4/11/19

The Concept of Human Moral Universals

Philosophy and psychology differ substantially in form and content. Linguistic or analytic philosophy is concerned with word, meanings, relationships and so forth. Contemporary philosophers I.M.O. tend toward nominalism instead of realism for word meanings. Words fall within linguistic ontologies, many of those can't have their meanings accurately translated into another ontology. Universals and particulars; terms familiar in logic- especially in regard to Platonism, are ideas that persist in social memory and in a realm of forms to Platonists, yet for philosophers like Saul Kripke words go so far as neo-Platonism perhaps with rigid designators retaining permanent meaning for quite a while, the realm of forms likely may not be regarded with too much belief.
If there is theoretically perfect behavior for a human being; morality and truth in-himself, just Jesus Christ ever had it. Everyone else falls short of that being temporal beings with innate drives based on consuming energy for growth. That behavior sometimes creates conflict. In nature animals eat one another for growth. Human are supposed to have had a great awakening in the Garden of Eden and learned to differentiate good from evil. They became self-conscious and thought to put on clothes. They learned to lie and dissimulate with language deceits. At some point they began to think it wrong to eat other humans, although God needed to provide rules about eating animals raw.
Humans grew and adapted behaviors and social interactive practices in differing environments and social challenges. Human morality or recurrent social behavior practices that are acceptable and workable for the given social group, adapted to the empirical challenges they experienced. Neither would all human social groups progress at the same rate. In some respects moral norms differed as much as the pace of technological growth.
The idea that Prof Bloom has that people are innately good seems a product of a privileged social class and society. Although good and evil have a subjective quality, one might want to regard some concepts such as murder as Universals.
A grandson of Nelson Rockefeller was visiting New Guinea about 1960 and reported an incident, if I recall correctly, where he was talking with two natives that wanted to sell him something. One clubbed the other to death in order to have an exclusive opportunity to make a sale. Rockefeller later disappeared there and his body was never found. He may have been one of the last westerners to fall victim to cannibalism. The practice of eating the dead persisted there until a few decades ago. It was a ritualized religious practice believed to help the spirits of the dead.
Most of humanity has had a very violent past until fairly recently (in hundreds of years). Although some rely on religious devotions to guide them toward peaceful lives, the majority didn't. Fear of swift reprisals by formal law enforcement has driven humanity into sweet public behavior. I think it a great social fallacy to believe that groups that were compelled to peacefulness because of proximal threat of harm would not evolve their own tendencies toward violence if liberated and free to enact domination.
Sin means to miss the mark. If all humanity acted according to the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ the world wouldn't have the exploitation and disegalitarianism it does. They don't obviously. Society sins farther in some areas than others, and at a different pace. Elite college moralists tend toward supporting license for anything that isn't violent. Medicine can fix it if harm follows. Evolution is treated as if it contradicted the truth of God. Eating the dead would be o.k. for the elites if they regarded humanity as tasty. Dressing that up in philosophical robes won't help. Evolution may devolve human moral norms in some social ecosystems. The notion that evolution implies inevitable moral progress hasn't validity. It may be an incorrect synthetic a priori judgement- fantasy.
 Moral behavior patterns evolve to fit the times and circumstance. Wisdom does not.

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