OK. But you are speaking from the observer tense. A group is a conceptual entity. It has no actual existence. There is no blood, no bone, no heart, and no mind. It does sound as though you have some background perhaps in anthropology and that is a wonderful science.
I was using 'tribe' and 'group' interchangeably, so as a tribe there is actual blood, bone, heart and mind of the members within. I like to read about anthropology, but my educational background is applied math, physics and software, and my SI ID suggests a longterm background in GPS. Related to anthropology, I'm interested in ethology and sociobiology, hence the reference to E.O. Wilson.
Maybe as an extension to tribes, I think of groups of chimpanzees or a pride of lions or a pack of wolfs wherein the members identify others as being within the group or outside the group. Being outside the group creates an awareness of a potential rival or enemy and gives rise to hostility and fear. In this sense there is a group identity, as primitive as it may be, among the members of the group. I have a inkling that chimpanzees are cognitively aware of their groups, but I have no hard evidence.
For instance, I understand that every valuable addition to my original set of 1 (that would be me)...enlarges my life and increases my survival--and the survival of my group.
I fully agree. My original point was how we interpret the idea of 'duty' and/or the origins of morality. So, if my tribe or village raises me to adulthood, what duties did I incur to the tribe? What are my moral obligations to the tribe, if any? As a single person, if I shirk my 'duties' to the tribe, the tribe may still survive. On the other hand, if I'm mistreated by the tribe, I may look for another tribe to join. Also, I may need to leave the tribe to mate with unrelated females. If I do join another tribe, what are my duties to this new tribe?
I want to suggest that the idea of duty has some adaptive value to a tribe and this 'sense' or instinct of duty also has value in a modern society. There is a wide spectrum of social orders from African or South American tribes to the collection of nations of UN signatories. I think 'duty' plays a part throughout this spectrum.
But I think our ability to reason (accurately) amounts to improving on those instincts. But humans are different. Indeed, our young are helpless for years. (snipping only two sentences)
Yes, our ability to reason has given us a significant advantage. The thing is that it has taken millennia for us to learn to read and write and teach higher forms of reasoning, while our instincts evolved over millions of years. I don't believe we can escape our instincts but we can temper them with our reason.
So absolutely, we can reason, but we have too many examples in the news of people who seem not to reason through their actions. I would suggest that many of these people have slipped outside of reason and back into instinctive tribal values. I say tribal values to distinguish between the larger social values.
Allow me to prattle on and suggest that we don't reason very well when we are hungry or ill or threatened. Other impairments to reason can be humiliation, jealousy, or drug use and the like. My reasoning degrades as my blood sugar drops, and if I don't eat for a few days, I won't be very reasonable, to say the least.
We reason best when we are well fed, secure and educated, and maybe warm enough or cool enough. So what are the societal support systems for good reasoning?
However, groups have learned to live and let live, as it were. They are able to do a lot of damage to each other. The stakes are high. In the biblical tales, the loser was invariably exterminated to the last sperm and egg. Reason was dull. Now we know the value of other tribes to our survival.
Well, we, as in the world, are still doing a lot of damage to each other, so what have we learned collectively? Losers are still being exterminated on the order of millions of people. You probably know the examples. Yes, reason was dull, and in many, many parts of the world it still is.
Now, if one considers rational selfishness to (usually) mean living in a group and helping to create group values which favor the survival (and happiness) of the group (and thus the individual). then have we taken the wrinkles out of the cloth?
Taking a liberty to restate this, if rational selfishness implies aiding the larger society to improve my quality of life, then yes, absolutely be rationally selfish. |
