panthera wrote:nothingtosay wrote:Pain and fear from an evolutionary point of view, are just reactions to the environment developed by human beings and animals to help them survive better in the wild.
Interesting question.
Just a note: this reaction is shared by more organisms than most people realize at first. Since you attribute it to evolution, it sounds like you are acknowledging that it didn't just appear all of a sudden in the most highly evolved animals. I just wanted to clarify that, in case others who are reading this have not considered it.
nothingtosay wrote:With time humans and animals also developed a tendency not to harm others when socialization increased chances of survival.
But why is it WRONG to cause pain? Isn’t suffering after all just chemical reactions in the brain and death just the lack of the ability to keep cell function?
So are you saying that we found it
useful not to cause suffering, but there is no moral prohibition involved? I think maybe socialization has led to this emergent property of moral consideration. (I don't have a clear view on this, and my terms may be inexact. I'm thinking out loud at this point.) The highly advanced degree of social interaction has made it advantageous to be exquisitely attuned to the state of others around us. Our companions are incapacitated and less useful to us when they are suffering too much, since this signifies some sort of injury. If we are the cause of that suffering, they will not cooperate with us. They may try to debilitate us so that we stop injuring them as well.
Is this your view of why it is not useful to cause suffering? But you're asking about morality, not utility?
Maybe morality is just a highly developed faculty that allows for extremely close-knit living. It's a way for our brains to handle difficult situations without constantly thinking everything out. If we develop emotional reactions that parallel what our intellect has told us, then it's easier to figure out the appropriate reaction. Your emotional brain is quicker and perhaps more reliable than your logical brain. "Teaching" your emotional brain frees up your logical brain for other things.
When we share emotional reactions, we codify them in rules, to make things even clearer. Then we don't have to keep arguing about what to do in each situation.
I think that maybe this is the basis of morality, and it emerges in highly social environments.
So in a way, not causing unnecessary pain & suffering are part of what makes up morality in the first place.
How's that?
