I think it’s pretty clear that empathy has flaws and occasionally leads to unethical behavior, but it may help somewhat “cognitively disadvantaged” people act in a less evil way, maybe. Emotions as a whole are not necessary for morality if there is very high intelligence to really understand ethics in a conceptual level. Emotions by themselves also can never sustain ethical behavior without this conceptual understanding. Although you could argue that empathy only works well with understanding of ethics, since empathy leads to errors for example in the Trolley experiment or in abortion, understanding of ethics is better off without empathy. Ethical rules or laws may serve as guidelines and threats for people to act in ways that are predicted to be favorable (no need to invoke deontology, I think, as two-level utilitarianism allows for rules), but emotional people would be all the more prone to breaking them, I suppose.
The universal ethics of the universe do happen to exist. The universal ethics has a positive value which is feeling good and a negative value which is feeling bad. These are physical phenomena which in their essential form consist in the activation of the neural areas that produce them in the brain, in our case. It applies to all sentient creatures in the universe since although they may not have human emotions they may have good or bad feelings, by their own classification. Other values are either reducible to these or invalid. For example, survival as a value is dependent on having good feelings, therefore it is reducible to them. The proof is that in eternal hell, for example, survival acquires a highly negative value. Another example is knowledge, it is reducible to increasing our ability to solve the causes of our feeling bad and increase our power of feeling good. Without it, knowledge by itself is as worthless as a boring class of useless information… if we had all the knowledge in the universe, but lived as an isolated paraplegic in a prison, then what? This wouldn’t change anything therefore knowledge too is reducible to feeling good. Also, personal identity is a Darwinian delusion, so egotism should not be accepted as reasonable, although this ethics can work in an individual framework. Rules or laws may be accepted for humans to manage ignorance and incapability to make correct ethical decisions, on the basis that these laws increase global value.
I think it’s pretty clear that empathy has flaws and occasionally leads to unethical behavior, but it may help somewhat “cognitively disadvantaged” people act in a less evil way, maybe. Emotions as a whole are not necessary for morality if there is very high intelligence to really understand ethics in a conceptual level. Emotions by themselves also can never sustain ethical behavior without this conceptual understanding. Although you could argue that empathy only works well with understanding of ethics, since empathy leads to errors for example in the Trolley experiment or in abortion, understanding of ethics is better off without empathy. Ethical rules or laws may serve as guidelines and threats for people to act in ways that are predicted to be favorable (no need to invoke deontology, I think, as two-level utilitarianism allows for rules), but emotional people would be all the more prone to breaking them, I suppose.
The universal ethics of the universe do happen to exist. The universal ethics has a positive value which is feeling good and a negative value which is feeling bad. These are physical phenomena which in their essential form consist in the activation of the neural areas that produce them in the brain, in our case. It applies to all sentient creatures in the universe since although they may not have human emotions they may have good or bad feelings, by their own classification. Other values are either reducible to these or invalid. For example, survival as a value is dependent on having good feelings, therefore it is reducible to them. The proof is that in eternal hell, for example, survival acquires a highly negative value. Another example is knowledge, it is reducible to increasing our ability to solve the causes of our feeling bad and increase our power of feeling good. Without it, knowledge by itself is as worthless as a boring class of useless information… if we had all the knowledge in the universe, but lived as an isolated paraplegic in a prison, then what? This wouldn’t change anything therefore knowledge too is reducible to feeling good. Also, personal identity is a Darwinian delusion, so egotism should not be accepted as reasonable, although this ethics can work in an individual framework. Rules or laws may be accepted for humans to manage ignorance and incapability to make correct ethical decisions, on the basis that these laws increase global value.