Fun Stuff > BAND
Folk Music and the Environment
Jackie Blue:
Well, I could take a cue from Future Sound of London and call it "the Isness", but honestly that just sounds kind of daft.
De_El:
You could call it "Om."
Or "David Bowie." Whatever you prefer, I suppose.
Alex C:
--- Quote from: zerodrone on 26 Jan 2008, 18:59 ---Well, yeah. My point was just that, sadly, a lot of people treat others like shit and improve their lives by doing so, and they have a right to make their soulless, Moloch-worshipping argument that "survival of the fittest" necessitates stepping on other people.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I hate it when people use natural selection to justify selfish behavior. It's transparently self-serving and in most cases it's just a sentiment that gets brought out to muddy the waters when someone calls them on their lazy ass manipulative bullshit. Besides, altruistic and cooperative behavior is just as useful for ensuring the ongoing fitness of a population as being hyper-dominant, or else there wouldn't be anyone for the so-called "fit" assholes to rip off or depend on when their own powers fail them. So even if you were such a massive tool that you think its perfectly fine to live life based on what you surmise to be the true goal of biological imperatives, you're still mostly being ignorant and/or a selfish dickhead.
John Curtin:
The Golden Rule (we're talking about "do unto others as you would have done unto yourself", right?) is a pretty decent ethical rule of thumb and works in the vast majority of situations but there are foreseeable results of it that most people would reject. Its problem is that all people have the same desires and wishes, which is roughly true in a large statistical sense but there are always outliers. My counterexample to it would be a person who wishes to be killed in a car accident. If that person follows the golden rule then there is no reason for him/her to not deliberately seek to cause a fatal car accident on the autobahn. S/he would have no problem if somebody else caused an accident killing them. It's not hard to come up with pretty extreme examples like this, because different people have different desires. On a less fatal scale, what's stopping a person who can't stand watching television from stealing his neighbour's TV and selling for money? Not the golden rule, unless we narrow the definition of 'what you would have done' to 'what you would have done unto yourself if you were the other' in which case there's not much to be done unless you can read minds, and still gives absurd results: what if the other person wants you to help him/her kill somebody?
I'm not saying it's not a wonderful rule; it works in pretty much every "normal" situation involving "normal" people (whatever that means), as well as a large majority of "abnormal" situations (for instance it can't justify totalitarianism or genocide). But it's not effective as a singular ethical code. It can't solve quandaries of competing interests, such as in the case where a pregnant woman's life can only be saved by an abortion.
So yeah, it's good in most situations but to be honest it doesn't really help in the areas where ethics are most needed. Most people have a pretty good intuitive idea that stealing is bad.
As for "natural selection", that's not an ethical justification for anything. It's simply a truistic observation: things that are better equipped to survive will survive more. It's in a way a form of begging the question: I am selfish because if I am not then natural selection will kick in and I won't be as well off as I would be if I am selfish. I am selfish because I want to do better than other people. I am selfish because I am selfish. Selfishness is being used justify selfishness.
supersheep:
--- Quote from: zerodrone on 26 Jan 2008, 17:41 ---That doesn't account for some phenomena, such as convergent fables amongst geographically separated populations.
--- End quote ---
True, but there are plenty of other explanations for this - such as parallel evolutions of stories, or genetic predispositions towards these stories (or interpreting certain events in a certain way so as to bring out these particular fables). Not saying that these are the actual explanations, just that it is possible that the divergence of stories is not down to us sharing a mass unconsciousness.
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