How morally different are ISIS fighters from us? If we had a similar upbringing would we think it morally correct to kill Yazidi children for having the “wrong” religion? Or might genetics play a role in our differing moral views? I find it hard to think of ISIS members as human, or at least I don’t want to belong to the same species as them. But yes I do realize that some of my direct ancestors almost certainly did horrible, horrible things by my current moral standards.
How morally different are ISIS fighters from us? If we had a similar upbringing would we think it morally correct to kill Yazidi children for having the “wrong” religion?
A relevant factor which is (intentionally or not) ignored by American media is that, from the point of view of pious Muslims, Yazidis are satanists.
To quote Wikipedia (Taus Melek is basically the chief deity for Yazidis, God the Creator being passive and uninvolved with the world):
As a demiurge figure, Tawûsê Melek is often identified by orthodox Muslims as a Shaitan (Satan), a Muslim term denoting a devil or demon who deceives true believers. The Islamic tradition regarding the fall of “Shaitan” from Grace is in fact very similar to the Yazidi story of Malek Taus – that is, the Jinn who refused to submit to God by bowing to Adam is celebrated as Tawûsê Melek by Yazidis, but the Islamic version of the same story curses the same Jinn who refused to submit as becoming Satan.[38] Thus, the Yazidi have been accused of devil worship.
So, what’s the Christianity’s historical record for attitude towards devil worshippers?
or at least I don’t want to belong to the same species as them
Any particular reason you feel this way about the Sunni armed groups, but not about, say, Russian communists, or Mao’s Chinese, or Pol Pot’s Cambodians, or Rwandans, or… it’s a very long list, y’know?
from the point of view of pious Muslims, Yazidis are satanists [...] what’s the Christianity’s historical record for attitude towards devil worshippers?
The closest parallel might be to Catharism, a Gnostic-influenced sect treating the God of the Old Testament as an entity separate from, and opposed to, the God of the New, and which was denounced as a “religion of Satan” by contemporary Christian authorities. That was bloodily suppressed in the Albigensian Crusade. Manicheanism among other early Gnostic groups was similarly accused as well, but it’s much older and less well documented, and reached its greatest popularity (and experienced its greatest persecutions) in areas without Christian majorities.
A few explicitly Satanist groups have popped up since the 18th century, but they’ve universally been small and insignificant, and don’t seem to have experienced much persecution outside of social disapproval. Outside of fundamentalist circles they seem to be treated as immature and insincere more than anything else.
On the other hand, unfounded accusations of Satanism seem to be fertile ground for moral panics—from the witch trials of the early modern period (which, Wiccan lore notwithstanding, almost certainly didn’t target any particular belief system) to the more recent Satanic ritual abuse panics.
The persecution of witches targeted individuals or small groups, not (as far as modern history knows) members of any particular religion; and the charges leveled at alleged witches usually involved sorcerous misbehavior of various kinds (blighting crops, causing storms, bringing pestilence...) rather than purely religious accusations. Indeed, for most of the medieval era the Church denied the existence of witches (though, as we’ve seen above, it was happy to persecute real heretics): witch trials only gained substantial clerical backing well into the early modern period.
Charges of being in league with the Devil were a necessary part of accusations against the witches because, I think, sorcery was considered to be possible for humans only through the Devil’s help. The witches’ covens were perceived as actively worshipping the Devil.
I agree that it’s not the exact parallel, but do you think a whole community (with towns and everything) of devil worshippers could have survived in Europe or North America for any significant period of time? Compared to Islam, Christianity was just more quick and efficient about eliminating them.
I agree that it’s not the exact parallel, but do you think a whole community (with towns and everything) of devil worshippers could have survived in Europe or North America for any significant period of time?
That veers more into speculation than I’m really comfortable with. That said, though, I think you’re giving this devil-worship thing a bit more weight than it should have; sure, some aspects of Melek Taus are probably cognate to the Islamic Shaitan myth, but Yazidi religion as a whole seems to draw in traditions from several largely independent evolutionary paths. We’re not dealing here with the almost certainly innocent targets of witch trials or with overenthusiastic black metal fans, nor even with an organized Islamic heresy, but with a full-blown syncretic religion.
No similar religions of comparable age survive in Christianity’s present sphere of influence, though the example of Gnosticism suggests that the early evolution of the Western branch of Abrahamic faith was pretty damn complicated, and that many were wiped out in Christianity’s early expansion or in medieval persecutions. There are a lot of younger ones, however, especially in the New World: Santeria comes to mind.
That’s only tangentially relevant to the historical parallels I’m trying to outline, though.
Oh, it certainly is, but the issue is not what we are dealing with—the issue is how the ISIS fighters perceive it.
The whole Middle-East-to-India region is full of smallish religions which look to be, basically, outcomes of “Throw pieces of several distinct religious traditions together, blend on high for a while, then let sit for a few centuries”.
Oh, it certainly is, but the issue is not what we are dealing with—the issue is how the ISIS fighters perceive it.
I’m pretty sure their perceptions are closer to an Albigensian Crusader’s attitude toward Catharism—or even your average Chick tract fan’s attitude toward Catholicism—than some shit-kicking medieval peasant’s grudge toward the old man down the lane who once scammed him for a folk healing ritual that invoked a couple of barbarous names for shock value. Treating religious opponents as devil-worshippers is pretty much built into the basic structure of (premodern, and some modern) Christianity and Islam, whether or not there’s anything to the accusation (though as I note above, the charge is at least as sticky for Catharism as for the Yazidi). The competing presence of a structured religion that’s related closely enough to be uncomfortable but not closely enough to be a heresy per se… that’s a little more distinctive.
Although I’m a libertarian now, in my youth I was very left-wing and can understand the appeal of communism. For many of the others on the long list, yes they do feel very other to me.
I too was very left-wing when I was young, and now I feel communism does belong with the others on that list. It fills the same mental space as a religion, and is believed in much the same way (IME).
It’s a little harder to say about the ISIS guys, but I think personality wise many of us are a lot like the Al Qaeda leadership. Ideology and Jihad for it appeals.
Most people don’t take ideas too seriously. We do. And I think it’s largely genetic.
I find it hard to think of ISIS members as human
Human, All Too Human.
Historically, massacring The Other is the rule, not the exception. You don’t even need to be particularly ideological for that. People who just go with the flow of their community will set The Other on fire in a public square, and have a picnic watching. Bring their kids. Take grandma out for the big show.
I don’t think that’s the test. It’s not that they’d give the same answers to any particular question.
I think the test would be a greater likelihood to be unshakeable according to adjustments along moral modalities that move others who are not so ideological. How “principled” are you? How “extreme” a situation are you willing to assent to, relative to the general population? Largely, how far can you override morality cognitively?
I wonder if LW readers and Jihadists would give similar answers to the Trolley problem.
A hundred bucks says the answer is “no”. Religious fundamentalism is not known to encourage consequential ethics.
There may be certain parallels—I’ve read that engineers and scientists, or students of those disciplines, are disproportionately represented among jihadists—but they’re probably deeper than that.
A hundred bucks says the answer is “no”. Religious fundamentalism is not known to encourage consequential ethics.
That might depend on the consequences.
A runaway trolley is careering down the tracks and will kill a single infidel if it continues. If you pull a lever, it will be switched to a side track and kill five infidels. Do you pull the lever?
The lever is broken, but beside you on the bridge is a very fat man, one of the faithful. Do you push him off the bridge to deflect the trolley and kill five infidels, knowing that he will have his reward for his sacrifice in heaven?
I’ve read that engineers and scientists, or students of those disciplines, are disproportionately represented among jihadists
I’ve also read this, but I want to know if it corrects for the fact that the educational systems in many of the countries that produce most jihadis don’t encourage study of the humanities and certain social sciences. Is it really engineers in particular, or is the educated-but-stifled who happen overwhelmingly to be engineers in these countries?
Part of “us” is our culturally transmitted values.
My impression is that ISIS is mostly a new thing—it’s a matter of relatively new memes taken up by adolescents and adults rather than generational transmission.
I don’t think it’s practical to see one’s enemies, even those who behave vilely and are ideologically committed to continuing to do so, as non-human. To see them as non-human is to commit oneself as framing them as incomprehensible. More exactly, the usual outcomes seems to be “all they understand is force” or “there’s nothing to do but kill them”. which makes it difficult to think of how to deal with them if victory by violence isn’t a current option.
I was talking to someone from Tennessee once, and he said something along the lines of: “When I’m in a bar in western Tennessee, I drink with the guy from western Tennessee and fight the guy from eastern Tennessee. When I’m in a bar in eastern Tennessee, I drink with the guy from Tennessee and fight the guy from Georgia. When I’m in a bar in Georgia, I drink with the guy from the South and fight the guy from New England.”
It’s possible that more inbred clannish societies have smaller moral circles than Western outbreeders.
The history of the European takeover of the Americas and the damn near genocide of somewhere between tens and hundreds of millions of people in the process, and the history of the resultant societies, should disavow everyone here of any laughable claims of ethnic superiority in this regard. I also strongly suspect that the European diaspora of the Americas and elsewhere just hasn’t had enough time for the massive patchwork of tribalisms to inevitably crystallize out of the liquid wave of disruptive post-genocide settlement that happened over the last few hundred years, and instead we only have a few very large groups in this hemisphere that are coming to hate each other so far. Though sometimes I suspect the small coal mining town my parents escaped from could be induced to have race riots between the Poles and Italians.
Also… Germany. Enough said.
EDIT: Not directed at you, bramflakes, but at the whole thread here… how in all hell am I seeing so much preening smug superiority on display here? Humans are brutal murderous monkeys under the proper conditions. No one here is an exception at all except through accidents of space and time, and even now we all reading this are benefiting from systems which exploit and kill others and are for the most part totally fine with them or have ready justifications for them. This is a human thing.
Humans are brutal murderous monkeys under the proper conditions.
They are also sweetness and light under the proper conditions.
No one here is an exception at all except through accidents of space and time
You seem to be claiming that certain conditions—those not producing brutal murderous monkeys—are accidents of space and time, but certain others—those producing brutal murderous monkeys—are not. That “brutal murderous monkeys” is our essence and any deviation from that mere accident, in the philosophical sense. That the former is our fundamental nature and the latter mere superficial froth.
There is no actual observation that can be made to distinguish “proper conditions” from “parochial circumstance”, “essence” from “accident”, “fundamental” from “superficial”.
Chimpanzees tribes, given enough resources, can pass from an equilibrium based on violence to an equilibrium based on niceness and sharing. I cannot seem to find, despite extensive search, the relevant experiment, but I remember it vividly.
It visibly does. If you’re not sitting in a war zone, just look around you. Are the people around you engaged in brutally murdering each other?
This is not to say that the better parts of the world are perfect, but to look at those parts and moan about our brutally murderous monkey nature is self-indulgent posturing.
how in all hell am I seeing so much preening smug superiority on display here?
We have a right to feel morally superior to ISIS, although probably not on genetic grounds.
No one here is an exception at all except through accidents of space and time
But is this true? Do some people have genes which strongly predispose them against killing children. It feels to me like I do, but I recognize my inability to properly determine this.
and even now we all reading this are benefiting from systems which exploit and kill others and are for the most part totally fine with them or have ready justifications for them.
As a free market economist I disagree with this. The U.S. economy does not derive wealth from the killing of others, although as the word “exploit” is hard to define I’m not sure what you mean by that.
We have a right to feel morally superior to ISIS, although probably not on genetic grounds.
The Stanford prison experiment suggests that you don’t need that much to get people to do immoral things. ISIS evolved over years of hard civil war.
ISIS also partly has their present power because the US first destabilised Iraq and later allowed funding of Syrian rebels.
The US was very free to avoid fighting the Iraq war. ISIS fighters get killed if they don’t fight their civil war.
The Stanford prison experiment suggests that you don’t need that much to get people to do immoral things.
The Stanford prison “experiment” was a LARP session that got out of control because the GM actively encouraged the players to be assholes to each other.
I am very confident that a college student version of me taking part in a similar experiment as a guard would not have been cruel to the prisoners in part because the high school me (who at the time was very left wing) decided to not stand up for the pledge of allegiance even though everyone else in his high school regularly did and this me refused to participate in a gym game named war-ball because I objected to the name.
I didn’t stand for the Pledge in school either, but in retrospect I think that had less to do with politics or virtue and more to do with an uncontrollable urge to look contrarian.
I can see myself going either way in the Stanford prison experiment, which probably means I’d have abused the prisoners.
Suppressing bad instincts. Seems to make sense to me and describe a real thing that’s often a big deal in culture and civilization. All it needs to be coherent is that people can have both values and instincts, that the values aren’t necessarily that which is gained by acting on instincts, and that people have some capability to reflect on both and not always follow their instincts.
For the software analogy, imagine an optimization algorithm that has built-in heuristics, runtime generated heuristics, optimization goals, and an ability to recognize that a built-in heuristic will work poorly to reach the optimization goal in some domain and a different runtime generated heuristic will work better.
The usual. The decisions that you make result from a weighted sum of many forces (reasons, motivations, etc.). Some of these forces/motivations are biologically hardwired—almost all humans have them and they are mostly invariant among different cultures. The fact that they exist does not mean that they always play the decisive role.
You appear to be implying that all (or nearly all) motivations that are hardwired are universal and vice versa, neither of which seems obvious to me.
Hm. I would think that somewhere between many and most of the universal terminal motivations are hardwired. I am not sure why would they be universal otherwise (similar environment can produce similar responses but I don’t see why would it produce similar motivations).
And in reverse, all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal since the humanity is a single species.
Hm. I would think that somewhere between many and most of the universal terminal motivations are hardwired. I am not sure why would they be universal otherwise (similar environment can produce similar responses but I don’t see why would it produce similar motivations).
Well, about a century ago religion was pretty much universal, and now a sizeable fraction of the population (especially in northern Eurasia) is atheist, even if genetics presumably haven’t changed that much. How do we know there aren’t more things like that?
And in reverse, all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal since the humanity is a single species.
I’m aware of the theoretical arguments to expect that same species → same hardwired motivations, but I think they have shortcomings (see the comment thread to that article) and the empirical evidence seems to be against (see this or this).
Well, about a century ago religion was pretty much universal
Was it? Methinks you forgot about places like China, if you go by usual definitions of “religion”. Besides, it has been argued that the pull towards spiritual/mysterious/numinous/godhead/etc. is hardwired in some way.
I think they have shortcomings
This is a “to which degree” argument. Your link says “Different human populations are likely for biological reasons to have slightly different minds” and I will certainly agree. The issue is what “slightly” means and how significant it is.
This is a “to which degree” argument. Your link says “Different human populations are likely for biological reasons to have slightly different minds” and I will certainly agree. The issue is what “slightly” means and how significant it is.
Well, that’s a different claim from “all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal” (emphasis added) in the great-gradparent.
If you want to split hairs :-) all motivations hardwired into Homo Sapiens should be universal. Motivations hardwired only into certain subsets of the species will not be universal.
Do they have terminal value as humans (ignoring their instrumental value)? Yes, they do.
How about their instrumental value? Uhm, probably negative, since they seem to spend a lot of time killing other humans.
If we had a similar upbringing would we think it morally correct to kill Yazidi children for having the “wrong” religion? Or might genetics play a role in our differing moral views?
Probably yes. I think there can be a genetic influence, but there is much more of “monkey see, monkey do” in humans.
If we had a similar upbringing would we think it morally correct to kill Yazidi children for having the “wrong” religion?
The question is irrelevant. If it is wrong to behead children for having the “wrong” religion, that is not affected by fictional scenarios in which “we” believed differently. (It’s not clear what “we” actually means there, but that’s a separate philosophical issue.) Truth is not found by first seeing what you believe, and then saying, “I believe this, therefore it is true.”
Or might genetics play a role in our differing moral views?
Focusing on “morally correct” might prevent a lot of understanding of the situation. People in war usually don’t do things because they are morally correct.
How morally different are ISIS fighters from us? If we had a similar upbringing would we think it morally correct to kill Yazidi children for having the “wrong” religion? Or might genetics play a role in our differing moral views? I find it hard to think of ISIS members as human, or at least I don’t want to belong to the same species as them. But yes I do realize that some of my direct ancestors almost certainly did horrible, horrible things by my current moral standards.
That’s how the ISIS fighters feel about the Yazidi.
Yes, an uncomfortable symmetry.
Symmetry? Do you want to behead the children of ISIS fighters?
No, so I guess it’s not perfect symmetry.
What age are we talking about here? ISIS has been recruiting children as young as 9 and 10.
He finds their children human. Just not the ISIS fighters themselves.
Beware of refusing to believe undeniable reality just because it’s not nice.
Yes. But in in this case it might be an inkling that the credibility of the sources may be the cause.
A relevant factor which is (intentionally or not) ignored by American media is that, from the point of view of pious Muslims, Yazidis are satanists.
To quote Wikipedia (Taus Melek is basically the chief deity for Yazidis, God the Creator being passive and uninvolved with the world):
So, what’s the Christianity’s historical record for attitude towards devil worshippers?
Any particular reason you feel this way about the Sunni armed groups, but not about, say, Russian communists, or Mao’s Chinese, or Pol Pot’s Cambodians, or Rwandans, or… it’s a very long list, y’know?
The closest parallel might be to Catharism, a Gnostic-influenced sect treating the God of the Old Testament as an entity separate from, and opposed to, the God of the New, and which was denounced as a “religion of Satan” by contemporary Christian authorities. That was bloodily suppressed in the Albigensian Crusade. Manicheanism among other early Gnostic groups was similarly accused as well, but it’s much older and less well documented, and reached its greatest popularity (and experienced its greatest persecutions) in areas without Christian majorities.
A few explicitly Satanist groups have popped up since the 18th century, but they’ve universally been small and insignificant, and don’t seem to have experienced much persecution outside of social disapproval. Outside of fundamentalist circles they seem to be treated as immature and insincere more than anything else.
On the other hand, unfounded accusations of Satanism seem to be fertile ground for moral panics—from the witch trials of the early modern period (which, Wiccan lore notwithstanding, almost certainly didn’t target any particular belief system) to the more recent Satanic ritual abuse panics.
I would probably say that the closest parallel is the persecution of witches in medieval Europe (including but not limited to the witch trials).
The persecution of witches targeted individuals or small groups, not (as far as modern history knows) members of any particular religion; and the charges leveled at alleged witches usually involved sorcerous misbehavior of various kinds (blighting crops, causing storms, bringing pestilence...) rather than purely religious accusations. Indeed, for most of the medieval era the Church denied the existence of witches (though, as we’ve seen above, it was happy to persecute real heretics): witch trials only gained substantial clerical backing well into the early modern period.
Seems pretty different to me.
Charges of being in league with the Devil were a necessary part of accusations against the witches because, I think, sorcery was considered to be possible for humans only through the Devil’s help. The witches’ covens were perceived as actively worshipping the Devil.
I agree that it’s not the exact parallel, but do you think a whole community (with towns and everything) of devil worshippers could have survived in Europe or North America for any significant period of time? Compared to Islam, Christianity was just more quick and efficient about eliminating them.
That veers more into speculation than I’m really comfortable with. That said, though, I think you’re giving this devil-worship thing a bit more weight than it should have; sure, some aspects of Melek Taus are probably cognate to the Islamic Shaitan myth, but Yazidi religion as a whole seems to draw in traditions from several largely independent evolutionary paths. We’re not dealing here with the almost certainly innocent targets of witch trials or with overenthusiastic black metal fans, nor even with an organized Islamic heresy, but with a full-blown syncretic religion.
No similar religions of comparable age survive in Christianity’s present sphere of influence, though the example of Gnosticism suggests that the early evolution of the Western branch of Abrahamic faith was pretty damn complicated, and that many were wiped out in Christianity’s early expansion or in medieval persecutions. There are a lot of younger ones, however, especially in the New World: Santeria comes to mind.
That’s only tangentially relevant to the historical parallels I’m trying to outline, though.
Oh, it certainly is, but the issue is not what we are dealing with—the issue is how the ISIS fighters perceive it.
The whole Middle-East-to-India region is full of smallish religions which look to be, basically, outcomes of “Throw pieces of several distinct religious traditions together, blend on high for a while, then let sit for a few centuries”.
I’m pretty sure their perceptions are closer to an Albigensian Crusader’s attitude toward Catharism—or even your average Chick tract fan’s attitude toward Catholicism—than some shit-kicking medieval peasant’s grudge toward the old man down the lane who once scammed him for a folk healing ritual that invoked a couple of barbarous names for shock value. Treating religious opponents as devil-worshippers is pretty much built into the basic structure of (premodern, and some modern) Christianity and Islam, whether or not there’s anything to the accusation (though as I note above, the charge is at least as sticky for Catharism as for the Yazidi). The competing presence of a structured religion that’s related closely enough to be uncomfortable but not closely enough to be a heresy per se… that’s a little more distinctive.
It hasn’t been ignored by the American media. I’ve heard it multiple times. I don’t think the term used was Satanist, but “devil worshippers”.
Although I’m a libertarian now, in my youth I was very left-wing and can understand the appeal of communism. For many of the others on the long list, yes they do feel very other to me.
I too was very left-wing when I was young, and now I feel communism does belong with the others on that list. It fills the same mental space as a religion, and is believed in much the same way (IME).
Take some ISIS propaganda and do s/infidels/capitalist exploiters, s/Allah/the revolution, etc.
First you might want to consider propaganda.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/ten-commandments-war-t52907/index.html?s=8387131b8a98f6ee7e6ba74cce570d8e
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~mkinnear/16_Falsehood_in_wartime.pdf
It’s a little harder to say about the ISIS guys, but I think personality wise many of us are a lot like the Al Qaeda leadership. Ideology and Jihad for it appeals.
Most people don’t take ideas too seriously. We do. And I think it’s largely genetic.
Human, All Too Human.
Historically, massacring The Other is the rule, not the exception. You don’t even need to be particularly ideological for that. People who just go with the flow of their community will set The Other on fire in a public square, and have a picnic watching. Bring their kids. Take grandma out for the big show.
Excellent point. I wonder if LW readers and Jihadists would give similar answers to the Trolley problem.
I don’t think that’s the test. It’s not that they’d give the same answers to any particular question.
I think the test would be a greater likelihood to be unshakeable according to adjustments along moral modalities that move others who are not so ideological. How “principled” are you? How “extreme” a situation are you willing to assent to, relative to the general population? Largely, how far can you override morality cognitively?
A hundred bucks says the answer is “no”. Religious fundamentalism is not known to encourage consequential ethics.
There may be certain parallels—I’ve read that engineers and scientists, or students of those disciplines, are disproportionately represented among jihadists—but they’re probably deeper than that.
Also disproportionately represented as the principals in the American Revolution. Inventors, engineers, scientists, architects.
Franklin,Jefferson, Paine, and Washington all had serious inventions. That’s pretty much the first string of the revolution.
That might depend on the consequences.
A runaway trolley is careering down the tracks and will kill a single infidel if it continues. If you pull a lever, it will be switched to a side track and kill five infidels. Do you pull the lever?
The lever is broken, but beside you on the bridge is a very fat man, one of the faithful. Do you push him off the bridge to deflect the trolley and kill five infidels, knowing that he will have his reward for his sacrifice in heaven?
I’ve also read this, but I want to know if it corrects for the fact that the educational systems in many of the countries that produce most jihadis don’t encourage study of the humanities and certain social sciences. Is it really engineers in particular, or is the educated-but-stifled who happen overwhelmingly to be engineers in these countries?
Part of “us” is our culturally transmitted values.
My impression is that ISIS is mostly a new thing—it’s a matter of relatively new memes taken up by adolescents and adults rather than generational transmission.
I don’t think it’s practical to see one’s enemies, even those who behave vilely and are ideologically committed to continuing to do so, as non-human. To see them as non-human is to commit oneself as framing them as incomprehensible. More exactly, the usual outcomes seems to be “all they understand is force” or “there’s nothing to do but kill them”. which makes it difficult to think of how to deal with them if victory by violence isn’t a current option.
On the contrary, that’s the attitude specifically trained in modern armies, US included. Otherwise not enough people shoot at the enemy :-/
You might not be in an army.
I’m not sure about modern armies, but ancient and even medieval armies certainly didn’t need this attitude to kill their enemies.
It’s possible that more inbred clannish societies have smaller moral circles than Western outbreeders.
Bedouin proverb
I was talking to someone from Tennessee once, and he said something along the lines of: “When I’m in a bar in western Tennessee, I drink with the guy from western Tennessee and fight the guy from eastern Tennessee. When I’m in a bar in eastern Tennessee, I drink with the guy from Tennessee and fight the guy from Georgia. When I’m in a bar in Georgia, I drink with the guy from the South and fight the guy from New England.”
The history of the European takeover of the Americas and the damn near genocide of somewhere between tens and hundreds of millions of people in the process, and the history of the resultant societies, should disavow everyone here of any laughable claims of ethnic superiority in this regard. I also strongly suspect that the European diaspora of the Americas and elsewhere just hasn’t had enough time for the massive patchwork of tribalisms to inevitably crystallize out of the liquid wave of disruptive post-genocide settlement that happened over the last few hundred years, and instead we only have a few very large groups in this hemisphere that are coming to hate each other so far. Though sometimes I suspect the small coal mining town my parents escaped from could be induced to have race riots between the Poles and Italians.
Also… Germany. Enough said.
EDIT: Not directed at you, bramflakes, but at the whole thread here… how in all hell am I seeing so much preening smug superiority on display here? Humans are brutal murderous monkeys under the proper conditions. No one here is an exception at all except through accidents of space and time, and even now we all reading this are benefiting from systems which exploit and kill others and are for the most part totally fine with them or have ready justifications for them. This is a human thing.
They are also sweetness and light under the proper conditions.
You seem to be claiming that certain conditions—those not producing brutal murderous monkeys—are accidents of space and time, but certain others—those producing brutal murderous monkeys—are not. That “brutal murderous monkeys” is our essence and any deviation from that mere accident, in the philosophical sense. That the former is our fundamental nature and the latter mere superficial froth.
There is no actual observation that can be made to distinguish “proper conditions” from “parochial circumstance”, “essence” from “accident”, “fundamental” from “superficial”.
Chimpanzees tribes, given enough resources, can pass from an equilibrium based on violence to an equilibrium based on niceness and sharing.
I cannot seem to find, despite extensive search, the relevant experiment, but I remember it vividly.
I guess the same thing can happen to humans too.
It visibly does. If you’re not sitting in a war zone, just look around you. Are the people around you engaged in brutally murdering each other?
This is not to say that the better parts of the world are perfect, but to look at those parts and moan about our brutally murderous monkey nature is self-indulgent posturing.
See “Can the Chain Still Hold You?”.
We have a right to feel morally superior to ISIS, although probably not on genetic grounds.
But is this true? Do some people have genes which strongly predispose them against killing children. It feels to me like I do, but I recognize my inability to properly determine this.
As a free market economist I disagree with this. The U.S. economy does not derive wealth from the killing of others, although as the word “exploit” is hard to define I’m not sure what you mean by that.
The Stanford prison experiment suggests that you don’t need that much to get people to do immoral things. ISIS evolved over years of hard civil war.
ISIS also partly has their present power because the US first destabilised Iraq and later allowed funding of Syrian rebels. The US was very free to avoid fighting the Iraq war. ISIS fighters get killed if they don’t fight their civil war.
The Stanford prison “experiment” was a LARP session that got out of control because the GM actively encouraged the players to be assholes to each other.
I agree with that interpretation of the experiment but “active encouragement” should count as “not that much.”
I am very confident that a college student version of me taking part in a similar experiment as a guard would not have been cruel to the prisoners in part because the high school me (who at the time was very left wing) decided to not stand up for the pledge of allegiance even though everyone else in his high school regularly did and this me refused to participate in a gym game named war-ball because I objected to the name.
I didn’t stand for the Pledge in school either, but in retrospect I think that had less to do with politics or virtue and more to do with an uncontrollable urge to look contrarian.
I can see myself going either way in the Stanford prison experiment, which probably means I’d have abused the prisoners.
But you aren’t that left wing anyone but go around teaching people to make decisions based on game theory.
I moved to the right in my 20s.
Who is “we”? and are you comparing individuals to an amorphous military-political movement?
Everyone has these genes. It’s just that some people can successfully override their biological programming :-/
Killing children is one of the stronger moral taboos, but a lot of kids are deliberately killed all over the world.
By the way, the US drone strikes in Pakistan are estimated to have killed 170-200 children.
“Every computer has this code. It’s just that some computers can successfully override their programming.”
What does this statement mean?
Suppressing bad instincts. Seems to make sense to me and describe a real thing that’s often a big deal in culture and civilization. All it needs to be coherent is that people can have both values and instincts, that the values aren’t necessarily that which is gained by acting on instincts, and that people have some capability to reflect on both and not always follow their instincts.
For the software analogy, imagine an optimization algorithm that has built-in heuristics, runtime generated heuristics, optimization goals, and an ability to recognize that a built-in heuristic will work poorly to reach the optimization goal in some domain and a different runtime generated heuristic will work better.
The usual. The decisions that you make result from a weighted sum of many forces (reasons, motivations, etc.). Some of these forces/motivations are biologically hardwired—almost all humans have them and they are mostly invariant among different cultures. The fact that they exist does not mean that they always play the decisive role.
You appear to be implying that all (or nearly all) motivations that are hardwired are universal and vice versa, neither of which seems obvious to me.
Hm. I would think that somewhere between many and most of the universal terminal motivations are hardwired. I am not sure why would they be universal otherwise (similar environment can produce similar responses but I don’t see why would it produce similar motivations).
And in reverse, all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal since the humanity is a single species.
Well, about a century ago religion was pretty much universal, and now a sizeable fraction of the population (especially in northern Eurasia) is atheist, even if genetics presumably haven’t changed that much. How do we know there aren’t more things like that?
I’m aware of the theoretical arguments to expect that same species → same hardwired motivations, but I think they have shortcomings (see the comment thread to that article) and the empirical evidence seems to be against (see this or this).
Was it? Methinks you forgot about places like China, if you go by usual definitions of “religion”. Besides, it has been argued that the pull towards spiritual/mysterious/numinous/godhead/etc. is hardwired in some way.
This is a “to which degree” argument. Your link says “Different human populations are likely for biological reasons to have slightly different minds” and I will certainly agree. The issue is what “slightly” means and how significant it is.
Well, that’s a different claim from “all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal” (emphasis added) in the great-gradparent.
If you want to split hairs :-) all motivations hardwired into Homo Sapiens should be universal. Motivations hardwired only into certain subsets of the species will not be universal.
If you mean motivations hardwired into all Homo Sapiens sure, but that’s tautological! :-)
Uhm, taboo “morally different”?
Are their memes repulsive to me? Yes, they are.
Do they have terminal value as humans (ignoring their instrumental value)? Yes, they do.
How about their instrumental value? Uhm, probably negative, since they seem to spend a lot of time killing other humans.
Probably yes. I think there can be a genetic influence, but there is much more of “monkey see, monkey do” in humans.
Here is a Vice documentary posted today about ISIS: https://news.vice.com/video/the-islamic-state-full-length
The question is irrelevant. If it is wrong to behead children for having the “wrong” religion, that is not affected by fictional scenarios in which “we” believed differently. (It’s not clear what “we” actually means there, but that’s a separate philosophical issue.) Truth is not found by first seeing what you believe, and then saying, “I believe this, therefore it is true.”
This question is also irrelevant.
Well, they are. Start from there.
Focusing on “morally correct” might prevent a lot of understanding of the situation. People in war usually don’t do things because they are morally correct.