All Morals & Ethics are Biased, Self-Serving - Exhibit A - The Brahmin & the Royal

[Bomb#20]

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has a personal wealth sufficient to create about 8,000 such people, with that $50 million lifestyle.

Why does anyone need eight thousand times as much money as is necessary to have pretty much any experience it is possible to have?

Why do you need a computer when what you're going to do with it is spray hate at a minority group and mind viruses of zero-sum-game economic idiocy at impressionable host brains? Clearly you don't need one, so clearly you should not be allowed to have one, since clearly what a person is allowed to have should be determined by what his self-appointed betters decide he needs.

Just a tad uncharitable.

What's your point? Do you object to uncharitable posts? Did you think bilby's post #5 was charitable?

In any event, "uncharitable" isn't the word I'd have used for my post. Here's a better one.

"Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing." - T. H. Huxley​

 

[The AntiChris]

In any event, "uncharitable" isn't the word I'd have used for my post. Here's a better one.

"Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing." - T. H. Huxley​

I'm afraid your point escapes me.

 

[Bomb#20]

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has a personal wealth sufficient to create about 8,000 such people, with that $50 million lifestyle.

Why does anyone need eight thousand times as much money as is necessary to have pretty much any experience it is possible to have?

Why do you need a computer when what you're going to do with it is spray hate at a minority group and mind viruses of zero-sum-game economic idiocy at impressionable host brains? Clearly you don't need one, so clearly you should not be allowed to have one, since clearly what a person is allowed to have should be determined by what his self-appointed betters decide he needs.

It wasn't a rhetorical question.

I think the answer is "in order to obtain political power, despite the efforts made over the last few centuries to dismantle aristocracy and replace it with rrpresentative democracy".

But I am keen to know ehether there are other, less ignoble, benefits to a person that arise due to having many thousands of times the wealth needed to enjoy pretty much anything our society can provide.

Stop JAQing. Of course it was a rhetorical question. You didn't ask how he benefits; you asked why anyone needs it. You know as well as I do that he doesn't need it. You also know as well as I do that your "wasn't a rhetorical question" assumes facts not in evidence like a "stopped beating your wife" "non-rhetorical" question. You know perfectly well that Musk already used his vast wealth to buy himself two delicious experiences any normal person would massively enjoy -- the opportunity to play with his very own space rockets, and the opportunity to play the "I'll pay the rent!" hero for millions of victims of a mustache-twirling villain's anti-free-speech policies -- and there is no way he could have gotten those experiences for a paltry fifty million dollars.

And you know as well as I do that your question was in support not of an investigation into the merits of allowing people to become billionaires, but in support of a conclusion already arrived at, Mr. "I don't think it is in any way a good thing to give anyone a billionaire life standard."

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Sure but it seems even if morals are self-serving, we can still get some pretty neat things like universal healthcare (depending on the country). That still exists regardless of ultimate motivations for morality. Vaccination programs still help everyone as well. And let's say someone is doing volunteer work simply because it helps with their depression, well the outcome of that is still ultimately beneficial.

 

[Crumb]

As Stanley Milgram has shown us, we humans are capable of some pretty disgusting and despicable acts

I think the historic record and current events are much more convincing on this point than Milgram's experiment. Human's are capable of many horrific things. We are also capable of many wonderful things.

I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving

This is a very sweeping statement. I think people are often subjective, biased and self-serving. It seems weird to ascribe these things to morals, principles and ethics. I think these are ways we can systematize and discuss right and wrong so we can as individuals and as a species be less biased and self-serving.

I present Exhibit A - and I will have a few more as we go on
Take Caste - Everyone agrees that it is pure evil, people should not be set apart that way
At the highest level in Caste are the Brahmins - and what did they do to deserve this level? - well, they were born in the right family!
That's it!
But wait, let's do a simple word change and see what happens
Change Brahmin to Royalty and now suddenly there is an about-face
The Royals are given riches, praised, idolized, looked up to & what have they done to deserve all this? Well, they were born in the right family!
They won the birth lottery!
That's it!
But contrast the treatment of these two - one is abused, called evil, wrong while the other is praised sky-high, given riches to live the easy good life!
A simple change in a word is all that it took for even the best of minds to be rendered blind!
huh?
.
But then when one hears Caste the image is of dark-skinned far-away poor people following a non-Abrahamic religion
Whereas Royalty conjures up the image of us, white people following an Abrahamic religion
Might Makes Right - not morals, principles or ethics
.

I find this example odd, because it seems clear to me that any system that assigns worth or responsibility to people based on the accident of birth is reprehensible and nonsensical. So I guess you would have to find someone who loves white royals but hates the caste system. Good luck with that. It is certainly true that peoples bigotry can cause them to subvert their supposed morals or principles, but that is a problem with bigotry not with morals.

BTW other religions have caste as well, they just don't call it that
Jews are and were the lower castes for centuries - condemned for simply being Jews
Gypsies in Europe - same thing, Blacks here in the US

These aren't really caste systems of the Jews or Roma . They are due to the bigotry of the societies that these groups find themselves in.

Muslims have lower "castes" - Ahmadiyas, Hazaras - deemed not Muslim enough, hated and discriminated

My morals says this is bad. It just seems like this is bigotry. It is too bad that bigotry seems to have more power than morals do. It's weird to conclude that this means that morals are bad.

 

[Bomb#20]

The zero-sum-game thinking, it burns!

I am not engaged in zero-sum-game thinking. Your uncharitable assumptions about what people you disagree with are thinking are not necessarily correct.

Do tell. What, other than zero-sum-game thinking, could possibly induce you to believe that preventing lots and lots of customers from making themselves better off by buying so many goods and services from a handful of prestigious guys that the handful become hyper-rich would make everyone having a decent basic living easily achievable? Care to explain the cause and effect mechanism you have in mind?

Does this look to you like a list of countries making progress toward providing everyone a comfortable home with heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry?

Does this look to you like a claim about any of those countries?

Certainly as a society we can (in the developed world) easily afford for every person to live in a comfortable home with heating in winter and airconditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry.

You appear to be taking for granted that "developed" and "allow a handful of prestigious guys to become hyper-rich" are two independent variables, and you appear to be advocating excluding any empirical observations tending to throw that premise into doubt from the set of input data we consider. That is an unfalsifiability engine. Countries becoming part of the developed world and countries allowing people to amass billions in personal wealth are not unrelated phenomena -- they are both consequences of the same collection of public policies and cultural practices. Societies that disallow billionaires impoverish their common people.

 

[Bomb#20]

In any event, "uncharitable" isn't the word I'd have used for my post. Here's a better one.

"Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing." - T. H. Huxley​

I'm afraid your point escapes me.

My point is that what bilby wrote was unscientific, unobservant, and logically fallacious, so I was merciless to his argument. I'm trying to induce him to sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up his preconceived folk-economic and folk-moralistic notions, and follow humbly to the capitalism-isn't-the-root-of-poverty abyss that Nature leads to.

 

[Bomb#20]

I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving

Morals are complicated, adaptive, found in every human society, and homologous to behavior patterns in the rest of the monkey family. If we choose not to also call what the other monkeys do "morals", we're just clinging to a pre-Copernican assumption that we're the center of the universe. We have morals for the same reason we have everything else that's complicated, adaptive, common to all of us, and homologous to what other animals have: natural selection. It's in our DNA. There are genes that cause the organisms containing them to behave according to morals, and we have them because they won the reproduction contest against alternative versions of those genes that were less effective at planting morals in brains. Morals are the product of selfish genes. Consequently, the behavior they induce is good for the morality genes. But make no mistake -- that does not mean it's good for the moralizing brains. Evolution isn't goal-oriented, but it acts like it is enough to make goal metaphors useful. So to put it in metaphorical terms, morality isn't about what's good for us; it's about what's good for morality.

The point of all this is that morals are "self-serving" from the morals' point of view, not from the organisms' point of view. When a monkey breaks a monkey rule, the other monkeys gang up on him and beat him up. This is in the self-interest of the moralistic behavior pattern itself -- he may have broken the rule because he has a competing version of a gene that makes the other monkeys follow monkey rules, and getting beaten up reduces his chance of passing his gene on. But note that it is not in the self-interest of the other monkeys -- any monkey who doesn't join the beating-up party and leaves it to the others reduces his own chance of getting hurt in the fight. A selfish gene for beating up rule breakers isn't going to get its host brain's cooperation by appealing to that brain's self-interest. So it appeals to the brain's emotions. We monkeys beat up rule-breakers not because it's good for us but because we're angry at them. And we're angry because morality genes make us get angry, to manipulate us into doing what's good for morality genes instead of what's good for us.

 

[pood]

Societies that disallow billionaires impoverish their common people.

Which societies “disallow billionaires”?

 

[pood]

I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving

Morals are complicated, adaptive, found in every human society, and homologous to behavior patterns in the rest of the monkey family.

Humans are not part of the monkey family.

 

[bilby]

Do tell. What, other than zero-sum-game thinking, could possibly induce you to believe that preventing lots and lots of customers from making themselves better off by buying so many goods and services from a handful of prestigious guys that the handful become hyper-rich would make everyone having a decent basic living easily achievable?

Where did I say anything about preventing anyone from buying anything from anyone?

Care to explain the cause and effect mechanism you have in mind?

Taxation. Highly progressive taxation.

 

[bilby]

You appear to be taking for granted that "developed" and "allow a handful of prestigious guys to become hyper-rich" are two independent variables, and you appear to be advocating excluding any empirical observations tending to throw that premise into doubt from the set of input data we consider.

I am not taking it for granted, but I do lean towards believing it to be true.

You appear to have decided that it is absolutely, definitely, and demonstrably false - but have not shown your work.

That is an unfalsifiability engine.

Indeed.

Countries becoming part of the developed world and countries allowing people to amass billions in personal wealth are not unrelated phenomena -- they are both consequences of the same collection of public policies and cultural practices. Societies that disallow billionaires impoverish their common people.

Like Sweden, for example?

 

[bilby]

My point is that what bilby wrote was unscientific, unobservant, and logically fallacious, so I was merciless to his argument. I'm trying to induce him to sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up his preconceived folk-economic and folk-moralistic notions

Yeah, but your condecension is misplaced, as it is based in your unevidenced belief that if a bit of private wealth is good, more must be better.

Note that I am not arguing against the existence of wealth. Only against a system that creates hyperwealth, and against the attitude that this is somehow an unavoidable or necessary prerequisite for economic development of any kind.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The zero-sum-game thinking, it burns!

I am not engaged in zero-sum-game thinking. Your uncharitable assumptions about what people you disagree with are thinking are not necessarily correct.

Do tell. What, other than zero-sum-game thinking, could possibly induce you to believe that preventing lots and lots of customers from making themselves better off by buying so many goods and services from a handful of prestigious guys that the handful become hyper-rich would make everyone having a decent basic living easily achievable? Care to explain the cause and effect mechanism you have in mind?

The problem is reality doesn't conform. Just because there "should" be good jobs for everyone doesn't make it so. There has to be someone to blame for that, the only candidate is the rich. Therefore the rich are at fault.

 

[TomC]

As Stanley Milgram has shown us, we humans are capable of some pretty disgusting and despicable acts
I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving
I present Exhibit A - and I will have a few more as we go on
Take Caste - Everyone agrees that it is pure evil, people should not be set apart that way
At the highest level in Caste are the Brahmins - and what did they do to deserve this level? - well, they were born in the right family!
That's it!
But wait, let's do a simple word change and see what happens
Change Brahmin to Royalty and now suddenly there is an about-face
The Royals are given riches, praised, idolized, looked up to & what have they done to deserve all this? Well, they were born in the right family!
They won the birth lottery!
That's it!
But contrast the treatment of these two - one is abused, called evil, wrong while the other is praised sky-high, given riches to live the easy good life!
A simple change in a word is all that it took for even the best of minds to be rendered blind!
huh?
.
But then when one hears Caste the image is of dark-skinned far-away poor people following a non-Abrahamic religion
Whereas Royalty conjures up the image of us, white people following an Abrahamic religion
Might Makes Right - not morals, principles or ethics
.
BTW other religions have caste as well, they just don't call it that
Jews are and were the lower castes for centuries - condemned for simply being Jews
Gypsies in Europe - same thing, Blacks here in the US
Muslims have lower "castes" - Ahmadiyas, Hazaras - deemed not Muslim enough, hated and discriminated

I don't see any discussion of morals or ethics here.
What I see is a discussion about ancient culture and cultural norms. That's very different.

Best thing that has happened to Humanity since penicillin is Secularism. Morals and ethics based on what is best for the Human Family as a whole. Most old cultural norms and religions are based on what is best for the elite.
That's not morals or ethics, it's political power and the resulting wealth. Might makes right(s). Somehow, God always comes down on the side of the aristocrats.
Get it?
Tom

 

[BH]

The zero-sum-game thinking, it burns!

I am not engaged in zero-sum-game thinking. Your uncharitable assumptions about what people you disagree with are thinking are not necessarily correct.

Do tell. What, other than zero-sum-game thinking, could possibly induce you to believe that preventing lots and lots of customers from making themselves better off by buying so many goods and services from a handful of prestigious guys that the handful become hyper-rich would make everyone having a decent basic living easily achievable? Care to explain the cause and effect mechanism you have in mind?

The problem is reality doesn't conform. Just because there "should" be good jobs for everyone doesn't make it so. There has to be someone to blame for that, the only candidate is the rich. Therefore the rich are at fault.

Even if good jobs could be provided to all or robots do all the work allowing us to live in luxury why should the rich allow such to take place? There would no longer be any reason to have them around anymore or have them as our leaders. They want us to be kept dependent on them.

 

[Bomb#20]

You appear to be taking for granted that "developed" and "allow a handful of prestigious guys to become hyper-rich" are two independent variables, and you appear to be advocating excluding any empirical observations tending to throw that premise into doubt from the set of input data we consider.

I am not taking it for granted, but I do lean towards believing it to be true.

You appear to have decided that it is absolutely, definitely, and demonstrably false - but have not shown your work.

That is an unfalsifiability engine.

Indeed.

Countries becoming part of the developed world and countries allowing people to amass billions in personal wealth are not unrelated phenomena -- they are both consequences of the same collection of public policies and cultural practices. Societies that disallow billionaires impoverish their common people.

Like Sweden, for example?

You know what else is an unfalsifiability engine? Not fact-checking. Did you read the list I posted? Did you see Sweden on it? Did you spend two seconds asking Google if your preconceived notions are correct?

List of Swedish billionaires by net worth - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Bomb#20]

I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving

Morals are complicated, adaptive, found in every human society, and homologous to behavior patterns in the rest of the monkey family.

Humans are not part of the monkey family.

Of course we are.

You see the short 45-degree line segment connecting the long 135-degree line leading to tarsiers to the long 135-degree line leading to new world monkeys? Either the species at the top of that segment was a type of monkey, or else it was not, agreed? Well, if it was a monkey, then since it was our ancestor, humans are part of the monkey family (technically an "infraorder".) Conversely, if it was not a monkey, then its descendants evolved into monkeys twice, independently, once into the new world monkeys and separately into the old world monkeys. But evolution doesn't repeat itself like that. The same family doesn't arise twice. Ergo, we're part of the monkey family. (And if you share the modern taste for "cladistic" terminology, ergo, we are monkeys.)

 

[Bomb#20]

Societies that disallow billionaires impoverish their common people.

Which societies “disallow billionaires”?

Most of the ones on the list in post #15. Of course if Tuvalu had as many billionaires per capita as Sweden it would have 0.04 billionaires; we can hardly blame their government for Tuvalu rounding that off to zero. But most of those countries' governments either actively prevent their people from producing billions in wealth, or tolerate so much corruption producing it is unprofitable, or are simply too weak to stop criminals from stealing it.

 

[pood]

I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving

Morals are complicated, adaptive, found in every human society, and homologous to behavior patterns in the rest of the monkey family.

Humans are not part of the monkey family.

Of course we are.

You see the short 45-degree line segment connecting the long 135-degree line leading to tarsiers to the long 135-degree line leading to new world monkeys? Either the species at the top of that segment was a type of monkey, or else it was not, agreed? Well, if it was a monkey, then since it was our ancestor, humans are part of the monkey family (technically an "infraorder".) Conversely, if it was not a monkey, then its descendants evolved into monkeys twice, independently, once into the new world monkeys and separately into the old world monkeys. But evolution doesn't repeat itself like that. The same family doesn't arise twice. Ergo, we're part of the monkey family. (And if you share the modern taste for "cladistic" terminology, ergo, we are monkeys.)

We ate distantly related to EVERYTHING. Look at your own cladogram. Yes, like monkeys, we are primates, but our nearest relatives are apes . In fact we ARE apes — Great Apes. It’s no more helpful to describe us as members of the monkey family that it would be to describe us as members of the canine family, even though everything has a universal common ancestor.