Before any of you goes into desert:
One must first be baptized otherwise one dies or turns back soon. Being baptized means: having broken up with this world. Than the order comes, otherwise it is suicide.

Ok, shahrad. If that's where you want to take this topic, so be it. Take care.

Sigh.

I give you an example:
I worked all day long, I hadn't time to eat something, I come home and my wife didn't feel like cooking a dinner. I get mad, I get angry: Why? Because animal likes full stomach and comfort.
Anger is the distinctive sign of immorality/animality.

I give up. Nice chatting with you, I guess. Maybe I'll chime in if the OP follows up. Cheers.

Last thing...

Anger is a sign that you're hungry. Also, that maybe you should make dinner once in a while too.

Anger is not a sign of hunger.
I did work all day long and I hadn't time to eat something, I come home and there is no dinner but Scarlett Johansson is there instead of my wife. Now I will be very nice and order the best food. Animal loves new achievements.

Thanks for your input, I'm glad to be able to discuss this seriously and in depth with someone thoughtful like yourself. My understanding from your first post is that you've ultimately found this issue to be epistemologically intractable and so have found peace with it by way of an ethical code based in empathy, mutual benefit, and perhaps pluralism. In other words, because morality seems to have no objective pivot point, ethics is more or less what we're left to work with (thanks also for distinguishing morality from ethics, I wasn't clear about the definitive difference either). Please clarify if I'm wrong in my paraphrasing of your outlook.

Also I'd like to add something that I forgot to mention in my OP: when I think about a situation like my thought experiment where the societal constraints and empathy are removed, it reminds me very much about Nietzsche's Ubermensch whereby the strong "impose meaning on a meaningless world". Although the question of "human meaning" is distinct from questions of morality, I think they are closely related, and frankly it bothers me that the Ubermensch's realpolitik seems to have no opposing moral counterforce, so to speak, other than an agreed code of ethics implemented within a society (whether explicitly or tacitly).

In other words, if I found myself as a third party on the island in my thought experiment, and the psychopath asked me to give him one good reason for why he shouldn't kill the stranger, I would have no good answer for him.

Some animals love monogamy and not nailing new achievements too.

You should have come up with: Muhammad had lots of wives. Would have been stronger considering my claim about new achievements.
As said not the act is important but the intention. If our acts have the same intentions as those of animals, than our thinking is just another shape of animal instincts.
=> Under these circumstances viewing human's thinking as the main difference between animals and humans means: We are just more clever animals.
This is a circular argument.
Sorry but the whole Western philosophy is basically refuted, admittedly in a non relevant poker forum.

Like ive said you are an animal. The good the bad the ugly is all apart of the human animal.

Putting all the negative human quality's into the animal realm and all the good ones into something else is an odd believer quirk. But if there is a God he made you an animal with all the good and bad included.

"Putting all the negative human quality's into the animal realm and all the good ones into something else is an odd believer quirk. "
There are for sure ppl who did overcome their anger. Atheists and believers both can train this equally. Predators cannot.
"But if there is a God he made you an animal with all the good and bad included."
Ofc but it is also true that acting like animals with or without god causes suffering.

This had nothing to do with me post as far as i can tell. Other then confirming you wrongly giving a negative quality, anger to the animal world, and i guess not being angry out of it.


You cant not act like an animal, its what you/we are.

There are always problems with moral theories. Since there is no possibility of rescue what would be the point of staying alive longer? Perhaps you should amend the question so that one has a possibility of rescue if they kill the other, perhaps if it's the only way that they can stay alive long enough. But then it's just a different version of the age old question.


I wouldn't kill and eat the stranger simply because it would be extremely unpleasant for me and in any case would only be prolonging my suffering (heightened by my new solitude and guilt at my act) and delaying the inevitable only slightly. I would rather have company until the end. So my reasons are not actually due to any empathy with my victim but selfishly motivated by my not wanting to feel guilt or be alone.

Fair enough. So let's assume that you stand to benefit from the stranger's death in some way. I don't know how to phrase the question so that there are no loopholes for people like you to find, but I think you get an idea of the variables I'm trying to isolate here.

I don't know why it's so hard for people to think hypothetically. People always want to insert themselves into the scenario and poke holes in it, rather than trying to play by the rules of the thought experiment. Like, ok maybe I wasn't clear enough in laying out the rules, but I think you understand what I'm getting at enough to let it slide.

Are 'people like you' the people who see flaws in your proposition? What I see isn't a 'loophole', although that term is very revealing about your own view, it's simply a flaw in the model, a variable that you didn't consider, that I might have reasons for not committing murder in your scenario that have nothing to do with empathy and yet further support that we might have an inbuilt aversion to murder. As I said, there are flaws in every moral theory. I'm quite happy to discuss this but not if I'm going to be told 'stop being awkward'.

Why don't you just tell me what it is you want me to think. Or you could ask a better question. You can't just ask for enough latitude that we simply agree with whatever it is you're trying to say and act as if I'm being unfair by not providing it.

haha I had a feeling it was a mistake to write the "like you" part, cause I instantly knew it was gonna cause tension. Sorry then. In my own mind I'd assumed that others would intuitively get that the person in our experiment would have absolutely no reason to prevent them from committing murder, but it's my fault for not communicating that properly. What I'm trying to isolate here is whether or not there is a moral reason, independent of our own feelings/motivations, for not doing ___(insert action that we consider profoundly wrong)_____.

I strongly suspect that there isn't, as has been discussed earlier itt, but that's what I'm trying to hammer out.

You put the loophole of empathy in...

In the OP you say there is no intrinsic moral reason not to kill. But it also says empathy is all thats keeping the norms from killing. So if empathy is intrinsic, never got an answer, then there is intrinsic reason not to kill.

I dunno how you'd define it, but I'd say that intrinsic means that it's inalienable. Under that definition, while I think empathy is extremely common and is indeed the norm, it's not intrinsic because psychopaths do not have empathy.

Ok fair enough i guess. Though i think its you thats using loopholes.

It also makes the word intrinsic not say very much since i couldn't even say hearing or arms are intrinsic to humans since some are born without those ability's or body parts.

More of a mild irritation but forget about it. I think this is a really interesting subject.

If they have 'absolutely no reason' not to commit murder, that would also rule out that any moral reasons that might prevent them doing it. You seem to have set up a thought experiment that can only have the result you already believe true because you've made it impossible for there to be any other result. The only possibilities are 1) have no reason not to murder the other person, & 2) have at least one (highly motivating) reason to murder the other person.

I would rather live 24 hours together with someone who understands my misery and pain than 240 years alone.

I don't really think the two reasons you listed (not killing each other and Economic Growth)are enough to justify our morality being a human evolution or invention.
Besides we still kill each other even with morality.

I think that humans tend to start out more moral as children and tend to lose it with age. If this is the case then I would think morality is something hardwired into your human makeup as opposed to something that has been learned or passed down. Are you suggesting morality and our conscience is inside of our DNA?

I wouldn't put it that way, because that would make it a scientific question that, technically speaking, could be analyzed under a microscope. Empathy is part of our natural instincts, but it would only follow that morality is part of our biological makeup if we believe that morality arose purely as a function of empathy, and I'm not sure that it did. I'm hesitant to think of morality as a scientific question as much as a social one.

Rape aside, you can't understand why people might be inclined to pillage?

No matter how many times i read this sentence, "by him exiting" just doesn't register as a coherent thought. Care to elaborate?