Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jhild who wrote (9919)	4/17/1998 2:41:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

I'd elaborate on that as follows: Individually, we get our morality from our families and then from the playground. Upon hitting adolescence, and again in college, we tend to put our own moral/ethical frames under a pretty comprehensive review. This is the "reason" part if I hear you right. To me reason is a process which is highly dependent on the premises. It's the source of the premises which fascinates me. In the broadest terms, the premises come from the sum total of human-human interactions across the ages, and the moral premises of today attempt to distill What Works. As individuals, we subject the moral options available to us to a rational review. Since we are creatures of nature&nurture as well as intellect, this review process is not pure or absolute. "We are what we eat" morally. That's why the study of the humanities will be forever with us. As a culture though - that's the neat part. Apes have a nascent sense of morality which is very much socially determined. The group punishes bad behavior. (The groups which punish the correct bad behavior are most fit.) I see this as the kernel from which collective or social morality grew, the stuff we get with our mothers' milk. I see mythology as a narrative framework to teach and illustrate moral and ethical precepts.

To: jhild who wrote (9919)	4/17/1998 3:38:00 PM
From: BlueCrab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

j -- You said something earlier that I really liked, and now I can't find it - I'll try to find it later, but it had to do with a personal rationale for morality. I kinda think that we develop a personal "code" long before we're old enough to realize it; in most folks it probably exists in at least rudimentary form by the age of three or so. I see it in my kids and their friends - there are the kind, the good, the abrasive and the cruel. And although they all do mean, cruel or selfish things at times, some of them feel bad about it later, others don't, regardless of punishments or other external stimuli. Everything beyond that is just fitting newly-gathered knowledge into that personal, long-standing internal frame of reference. Of course, I could be totally, completely wrong, but that RARELY occurs<G>