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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: St_Bill who wrote (30286)	9/29/2001 8:50:32 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 82486

As animals that evolved out of a natural system, would it be fair to say that absolute ethics is unique to humans? If so, that would imply that ethics applied to some early hominids and not to others. Maybe there was even an Adam and Eve of ethics? I'm having trouble with that. Was the first ethically bound human male or female? If you say that ethics is something that existed immediately upon the moment of the Big Bang, then it is an absolute property, independent of time-space and observer. If that is true, what is the morality of a trail of army ants 'murder' of other insects and how, precisely, is one to judge that relative to a murder of one group of people by another without introducing your POV as the observer? I have a hard time believing that ethics is anything other than a way for humans to justify doing harm or feel better about themselves when they aren't harming anyone. Because a transcendent ethic doesn't have to be consistent with our world, one can do things that are ethical now but might be unethical later. That just seems odd - not exactly the kind of behavior from something you'd expect to be absolute. Interesting note about locusts (as in plagues of). Locusts have a long breeding cycle because birds never learn to recognize them as a food item and are initially afraid of them. There is usually no bird alive that has ever been around for two locust cycles. It isn't until the locust swarm has already passed that the birds learn that the little things are tasty as anything. This whole strategy could be thwarted if any bird developed a symbolic way of recording the things that were edible.

To: St_Bill who wrote (30286)	9/29/2001 9:24:33 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I'm not sure people have all that much choice. We are limited by our genetics and our circumstances (IMO). I don't know what to tell you about the word inconvenient. Someone who lost a family member in the Holocaust surely thinks the Germans were terribly evil. A German of the same time period wouldn't think that at all. I find it very easy to balance the interests involved without calling anyone evil. The Germans were an impediment to all life around them preceding in a normal way. As such they are, imo, totally analogous to an extremely virulent germ. The germ isn't good or evil in itself (and of course this is my opinion of all cultures - they are neither good nor evil- they simply are) but some cultures/germs imperil what is outside of them. It seems to make sense for the body/cultures in danger of what is virulent to them (but not necessarily evil) to mount an attack. I don't think humans are very complex. The more I know humans, the simpler they seem. We seem to be quite quite limited. Maybe we are fatally limited. As a human, I am inside the human box, and cannot analyze the system from the outside as I would really love to do.