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Violence and Morality

2018-12-30 18:53:34.864658+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Psychology Today: The seeds of love contain the roots of hate:

... People are violent because of their morality, not in spite of it.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Violence and Morality made: 2018-12-30 20:58:29.343445+00 by: TheSHAD0W

... So, get rid of morals and there will be no violence? Wat?

Also, this goes more than a little away from the supposition in the title. Guess what? Love and hate aren't polar opposites, nor are they mutually exclusive.

#Comment Re: Violence and Morality made: 2019-01-01 05:13:56.534296+00 by: Dan Lyke

Hasn't this long been the discussion about morals vs ethics? Morals are generally the cultural beliefs that cement tribalism.

So maybe not no violence, but likely less.

#Comment Re: Violence and Morality made: 2019-01-01 17:39:54.825671+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Thaaaaaat's rather interesting... But morals are largely based on ethics, aren't they? This seems to be and extension of deconstructing the idea of morals. As with all deconstruction, you have to be careful of your logic or you'll wind up throwing very important things away.

Also I don't think this article is making a good distinction between violence and aggression.

#Comment Re: Violence and Morality made: 2019-01-02 19:30:01.593511+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Yeah, I mean on one hand the whole morals v ethics thing seems like an interesting philosophical discussion, on the other hand after enough time playing with it I realized that eventually ethics may just be bullshit that philosophers come up with to justify their morals.

(I've been thinking about the things that eventually caused me to drift away from Libertarianism, and how a seminal event in that process was the Ayn Rand "letter" where she attempted to defend patent terms, and ended up just showing that an economy was something with arbitrary knobs that got tweaked by law, and you could set those knobs in places that'd bias towards labor, or capital, and it was really a matter of cultural choice where those settings ended up.)

But last night we watched He Named Me Malala and as I read the subtitles on the Taliban cleric rants, it was ... well, not shocking, because I could have predicted it, but it really put into stark relief how much moralism is the driving force underlying hate and violence, especially against women. Phrases like:

We are not against advancement, we are against shamelessness and vulgarity.

are code for "we will kill anyone who tries to evolve the culture".

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