the whole cannot be said to be invented then each part (which are building the whole) cannot be said to be invented either, but found.
Let's say that each one make a part of the whole of something. No one has ever looked at the whole, they just build what is needed for the whole to work. Then finally everything works perfectly and they look at what the whole looks like, and they see the shape of a perfect circle.
This is of course only my belief. That each perfect function has a perfect form. But I think it's worth to consider.
I also see what you meant by "evil" not existing without us, I don't know about that either. Everything in the universe seems to strive for completness, so "evil" in that sense may be incompletness and disorder. Though it may -or may not- be a felt evil. Evil may also be forces that try to destroy harmony and symmetri.
About the legal system, I think that it will develop in a good way as long as there are good reasons.
Chimpanses doesn't have the intelligence for a legal system, and in that comparance I can see why we would have build ours. But in a way, intelligence may also be an understanding of what to look for, not only a understanding of what to "build". Though intelligence may be in another form, the understanding of how to use what you find to "build". In the long run I think it comes down to that we "find" it though.
C.S. Pierce wrote:
"It is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency - by something upon which our thinking has no effect."
I disagree with Pierce. Our most important beliefs arise because of who we are. It is, for example, a fool's errand to search for the source of morality anywhere outside our (metaphorical) hearts.
"Man lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them." Thomas Wolfe
Michael
I agree more or less with Pierce, for our ideas to become "pure" then we need something that is above the idea, and since we all have the same idea (just different things inside it) then we will never come to a common truth that is true to everybody (except, maybe "we exist", but some doubt that others exist so...well...) - that is if nothing radical happens. I believe that the same principles that we follow can be found everywhere - in case that they are very good, but I still think that we can see the incomplete form of our ideas as well - as I think that each perfect is constantly going through it's own evolution (and we can only see the level on which we are). I think that there are alot to be learned from ourselves also though (don't think that one rules out the other in this case).
