I was thinking about the example someone made in class today, "when you find twenty dollars on the ground, what do you do?" And I preceded to tell how that happened to me once and I gave it back to the person who dropped it. But, my initial instinct was to keep it. It only lasted for a few seconds, but it was still there. So, does that make my first instinct immoral? Does the fact that I almost immediately gave it back cancel that out? Do my morals conflict with one another? Or, was it just the natural thing to do? If the latter is true, then society has indeed played its part in shaping our ideas of morality.
I remembered this quote though, "moral life was a struggle to combat nature-- a view that left morality hanging in mid-air, without any evolutionary explanation, as a kind of human protest against the cosmos." I just can't bring myself to believe that morality just came out of nowhere. That doesn't necessarily mean it's solely biological, but I don't think society is the only reason either.
Kelly Dickens
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Thursday, November 5, 2009
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Yeah, I was thinking that it could've also been conflicting instincts in a way; we have the natural instinct to compete in order to survive natural selection, yet we may also have evolutionary bred instincts for morality in order to function within a group. Your natural selection instincts may have been telling you to take the money, so you can use it and possibly survive longer in order to pass on your genes, while you moral instincts were telling you to give the money back in order to build positive connections with the person which might also help you survive longer. This is all a little out there though...
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