Udayama,
It, altruism, is a perfectly good response in some common game situations and that is why we see it in nature. However the game is always changing. Once you are aware of a tactic in use by the "competition" you can exploit that fact and gain an advantage, but the game then changes.
We can understand pack mentality and use it to turn wolves into dogs to do our bidding, then destroy the wild predator, destroying the ecology of vast swathes of the planet as a result. Later we might want the wolf back.
Once you have everyone going along with the "golden rule", the next step is to cheat, grab the advantage and treat the rest as peasants.
All of that may well be true, but I was responding to the charge of just asserting altruism to being the default position for human behaviour when in fact it’s well demonstrated and documented in the literature in our and in many other species.
It seems to me that you're mixing up two different things here - firstly, the technical matter of being able to decide on which abstract models best fit observed events and, secondly, the matter of being wrong or right on moral issues which really depends on understanding of each others emotions and desires and agreeing objectives.
I don’t think so. Rather I was thinking specifically of the claims of
fact made on the basis of faith – “god”, “heaven/hell” etc – and suggesting that such claims are no more likely to be true than just guessing. Absent a method of any kind to test these claims of fact, that doesn’t seem an unreasonable position to take to me. That’s your “which abstract models best fit observed events” bit.
Morality – judgments about what’s “good” and “bad” – on the other hand, are a different matter, albeit often situated on claims of fact. For this purpose though it’s a second order issue: “homosexuality is wrong because god says so” is situated on the claimed fact of “God”, and so I dismiss the rationale before we get to the outcome.
"Faith" here will get better (in the sense of more feeling happier) results than guessing because it will be based on discussion following agreement (or indoctrination) of some basic framework.
I’m not so sure about that. First, some of the most vehemently “faithful” here seem to me to be least happy posters – thoroughly bitter and twisted, hateful towards those who don’t share their opinions etc. Second though, faith claims of fact are in a different category from concerns about what makes us happier or not (which brings us back to the atheism/antitheism category error). What I think to be true and what I want to be true are very different things.
This is correct but means that the nutcase bomber being just as "right", in his/her own eyes, as you are in yours. In fact they feel morally superior just because of their belief in a god and absolute morality.
Yes – in their eyes they are morally correct; in my eyes I’m morally correct. How could it be otherwise? In the absence of an empirical measure for “moral correctness” that must be the case, just as Fred thinks Kylie’s “I Should Be So Lucky” is musical genius and Mary thinks it’s crap. The best I can hope for therefore is to be sufficiently persuasive to convince more people to share my opinion than the ISIS bomber is to persuade people of his.
I don’t have a problem with this because I don’t claim an absolute, gold standard for moral good/bad so I’m fully aware that – when all said and done – it’s all intuition and reason leading to opinion with no pretence at objectivity to underpin it.
Which game you play and how you play it is your own choice, to the extent that, in a deterministic universe, you have one.
Yes it is – but that doesn’t prevent me from being both an atheist and an antitheist. I play the hand I’m dealt. The problem with the deterministic discussion here is that it’s going nuclear – any discussion about art or politics or philosophy or
anything – could be met with the same reply of, “but it’s all deterministic isn’t it?” to which the only answer is, “yes, but so what?”
