Well Veeky Forums?

>Caring about strangers
Thats being dumb. Empathy was a mistake.

Why would you care more for someone near you than a stranger if not for selfishness?

It's easy to confirm your biases when they're framed in words that only mean whatever you want them to mean when you use them. Welcome to the social sciences. People are naturally whatever their genes predispose them to be and that includes all of the competing urges and impulses that make them up, and the competing developmental trajectories of those urges' physiological underpinnings. Nature and nurture always coexist and separating one from the other always depends upon some framing fallacy.
Social scientists are bullshit artists.

gradually it was disclosed to me that writing lies and bullshit could help me accumulate that sweet sweet cia money

Rousseau desu

>you only care for those dear to you
this is a tautology

also stretching the definition of selfishness like that makes the concept useless

personally I follow the sociobiological reasoning, which means that it is technically selfishness(of the gene not you though), but you're missing the point here.

The word 'selfish' refers to a person who doesn't care about other people very much. Somebody who devotes themselves to their family, no amtter the ultimate reasons behind this, is not selfish by the common meaning of the word. you're just fucking with definitions here, ie. being pedantic.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is retarded

You can generally consider someone abominable and still care for them.

Can you claim to be truly empathic if you're empathic only to a certain group of people? Now, why would you restrict this empathy? I'm asking you this.
Someone who is selfish is better explained as someone who is driven by personal interest. You can compare it to greed.
>Somebody who devotes themselves to their family, no amtter the ultimate reasons behind this, is not selfish by the common meaning of the word
Then this "common meaning" is absolutely useless in the discussion of human nature, you monkey

we have to differentiate between people who feel empathy for their relatives and friends, and people who don't. This is both the subjective feeling of empathy, and actual actions taken for their benefit. Whether both of these can be classed within a larger set that could be called selfish is immaterial.

We use the word selfish for this distinction, you are being extremely autistic

Mate, what are you even doing in a thread discussing human nature if everything is "hurrr pedantic and autistic"? Don't you have a Peterson thread to go to?

if you don’t feel empathy for strangers then you don’t have empathy. empathy does not limit itself because of social ties. we would say a society where foreigners are mistreated and neglected is apathetic. one where they’re care for and respected is empathetic. for instance danes are empathetic, chinese are apathetic. the US is empathetic relative to the apathy of Botswana

The words mean different things fuckface, saying that altruistic behavior is ultimately selfish gene behavior is not the same as saying that an individual is selfish.

How can you not grasp this

If you only feel empathy towards your family or tribe, then that is obviously just bioliogical behaviour and not true empathy.

So there is a spectrum of being selfish and selfless, which I said in my very first post. You're still trying to redefine the word selfish when it already has a meaning that everyone uses it for.

What word do you want to use to describe someone who doesn't give a shit about their family and just furthers their own interests, as opposed to a mother who spends all her time working for her children.

>obviously just bioliogical behaviour and not true empathy.
I'm going to just abandon the thread now, have fun taking about magical concepts

>maternal instincts are magical concepts
You're a damn retard
So a grown man suddenly caring for his old, dying father after he wins the lottery is suddenly empathic? Even if he just does it for the money?

you're functionally illiterate. Maternal instincts are obviously 'biological behavior'.

And clearly that is not empathic, because he is not feeling empathy, he is being calculating; my definition involved both action and feeling. I specifically used the example of a mother who cares about her children and devotes herself to them.

Then your definition
>Somebody who devotes themselves to their family, no amtter the ultimate reasons behind this, is not selfish by the common meaning of the word
Is useless, just as I told you.

Any sources on this? People on this board are always throwing this accusation around but I can't find documentation anywhere else.

When I said 'no matter the ultimate reasons' I was referring to the ideas of empathy having evolved for reciprocal altruism or kin selection, I was not talking about ruthlessly gaming somebody by pretending to care about them.

you are purposely trying not to understand the distinciton to uphold your retarded view of the word 'selfish'

We are the product of billions of years of genes replicating in different combinations forming more or less optimal organisms for their time and place. Selective pressures favor selfishness and opportunism. Sometimes selective pressures favor communities and a certain amount of altruism. What's even the debate here? Good and evil only relatively and loosely define each other. You might as well ask if humans are naturally hooplah or foopajoo.

Rosseaus seems a bit dumbed down. If everyone is naturally good then why is society evil?

*SOMETIMES selective pressures favor selfishness and opportunism. My bad.

I don't give a rat's ass about my so-called "own definition", but if we're trying to discuss human nature, we need to pinpoint the true motivation behind actions.

Why not sink into debauchery? Nothing really matters. We're just molecules

If society corrupts people than wouldnt that mean people within the society were inherently evil if it causes people to be corrupted?

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I don't care what you do. Do whatever you want. If i end up objecting it won't be out of any moral conviction, it will just be out of what I will and won't let you do for my own reasons.

Can you not mix two pure things and get an impure mixture?

*kills you*
sorry... i don't care much for your lame ideas, kiddo

your molecular arrangement lacks the balls to kill anyone tbqh

I don't have to have definitions of right and wrong to take part in the social contract modern societies have that says we like to punish killers and discourage that inconvenient behavior, just the same as I don't need to have definitions of right and wrong in order to decide I don't want to die and would kill to keep that from happening.

So you happily break laws and do anything you want as long as you don't fear repercussions?

Nobody said that either kid. I follow and agree with most laws because behaving that way makes life the way I'm comfortable with it being and if I want to uphold that social contract, or law, that says we discourage certain behaviors I don't like, I accept that the pumishments would apply to me too. I don't need moral convictions like right and wrong to know I don't like killing because that's just not effective or sustainable problem solving. I don't rape because there's no replacement for the girl actually WANTING me. I don't steal because i don't want to be stolen from, and I would kill anyone who tried to kill me, because fuck him. Humans could do something interesting like learning skills and exploring space. We've got endless books and porn and sports and netflix and he can't find a single use of his time better than killing me. This doesn't require morals. It requires personal priorities and a general knowledge that working together can make things sustainable and easier. I like the internet, so i'd rather society not descend into anarchy. Got it?

I'll pick the Italian over the French man

Goodness and evilness follow a gaussian distribution in the human population.

>kid
embarassing
>i don’t need to have a moral compass to decide what’s inconvenient
idiot

Humans want to be good but they're often in denial about what it means to be good, because being good is hard.

Where do those quotes come from?

There isn’t any, he’s just an assmad red like the rest, pissed off that someone dare write about the reality of communism.

>This doesn't require morals. It requires personal priorities and a general knowledge that working together can make things sustainable and easier.

Do you even think about the things you're bullshitting about? Are you naive enough to think that people will accept the social contract based on logical arguments? Or that people even want comfort or sustainability?

Besides, without morality, there is no such thing as a social contract. How can you truly believe that there is no morality, but also that everything is just based on rational self interest? Where do people get their ideas on right and wrong, in what their interests are? Because if we aren't drawing on the same principles (morality), then the social contract should be unintelligible in moral and rational terms to almost everybody.

It's pretty clear that you obey the social contract out of fear of becoming uncomfortable, because your understanding of society is on par with someone who lives in a basement and only communicates to people through the internet and ordering pizza.

CIA supported USSR secretly, dummy

I'm interested as well. I would fully believe the left is from Rousseau, because that quote is from The Social Contract.

Machiavelli's quote on the other hand... I would never attribute to him. I recall him being of a rather good character in the Prince, exhorting the good ways to do things and cautioning against the evil.

>Rousseau
Wrong pretty much by default.

Who said anything about anyone else accepting a moral contract? Generally people do. Those that don't are punished. I'm generally okay with that. Wherein exactly is the bullshit?

I'm not denying that people's ideas of what is desirable, or how their priorities will be structured, are based off of value judgements. I didn't claim they were rational. I didn't claim mine were any semvlance of "correct". I said that they did not have to be rooted in a definition of right and wrong. You're arguing with a whole lot of things that weren't said, user.

There can be plenty of social contracts without morality. Like you said I prefer not to be murdered. I imagine you feel the same. We don't have to believe in souls or god or divine punishment or even legal punishment for me to go "hey i only need this much food and you only need that much food, wanna just call it a day and go our separate ways?" I didn't say that was guaranteed to work out. That's why i'd probably have a backup plan because i've experienced enough of life to know some people simply want to watch you suffer. And I dislike those people because they make life difficult for me. That does not mean I have to have absolute beliefs in what is right and wrong and how values "should" be shaped.

Calm down. Read carefully.

If your whole argument is that value judgements are necessary you waste your breath because i'm only saying that their necessity doesn't make them correct.

Hegel

>Generally people do
Wow, that's some coincidence isn't it? I mean in a world without morality, it's pretty amazing that people generally accept some fundamentals.

>I'm not... I didn't...
Yeah, ok, so what, you want to replace good and evil with like and dislike? Is that substantially different from what most people call good and evil? I mean besides the fact that you think you can argue your side without having to base it in anything?

>More on social contracts without morality
But where do they come from? How can people generally agree on something that's not based in anything? And if people generally agree on these fundamentals, how is that not what people are talking about when they talk about morality?

Found the brainlet.

God corrupted man

Enjoy hell.

To continue existing you necessarily have to harm another existing agent. Humans are then evil just by virtue of being.

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>The question has been raised, What two men would do, who lived a solitary life in the wilds and met each other for the first time. Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Rousseau have given different answers. Pufendorf believed that they would approach each other as friends; Hobbes, on the contrary, as enemies; Rousseau, that they would pass each other by In silence. All three are both right and wrong. This is just a case in which the incalculable difference that there is in innate moral disposition between one individual and another would make its appearance. The difference is so strong that the question here raised might be regarded as the standard and measure of it. For there are men in whom the sight of another man at once rouses a feeling of enmity, since their inmost nature exclaims at once: That is not me! There are, others in whom the sight awakens immediate sympathy; their inmost nature says: That is me over again! Between the two there are countless degrees. That in this most important matter we are so totally different is a great problem, nay, a mystery.

as always, schopey nails it.

The question of whether humans are by default selfish, and brutish, until hammered into being empathetic, or they are naturally empathetic, and only corrupted by being brought up in an awful system inherently relies on the false assumption that before the dawn of civilization, every man was out for himself. That's simply not true, man is a naturally social animal, and we've lived in tribes since before we were humans, and anthropology has shown us that no two tribal societies are alike in this regard. The question is unanswerable, because it's built on false premises.

Off yourself. Rousseau was a hell of a man, knew aspects about reality that you will never contemplate.

>never read The Social Contract
It's basically just The Prince V2, with all the dad-tier advice in there that you love.

He even has a section where he distinguishes Tyrants from Despots, saying it's possible to be a benevolent tyrant, and impossible to be a benevolent despot.

>It's basically just The Prince V2,
It is literally nothing like the Prince. The Prince is Machievalli speaking from experience and being logical about power relations, the Social Contract is Rousseau making shit up completely at random

>It's amazing people accept some fundamentals.
Agreeing to behave a certain way doesn't make that way correct. Sharing value judgements does not make them the correct ones.

>is that substantially different.
Yes. It is. Because agreeing on value judgements does not make them correct.

>argue your side without having to base it in anything.
It's morality that has yet to be based in anything other than people's insistance. Are you not grasping the distinction between value judgements and morals? Because value judgements, or the objects of people's priorities, like sex, knowledge, etc, can often come from moral convictions, but do not need to. Because they can come from just enjoyment. I'm not sure what part of this you find arguable. You seem again to be arguing with a lot of things you think i'm implying, rather than the actual content of what i've said.

>how can people agree on anything that isnt based in anything?
I assume you mean how can people recognize a mutual desire to live, anf a productive way to behave to that end, without basing this in value judgements? They can't. You are right that it requires value judgements. But it doea not require morality, or any such convictions that there is a correct way to shape one's values.

>Humans are good by nature
>Has numerous affairs
>Refuses to raise his bastards
Lmao

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>That's simply not true, man is a naturally social animal, and we've lived in tribes since before we were humans, and anthropology has shown us that no two tribal societies are alike in this regard.
I guess you missed the point of this conversation if you are comparing society to human nature?

>The Prince is Machievalli speaking from experience and being logical about power relations

Did we even read the same book?

The only reason I said The Social Contract is similar to The Prince is because both of them use historical anecdotes to prove political points. That there are immutable truths.

They have synergistic points (i.e. they both make the same points about the means justifying the ends sometimes, which is what the 'benevolent tyrant' is all about)

To clarify, I'm saying you are correct, that is exactly what the Prince is.

But you are foolish and incorrect if you think that isn't also EXACTLY what The Social Contract is.

It's possible I'm foolish and incorrect

shut up christian

My question is, how is it possible that people who are basing their value judgements on a basically limitless selection of arbitrary things possibly come to agree on a social contract by anything other than impossible odds? Do you see the world we ended up in as a fantastic coincidence?

I get your point, that just because people agree on something doesn't make it "right." What i don't get is, if it isn't based on something more fundamental, which is what people are talking about when they talk about morality, then what do you, personally, think it's based on? Nothing? "Let's just be comfortable and sustainable, Bros"? Because if so, we're back to your naivety about people.

>man = good
>man + man = bad
>good + good = bad
Rousseau is a moron of the highest order, you can prove it mathematically.

>someone who thinks this posts on the literature board

The usage of good and bad in OP's picture isn't justified. Our actions are determined by our priorities, to say good and bad reduces it to something a child would understand. Do they mean evil as in, enjoys pleasure from hurting others? Or evil as in, doesn't do the right thing? There's a huge difference between someone who won't help you because they want to see you suffer, and someone who won't help you because that would take up too much of their time, even if they have the resources to do it.

That wasn't him though, that was society fampai.

With a genetic variability of ~0.1 percent, I imagine people are predisposed to have a lot of wants and needs in common. It's not arbitrary at all. We all have a mutual desire not to be killed because that is the single most successful trait in the history of evolution. We all hate being stolen from, not because there is some substance to "right" and "wrong" but because we like our stuff. You act like we all got together one day and it was a crazy coincidence we agreed on so much and you have the arrogance to call other people naive about people. Life has always been a competition over resources and reproduction and comfort. There have always been more and less optimal ways suited to the place and times they were in. People only recently started basing their preferences on assumptions about a correct way to shape ones values and behave. It happened gradually through millennia of debate and endoctrination and repetition of circular reasoning and fear of sky people and it has never had any basis in reality because repetition, even for millennia, does not make things true.

>That wasn't him though, that was society fampai.
Pretty sure he was acting on behalf of himself and not as part of some form of external influence on him pressuring him into an action

falso dichotomy only a brainlet would believe this
each side has their points, but psychology research slightly points towards the left guy, reciprocal altruism is biological, also in situations where it doesn't work we can nudge people, read richard thaler

you are inhuman

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Please don't.

Ok, so yes, naivety is the problem here.
>Mutual desire not to be killed
But what happens when someone wants to kill?
>We all hate being stolen from
Yes, but people want to steal from others, and very often do. It's like you're missing the other half of human experience.
>Morality is just sky people
Some children believe that, but most people just believe morality is real.
>Values and morality are recent inventions
Seriously?
>Everybody's beliefs are based on indoctrination and circular reasoning that somehow people have upheld and enforced all through human history, motivated by... genetics or something.
Great, that just brings me back to my original question of where all of this stuff originally came from and why do people keep repeating it. How do beliefs emerge from genetics or biological similarity? If things are just optimally suiting the times, and people don't base their beliefs on anything deeper, why have we tended toward basically the same things over and over again?

>what happens when somebody wants to kill?
They probably kill someone. What does that have to do with anything I said?

>missing the other half of the human experience.
I'm aware that not everyone shares the same ideals and behaviors. What does that have to do with anything I said?

>Morality is real
Sure. And it's based in value judgements that have no basis in reality other than what has been productive at a time and place or repeated by enough people. That does not make any version of morality "correct"

>seriously?
Yes. Human history is incredibly short in the scale of evolution. Most value judgements have not been made under assumptions of correctness, just out of subjective preference.

>how do beliefs emerge from genetics?
The same way all mental activity did. Then once we became capable of experiencing confirmation bias and killing off entire continents who didn't share our values, it became very easy tp surround yourself with people who share your opinions. Especially when it serves their needs which are essentially the same as yours.

>why have we tended toward the same thongs over and over again?
Because we're dealing with many of the same philosophical issues and have many of the same options regarding how to deal with them. Throughout history and before, people like you have envoked abstract concepts like gods and morals and the collective unconscious and insisted that these ideas don't need to endure scrutiny to be good, you just have to really like them and that makes them real.

>Human nature
LMAO

Both touch the truth. The broad nature of man cannot be summed in so short a statement.

Familiarize yourself with the concept of confirmation bias and circular reasoning. Then start with the greeks. The fact is that western thought is the history of men who tried to derive morality from fantasies that failed to endure scrutiny. That doesn't mean that society "should" have no morals either. I'm not selling you a correct way to behave, only pointing out that throughout history all attempts at doing so have been rooted in circular reasoning and confirmation bias. No matter how hard you insist that somehow people keeping on trying must make them right somehow, you'd be grasping at straws to take away the nagging existential angst and moral uncertainty we all face. There's no correct way to behave. Sorry. There's just our attempts as minimizing unproductive behavior and defining "productivity" either by majority vote or the whims of a dictator. Welcome to adulthood.

No. It's not a history of fantasies that didn't endure scrutiny. It's a history where vastly different people and cultures in different places and times found different ways to say essentially the same things. Criticisms were fundamentally based on the same reasoning processes, which were also inspired by morality. If everything just comes down to preference, consensus is impossible.

The only one saying things are true because they really want them to be is you. I know you're not saying you're correct, your whole point is that there's no such thing as correct, only what people want. But you're just asserting that every philosopher and theologian and person in history has had no better arguments than you, nothing more profound to say than you. You're assuming that nothing underpins their thoughts, because nothing underpins yours. You're just describing yourself and projecting it onto other people. But hey, what does it matter anyways right? That's just your preference.

Holy fucking kek. How didn't i see that posted before?

Genuinely, that last bit is interesting and I will think on it.

But,
>if everything is preference consensus is impossible
Peoples preferences are often similar. Yet, consensus is still an illusive bitch.

>essentially the same things.
You over-emphasize the similarities and ignore the vast differences hoping that this means that the morals they refer to have some substance beyond preference but you haven't said anything about the actual nature of said substance. Are you referring to god? Define right and wrong. That's all i'm saying. Who's right and wrong?

>true because I want them to be.
What? Provide me some basis in reality for moral truth, rather than just repeating that if other people agree with you they must be right. I'm pointing at an absence of evidence and you're insisting that's not evidence of absence. Fine. I conceded that.but that still does not leave us with morals based in anything other that repetition and spiritual assumption.

>asserting that every other philosopher and theologian has no better arguments than me and nothing more profound to say than I have.
That's horse shit and you know it.

>assuming nothing underpins their thoughts.
Do you know of any basis for morality that isn't rooted in spiritual or metaphysical assumptions or at least in pragmatic application of majority (but not absolute) value judgements?

>that's just your preference.
The difference is that i define my terms, cite my sources, and open myself to a dialogue. Good ideas are such because they ensure scrutiny. Not because we have faith in them, not because we repeat them louder, not because we kill off anyone who disagrees, and not because we collect people who agree with us. If you can think of a basis for morality that isn't rooted in these things, i'll listen. But until then, i'm not going to claim to have answers to what is morally right and wrong and how ones values should be shaped any more than ill claim to have talked to god.

Humans are innately disposed to both good and evil, and the events in their lives draw out and solidify one or the other in different sets of circumstances. Failing to acknowledge the radical impacts of environmental factors on developmental trajectory reflects a serious lack of scientific literacy. There is an extended literature on the effects of different events and circumstances (e.g., adverse childhood experiences, different parenting styles, exposure to environmental toxins such as lead, education and lack of it, proper and improper nutrition, etc.) on the manner in which the brain develops and genes are expressed. This even extends to prenatal development, from the anxiety levels of the mother to whether or not the mother engages in substance use.

I enjoy taking Hobbes and Rousseau as examples of different developmental outcomes. Hobbes, having grown up in wartime, evaluates humans as innately evil and in need of governance because he has been biologically conditioned to stress, he is disposed to think as though he is existing in a state of war even when he has not. Rousseau had a pleasant childhood and as such holds positive expectations of other persons. Neither of them are wrong; the goodness or badness of a person is entirely contingent on environmental factors influencing development and producing different developmental trajectories. Goodness and badness are probabilistic, influenced by myriad factors both genetic and environmental which can either detract from or build upon one another.

The implication of this outlook is that environmental factors which encourage good traits should be made present for as many developing persons as possible. If a person has "bad genetics," if such a thing really exists, these may be dissuaded by particularly good environmental factors (and vice versa). Effectively determining which environmental factors produce positive outcomes and which do not is difficult, particularly so given the difficulty of evaluating what outcomes should be construed as positive, but it is possible. Personally, I would consider a society in which individuals experience relative wellbeing, reach their greatest potential intellectual and practical ability, and feel warmth for other persons is ideal. But clearly positive regard for other persons is not ideal for an individual surviving war — in such a situation, it is most advantageous for the individual, as an organism, to be suspicious of others.

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>Provide some basis in reality for moral truth
>Not rooted in spiritual or metaphysical assumptions
I think morality has to be metaphysical, otherwise I'd be concerned with the things you're concerned with.

>Good ideas are such because they endure scrutiny, not because we have faith in them, etc...
But what's the end of scrutiny? How do you use it and why do you believe it works if you don't believe in metaphysics? Is it just a wish, a hope, a preference? Because then I again don't understand how anybody agrees on anything. I wouldn't be able to understand how anyone knows what they themselves believe.

I'm not arguing for any particular form of morality, but I am arguing that the amount of overlap in beliefs and aspirations of a majority of people in history is evidence that there is something deeper. It's not that people yelled louder and killed off dissenters, it's that thoughtful people used the scrutiny you're talking about and found things in common. Sure maybe it's all a lie, but so possibly is everything we think we see and touch. It wouldn't matter that pretty much everybody in history agrees that the sun and moon exist and they'd seen them, because maybe it's a lie.

Maybe i am wrong and people's ideas have far less in common than I think. But if it's preference and a disregard for scrutiny? The amount of overlap is astounding.

Rousseau believes you are at war with one another under the social contract as well.

There are many parallels to Hobbes and Rousseau, and he is not the pacifist you think him to be, just like Machiavelli is not the evil demon people think he is.

Hobbes is great though, beautiful work of logic Leviathan, I still utilize aspects of it whenever I think about political relations.

Nature is good and civilisation is evil

broke: philosopy philosophy
woke: racial philosophy

>has to be metaphysical
Then it also has to be unfalsifiable and being certain of it is still going to be dependent on circular reasoning. Which is what I said an hour ago which you've been wasting my time about ever since.

>is it just a wish? Hope? Preference?
What? It's structuring an understanding of the world based on deductive reasoning rather than what we feel or wish or hope. If you have some other special standards of what makes a good idea, other than it's ability to endure scrutiny, I promise you've got an engine of bullshit.

>something deeper
You keep saying this but giving no examples as to what it could be. Innate knowledge of the correct way to shape values and behave? No. Just neurophysiological habits picked up through natural selection.

There are many reoccurring themes in the history of philosophical debate, and that isn't because somewhere in them is a correct morality. Or a correct lack thereof either. It's simply that people are terrified of their existential uncertainty.

There are species of bird that move into others' nests and kill all the other babies to claim the mothers' affections. Sorry to burst your bubble but nature is hostile competition for resources.

I have a fairly contrary opinion of "good" to what is considered normal in this civilised hell world

Humans are naturally good, but both of them would describe that as evil.