I am actually quite interested in how this discussion has gone because I had a debate (argument) with a friend who said that people do not inherently know right from wrong and I feel that we do.
I fail to see how as a species we could have advanced as we have if we only used the base instincts we are born with, surely at some stage the feelings associated with 'knowing' for what of a better word, what is in many ways a right or wrong thing, shaped behaviour early in human development?
For example, if you are a caveman and you have been collecting and chopping wood for your fire and someone just comes and steals it. Surely there is a realisation that this behavious is bad?
Hoping I put that down right...
I believe I addressed this in a prior post, although it's possible you didn't see that one
We have two things: An innate capacity to learn and the innate triggers to develop empathy.
Empathy + Learning pretty naturally leads to the golden rule:
I didn't like this thing when I experienced it, so I won't do it. Once that empathy reaches a certain state, we're also able to extrapolate - so we can say
I am pretty sure I wouldn't like that if it happened to me, so I shouldn't do it to others.
Over time, living in social groups, experiencing substantially similar developmental events, we're highly likely to develop a set of very similar impressions of what constitutes
I would like/appreciate these things if done to me (good) and
I would dislike/resent these things done to me (bad). That then becomes a set of things that we teach as morality to each successive generation within that social group, because it's easier to be taught a thing than to develop it on our own.
But we aren't born with some hard-wired thing that says "theft is wrong".
You have to learn everything. You have to learn to lack belief in gods.
No you don't. If your position is that you have to *learn* a lack of belief in gods, then you are taking the position that babies believe in god the moment they're born.
If that were true, the entire world would have pretty much one god that everyone believed in. Maybe a few rapscallions here and there who try to invent their own due to a mental illness (because everyone has this built-in belief a variance from that would constitute a failure from a genetic transcription perspective). But the overwhelming majority would all believe in the same god.
Pretty sure that's not the case.
I think it is possible that the knowing right from wrong is a genetic thing which is more prominent in some and less in others...what make you think that one can learn things without having the tools to learn them in the first place?
Let's tackle this from a different angle. Are humans born knowing a language? Do we come out of the womb speaking English?
No, we don't. We come out of the womb with 1) the capacity to learn and 2) a set of developmental triggers that prompt us to acquire language at a very early stage. But we don't already know language.
Similar thing with morality. We don't already know right from wrong when we come out of the womb. We have the tools needed to learn right from wrong at a pretty early stage (for the most part). But we don't come into the world "knowing" which things are good and which are bad.
How is it that in knowing how something feels does not in itself create empathy in some people? What do they not have that other do and why were they born without it?
I don't know, I'm not a developmental psychiatrist. But there's a fair bit of research in that area that you might consider googling. Suppressed empathy is one of the hallmark characteristics of the autism spectrum, and a lack of empathy is evident in both sociopaths and psychopaths (depending on how you define those disorders). Empathy is known to begin developing very early - partially as a reflexive response, and partly through observation and reaction. In terms of reflexive responses, a young baby will cry in response to another baby crying... but by the time they're around 2 years old, they no longer reflexively share that emotion, they start taking action to soothe the crying baby and seeking ways to alleviate their distress. More complex types of empathic responses develop over time, as children are exposed to more events and situations, and as they develop a more concrete understanding of "self".
These aren't complete mysteries. Sure, there are a lot of unknown mechanisms (we don't, for example, exactly know the brain path, we don't know all of the hormonal or chemical triggers that begin the different developmental phases), but the development itself has most certainly been observed.
