Comment on When people say the phrase "Don't hate the player, hate the game", it removes responsibility from the player

• novibe@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That has nothing to do with morality. You don’t help people because it’s right. We help each other because we literally evolved to be social animals. Our biology in many ways depends on others. We feel individually sad and bad if we are isolated. And we feel good when we help others and see that people around us are doing well.

  Morality has not been present throughout our evolutionary or even social history. Moralism only became an essential part of society after the Christianity and other religions like it took over.

  Things being “wrong” or “right” doesn’t help us really, materially. In fact, it’s mostly been used to control people and keep them in-line. After all, who decides what’s “moral”?

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  • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I consider morality to be a societal representation of our social nature.

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    • novibe@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      morality noun principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. “the matter boiled down to simple morality: innocent prisoners ought to be freed”

      There isn’t much of a distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics is mostly spoken of as a philosophical question, and morality as an ideological one. Ethics is usually associated with the ancient Greeks, and morality to Christianity.

      What I mean is that if we allow external entities and “authorities” to dictate to us what is right or wrong (an ideology, the Pope, a philosopher we like etc.), we aren’t living materially and objectively, but ideologically. We are being controlled by externalities.

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      • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You should also look up the definition of ethics, if you do so for morality:

        ethics noun(used with a singular or plural verb): a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.

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  • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think the point is that Morality can very simply be an evolved human trait due to the massive second and third order effects that derive from it or the lack of it.

    Let me put things this way: psychopathy is a condition people are born with, were they are unable to empathise with others so amongst other things they don’t feel the hurt of others and are thus capable of inflicting great hurt to others, lie and do all sorts of socially-reprehensible things without feeling a shred of guilt. In practice they will do what’s best for themselves with no consideration for others except for the purelly rational “can they punish me if I do this” (in simplifying all this a bit since psychopathy is actually a range rather than simply an Yes/No thing).

    Anyways, around 3% of people are born high in the psychopathy spectrum. Now, if psychopathy is “doing what’s best for yourself with no consideration for others, no guilt, no conscience to be weighted on”, which one would expect is the best possible survival and reproductive strategy there is, why hasn’t that trait not dominated and human evolution led to 100% of people being born psychopaths?

    My theory is that societies with too many psychopaths collapse, removing the psychopaths from the genetic pool.

    How would that be. Well, they’re pure takers - why tire oneself by making if you can get away more easilly with taking - and they’re not good at cooperation (mainly because when others spot their character, they don’t trust them and don’t want to cooperate with them), so any society with too many psychopaths is less productive, has less resources available (too many takers too few makers), it stops evolving, can’t properly organise a collective defense system and eventually gets overwhelmed by some other society without such problems.

    This last bit is just my theory for why, but certainly the part that only 3% of people are born like that is a pretty good indication that for some reason an amoral behaviour in humans is not a winning evolutionary strategy even though some might think at first sight that it would be.

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    • novibe@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Psychopaths can just as well have morality systems… they will just look very different from yours.

      Morality is ideological definition of right or wrong. To you, scamming someone might be wrong. To a psychopath, getting money from a sucker who’s less smart/strong/awesome than you is right.

      Might makes right is a moral system… it might be “imoral” to you, but it’s a moral system nonetheless.

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