Recent conversations with a friend have revealed an area of exploration almost completely uncharted by me. I don't want to get bogged down in a lot of detail here, because I want to ask a couple of questions and don't want to strongly influence the answers received. So I'll just say for now that although I've rejected morality based on religion [that is, relying on that particular appeal to authority], I've tried to live by a moral code nonetheless. I'd like to stipulate for purposes of this discussion that "living my life" means just the essentials -- keeping myself alive, and keeping my offspring alive so that some of my genes are likely to continue in the gene pool. It's the same instinct that all animals have.
Within that context, I'm wondering why so many humans unilaterally (and often unquestioningly) reject deception and theft as immoral acts. If you've watched any decent nature show, you know that animals engage in one or both regularly. Animals pillage others' food stores, birds lay their eggs in other birds' nests, "paired" females engage in non-mate sexual activity so that males sometimes help rear young that don't have his genes, and so forth. Both intra- and inter-species, deception and theft are part and parcel of other animals' daily life. Couldn't some judicious sneaking and thieving similarly benefit human individuals? Or, phrased another way, is there some universal, non-religious, basis for the near-universal opprobrium those activities receive from "good" people (as opposed to those who make their livings from thieving and/or deceiving)?
Please understand that in asking these questions, I'm not endorsing the adoption of either behavior in any situation. It's a thought experiment, if you will, on differing levels for me. I invite any manner of substantive feedback. Idiotic responses (especially those that involve ignoring the first sentence of this paragraph) and the like will be shit-canned. Those that invoke religion will be deleted, but for different reasons (not because they're necessarily idiotic, but because they don't fit in the specified parameters).
[An alternative title to this post could be "Homework to help you prepare for the next Salon interviewee", but I figured that would scare too many people off. But it's a good thing to add here at the bottom, as a tease, and a possible hint.]
Of Morality, Individuals, and Life
John Newman says:
I think Mark Twain nailed it in "What is Man."
http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/wm_01.html
James Leroy Wilson says:
Here are a few ideas, each of which reinforces the others:
1. We were taught in the most impressionable years of life, through lessons and threats, that they are immoral. Our reactions to theft and deception thus become automatic responses from the subconscious mind. We can't not get angry when we find out we've been lied to, any more than we can't not smile when we see a picture of a basket full of puppies.
2. Cooperation is programmed into the matrix. I don't know much about Prisoner's Dilemma strategy games except from Robert Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation, but the best strategy is to be cooperative in any new encounter, and to be uncooperative only with those parties that have themselves been uncooperative in the past.
3. Humans fancy themselves to be not just survivors only, but creators who expand the fronteirs of life. We are partners in this, benefitting from each other's creations. Theft and deception inhibit the full flowering of human potential, because we are then forced to recover what we've lost, when we should be moving forward.
4. Freedom requires trust. In order to go out and improve our lives, we have to leave our stuff at home, unguarded.
Sunni says:
Thanks, gents, for your responses. John, I hope you don't mind that I made your link an active URL, for reader convenience. I haven't read the Twain piece yet, so I don't know if my followup is relevant to it or not ... James, do you mean to suggest that one should never lie or deceive another? Even when the other is a known enemy? Or an enemy of liberty (who may or may not have directly encroached on your liberty yet)?
John Newman says:
Thanks for changing that, Sunni.
"Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it." Mark Twain
Skeptical Man says:
When a group of people adopts a prohibition against theft amongst themselves, and a mandate to defend the group's property from outside pilfering, they are able to build capital.
As their capital builds, they become more powerful than individuals and groups lacking these understandings. Eventually, these capital-accumulating groups find it easier to exterminate outside pilferers than to defend their property from them.
Those groups that survive all feature this prohibition, which soon becomes the customary way of behaving. Since most humans are greatly swayed by arguments from authority, those groups who reinforce this prohibition with a "thou shalt not steal" meme, attributed to God, have less recidivism, and eventually become dominant.
jomama says:
I like what Skeptical Man said but something I think is left out.
Soon after the condition he describes, the meme "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" takes hold.
A reversion back to the animal world comes back and the whole process starts over again.
vache folle says:
It is not inconsistent from an evolutionary standpoint for condemnation of thievery and thievery to coexist. We want to keep our possessions safe and the condemnation of thievery is part of the legitimizing discourse by which we claim what is ours. At the same time, we are apt to steal where it would serve our interests and we are not too fearful of being caught.
James Leroy Wilson says:
No, I don't mean people should never lie. I was just trying to answer the question.
Jorge says:
Humans engage in deception and theft on a regular basis. It is not just other animals. Spouses cheat on each other with alarming regularity if surveys are to be believed. Judicious sneaking and thieving does indeed benefit some human individuals. Until/unless they get caught. Same as in the animal kingdom. If the Alpha-male chimp or gorilla catches one of his females "cheating" he will do serious damage to the offending male and punish the female as well.
As humans, we have codified the "normal" behavior of honestly, because it is what works best for all of us, when all of us act that way. A community where everyone cheated and stole, on a regular basis, from other members of the community, would not last long. However, in most communities (I would say "every", but I'm sure there is an exception somewhere) there are individuals who will take advantage of this and break with the norm. How often depends largely on if they can get away with it, what the punishment is if they are caught and how well engrained the code of behavior has become.
jeffrey smith says:
I agree with Jorge. People decieve and take what is not theirs on a regular basis-whenever they perceive it to be advantageous to them, and that they can do so with no or little risk of being caught by those who can impose sanctions on them of one sort or another--and what restrains them in such a case is simply their respect for the other person. If your respect another person, you will not decieve or steal from that person.
"Rabbi Chaninah the vice-high priest said: "Pray for the government, because if people did not fear it, a person would swallow his fellow alive.")(Avot 3:2)*
*Don't worry. If that sounds too pro-government, I can balance it with a couple of anti-government teachings from the same source :)
Big Turtle says:
Building an "extra religious" moral framework is one of the great personal chalenges of a lifetime. As simply stated as possible I think that the "Golden Rule" (Do unto others as.....) stands the basic test of time because while dishonesty and theft will benefit an individual, honesty and cooperation will benefit a society. In the end the great achivements of human kind need the diverse energys and strenghths of a society to prosper and grow. While great and free individual minds create the ideas and road maps to follow the heavy lifting is still done by a large mass of people that will mesh and function much more efficently and smoothly if they basicly trust each other in the large and small things of life. Overly simple? Of course it is. Whole volumes of books have been authored on the subject but this is my 100 words or less take on the subject.
BT
Wolf DeVoon says:
Ethical rules invalidate personhood and attack our ability to think. Is it wrong to lie to the Nazis? - hell, no. Must I watch my children starve and die rather than steal a loaf of bread from the Nazis? - of course not.