CaptainBeowulf wrote:For people that do not believe their is a higher power to hold them accountable, there is no reason to be fair or truthful.
How about having to live with yourself? You know, answering to your own conscience? Avoiding walking around realizing that you've screwed other people over?
Oh, geeze, I would love to answer this, but past experience has demonstrated to me time and time again that I won't be understood. I'll try again anyways.
The idea that "screwing over other people" is wrong, is a product of the moral ocean you grow up in. You are aware of your own zeitgeist, but completely unaware that YOUR zeitgeist is not a constant throughout human history. Indeed, MOST of human history possess a zeitgeist in which there is not only nothing wrong with "screwing over other people" it is in fact, your
DUTY to "screw over other people."
Slavery is the most obvious example, and what the British Drug Lords did to the Chinese is another good example.
To try to make this clearer, your conscious will only bother you if you have been TAUGHT that Something is wrong. The foundation for the belief that Screwing other people is wrong is the Judeo-Christian moral foundation of the society you grew up in. THIS attitude is NOT an automatic function of human nature, it was artificially created by the existence of the Judeo-Christian meme of a higher power guarding and punishing it's children.
If you create a society which has no belief in a higher power of retribution, you will have removed the negative feedback mechanism by which MOST people control their baser urges.
CaptainBeowulf wrote:
Maybe there is a biological basis for it. Game theory actually has two origins: biology and political science, although people are usually only aware of the political science version. However, in biology we see all sorts of examples of symbiotic species - for instance, birds that get some of their food from pecking out the debris between a crocodile's teeth. If the crocs eat them, they get a meal, but if they do it enough, the birds "learn" not to clean their teeth, and eventually they get a lot of gum disease and die earlier. Nature actually tends to reward "fairness." Not in all cases - some species, like the cuckoo bird, "cheat." But often playing the game fairly, and not cheating, gets members of a species ahead.
Maybe God set the parameters of the universe up this way so that when intelligent species eventually evolved, they would have an innate sense of fairness. Or maybe it just happened that way, in the absence of any God. The situation doesn't give you irrefutable evidence either way. However, it does suggest that ethics/morality can be instinctive, and does not have to be driven by the belief that some higher power is watching you.
Perhaps religion is a necessary crutch for those with the "cheater" genes.
Which is all of us. Yes, it is a necessary crutch for much of society. I have said before that religion is nothing but the "Santa Clause effect" on a large scale.
Constraining impulsive humans to control their excesses through fear of retribution is a beneficial effect to any society. It may be an artificial effect, but it is a necessary one.
I will once again point out that until very recently, the most highly advanced (scientifically and otherwise) portions of the world were those that embraced the Judeo-Christian moral philosophies. Everyone else are recent "catch ups" that saw the obvious benefits of what the Judeo-Christian societies produced.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —
