Eliezer: Are you really that sure that the ethical impulse you speak of is due to nature?
I am probably not alone in suggesting that it is due to nurture. It may seem to you that the ethical override is as hard-wired in you as hunger or thirst, but it may be that what is actually hardwired is not an ethical override. It is the listen-to-your-parents override.
It is kind of peculiar, is it not?, that ethic overrides such as you describe seem to be common among people who began their lives in religion, but not quite as common, and not quite as overriding, in people who did not. Contrast the principled attitudes of uptight religious people with those who were raised without stories of hell and damnation to scare them. Which type of person can be expected to avoid sex until they’re married? And what for? A hard-wired ethical override? Or because evolution taught us that if parents tell us not to eat certain berries, we should not, or we will die?
I don’t think that the ethical override you speak of is nearly as common as you purport. You only need to venture into a suitable part of Africa, where your head will be removed for the slightest of reasons, or into communities which raise their children ways quite dissimilar to how Catholic or Jewish children are raised.
Many of us have the ethical override because we are designed to internalize, on pain of death, the serious lessons taught by our environments. Remove the environmental lesson, and the ethical override disappears.
Eliezer: Are you really that sure that the ethical impulse you speak of is due to nature?
I am probably not alone in suggesting that it is due to nurture. It may seem to you that the ethical override is as hard-wired in you as hunger or thirst, but it may be that what is actually hardwired is not an ethical override. It is the listen-to-your-parents override.
It is kind of peculiar, is it not?, that ethic overrides such as you describe seem to be common among people who began their lives in religion, but not quite as common, and not quite as overriding, in people who did not. Contrast the principled attitudes of uptight religious people with those who were raised without stories of hell and damnation to scare them. Which type of person can be expected to avoid sex until they’re married? And what for? A hard-wired ethical override? Or because evolution taught us that if parents tell us not to eat certain berries, we should not, or we will die?
I don’t think that the ethical override you speak of is nearly as common as you purport. You only need to venture into a suitable part of Africa, where your head will be removed for the slightest of reasons, or into communities which raise their children ways quite dissimilar to how Catholic or Jewish children are raised.
Many of us have the ethical override because we are designed to internalize, on pain of death, the serious lessons taught by our environments. Remove the environmental lesson, and the ethical override disappears.