101–110 of 127 posts
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Hurting other people is an instinct.
Citation? I was under the impression that humans do not have instincts.
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But wouldn't it be awesome if one showed up and made an insightful contribution to the conversation? If I were a woman who had lost a limb in combat and had had a higher than average number of boyfriends, I think I would probably feel quite insulted that people were assuming I was unable to reason logically about the OP's premise.
In this case, wasn't the poster assuming that you (the slut-shamed landmine victim) were unable to avoid reasoning correctly? Without taking sides here, it seems as if the poster was saying "you're wrong about X, therefore you couldn't be part of group Y that would know about X".
I'll say this: anyone who goes around using sexual assault victims and landmine amputees for their analogies is just asking for it.
... I'd love to read this, but there does not appear to be a way to read the full article on an iPad.
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Citation? I was under the impression that humans do not have instincts.
Humans are just another species of animals, why wouldn't they have an instinct? The only difference is the cultural conditioning, which suppresses instinct behavior.
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Humans are just another species of animals, why wouldn't they have an instinct? The only difference is the cultural conditioning, which suppresses instinct behavior.
Because humans have such a capacity for learning, instincts would serve no purpose. Instincts are rigid and humans on the contrary are very adaptable. It appears to me that the scientific consensus is that there are no human instincts, but if you believe otherwise why don't you cite an example?
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Well, it's not a direct causal connection -- that's how we use "and" in English -- but basically, moral responsibility is commutative. Bears don't have a responsibility towards us: they're bears, they don't realize it's wrong to eat hikers. And accordingly, we don't have a responsibility towards bears: If there's a bear that's eating hikers, we don't try to have a conversation with it, we shoot it and move on.
That's a ridiculous example, and in fact it proves the opposite. Notice that we only shoot bears that are actually eating hikers, even though no bear actually have moral responsibility toward us; that's because we as a society do feel moral responsibility towards bears (and animals in general), and therefore avoid shooting them except when required. We certainly don't feel anywhere near the same moral responsibility…
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Although tempting, debating the meaning of empathy is probably not a beneficial contribution to this HN thread. But I will say, the initial emotional response (for ex. feeling sad someone was harmed) is largely out of our control. But spending time feeling bad after the fact is a controllable state, and is the basis of a large amount of psychological and behavioral therapy.
Although tempting, debating the meaning of empathy is probably not a beneficial contribution to this HN thread. Surely, given the subject, it is extremely relevant.
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This is a perverted view of history. In fact, in small hunter-gatherer tribes it was easier to keep track of each other and hold each other accountable, so crossing someone would be risky. Today, with large societies that are increasingly anonymous, one can more easily get away with screwing people over--you can always move someplace else. So I don't think being nasty is particularly natural for humans, it just comes…
If nastiness wasn't natural, it would take more than being able to get away with it to bring it out.
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That's a ridiculous example, and in fact it proves the opposite. Notice that we only shoot bears that are actually eating hikers, even though no bear actually have moral responsibility toward us; that's because we as a society do feel moral responsibility towards bears (and animals in general), and therefore avoid shooting them except when required. We certainly don't feel anywhere near the same moral responsibility…
I don't know if religion is such an important impediment to moral responsibility to animals. I think capitalism is more important namely because of factory farming. Most people don't want to know about it and wouldn't stop eating meat or pay twice as much to avoid it. Factory farming is completely hidden from people in cities, so people don't empathize with it as much.
Shame they took it so far with her though