Need help understanding this morality based essay question

just think about all that you need to think about here ( so much for philosophy being an essay credit ) .

think , do you really have the time necessary to give thorough thought ?

It is asking if your experiences with the "real" world affects your morality, perhaps indicating that the questioner believes morality is a priori to experience.

If you think killing another human is inherently wrong, did you come to that conclusion without having to see a dead body or killing? Or, to the contrary, did you believe killing another human being without seeing a dead body or killing is inherently wrong, yet because of the impact of seeing something now believe it to be acceptable.

I disagree

its not asking about " your experiences "

the question talks in " our " this that or other

What relevance has the observation (and what can be based on observation) to your moral beliefs? If (for instance) you believed capital punishment to be right (or wrong) what kind of evidence can you give to support your case? For instance, someone who believes capital punishment is the right thing (at least in certain cases of murder) might give as his reason (or evidence) that capital punishment is a deterrent to murder. I find the rest of the question pretty dense and vague, though, and don't blame you for being perplexed by it. But, I suppose the instructor has discussed this in class. Hasn't he?

what is the internal record of the empirical universe other than your experiences, which include reading and observing the outer world?

- demagogery
- group think
- flock instinct
- ignorence
- naivity
- compulsery behaviour
..etc

Perhaps i am just making too strong an inference in connection with the time of year, but this looks like the sort of question that would be asked as a final essay question for a semester-long philosophy course. What course is the question relevant to: ethics? Regardless, a response should be accessible given the context of the texts read throughout the course. Just break the question down into bite-size chunks, and your answer will be obvious to you. Don't panic, the question may be complex, but the source material must be available. The best answer from the professor's point of view will consist of, or at least highlight, texts included from the course.

If the course included utilitarians, emphasize their privileging of the practical; if it included pragmatists reference pluralism, and if it restrained itself primarily to idealists emphasize how irrelevant empirical detail was to them regarding moral decisions, etc...

I've seen you reference these varieties or qualities of thought before now, and yet they have never seemed particularly distinct. How would you distinguish "group think" from "flock instinct"? What is the difference between demagoguery and compulsory behavior systematically-speaking, aside from attributing them to disparate individual agents? Obviously, there are pedantic differences between all of these, but , practically, they are all very similar. As are, conversely, ignorance and naivety. Is there a reason that you keep providing a list of six conditions instead of three?

And what is their (your listed varieties of thought) particular significance in relation to the OP's question? Merely listing them is hardly sufficient to answer the query regarding their value.

Simple enough... A person who actually believes in evolution has no logical or rational basis for any sort of morality at all.

Newt Gingrich once stated the problem of evolutionism and morality about as succinctly as is possible in noting that the question of whether a man views his neighbor as a fellow child of God or as a meat byproduct of random processes simply has to affect human relationships.

Basically, every halfway honest person with any brains and talent who has taken any sort of a hard look at evolution in the past 60 years has given up on it and many have denounced it. A listing of fifty or sixty such statements makes for an overwhelming indictment of that part of the scientific community which goes on trying to defend evolution and they (the evolosers) have a favorite term ("quote mining") which they use to describe that sort of argument.

My own response to that is to note what I view as the ultimate evolution quote by the noted evolutionist (actually, FORMER evolutionist) Jeffrey Dahmer:




Dahmer converted to Christianity before he died. The basic tenets of true religion appear to be inprinted upon most of us biologically which is the only reason that Islammic societies and "secular humanist" societies like Britain and Canada function at all. A psychopath like Dahmer is basically somebody on whom that imprint did not take. For those guys, it has to be written down somewhere, and it has to be written down accurately; the bible does that. Telling somebody like Dahmer that we all evolved from "lucky dust" is a formula for getting people killed.

Evolution was the basic philosophical cornerstone of communism, naziism, the various eugenics programs, the out of control arms races which led to WW-I and WW-II, and all of the grief of the last 150 years. Starting from 1913, Europe had gone for a hundred years without a major war. They didn't even have to think. All they needed to do was act cool, go to church, have parades, formal balls, attend board meetings, and they'd still be running the world today; they'd be so fat and happy they'd not know what to do with themselves. Instead, they all got to reading about Darwinism, fang and claw, survival of the fittest and all the rest of that nonsense, and the rest as they say is history.

Your representation of "evolution" is extremely oversimplified. Perhaps you have been influenced by similarly misguided "Social Darwinists", but your view of evolution does not correspond to the scientific POV of evolution, past or present. The inclusion of your little Dahmer vignette, anecdotally accurate as it may be, is similarly misleading.

The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

Flock instinct can be boiled down to helping the group, solders has thrown themselves on grenades to save their fellow soldiers, sailors has felt guilt in surviving a shipwreck thus not drowned with their fellow ship mates.
In everyday life it's helping eachother out, loyalty to a group, nation, cause ..etc. It will prevent us walking out on eachother, even those we have great differences with or even dislike.

Group think a terrible thing that will make the grup make desitions for you, ie obeying a leader or a group.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS7P-eo-COo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K2vqVAG7iI&feature=related
Most horrorfying is the little known aspect that group thinkers will usually attack people/things outside of their "group", often in a very violent manner since they have low rationallity, hench religious people, sports fans or any other kind of group that can feel threaten by another group.

Demagogery it is indeed a compulsery behaviour in itself, but only 1 form of it. It manifests itself by a person's behaviour in lieing, manipulate and twisting things, where other compulsery behaviours will manifest themselves in vastly different ways.

Compulsery behaviour in general it's descibing a forced behaviour, that one has difficulties diverting from. The person may know it's very wrong, and may suffer from this unwilling behaviour or not even care. Optimism and pessemism is 2 opposit compulsery behaviours.

In most countries courts will differ between compulsery killing and willful manslaughter. Compulsery killing is killing without reason, and the killer may have done his crime out of a inner selfish need, where willful manslaughter may be done out of vengance, oppotunism ..etc, so in essence with a purpose.

An ignorent but intelligent person will learn from their mistake, or if intelligent enough forsee problems, where a naive person will cause problems and not learn from from them, or naive person can't figure out if the information is wrong or not, that an intelligent ignorent may do.

The word you were looking for was "impulse" and not "compulsory".

A compulsory killing would be one which the killer was forced to do by some outside agent.

I think your very right, it's the correct english term, sorry that english isn't my first language.

..and then not, it will contradict the understanding of OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.