|
Post by beth on May 10, 2009 3:16:26 GMT
Last week's Newsweek magazine has an intriguing article called Adventures in Good and Evil. I didn't expect to find it at Newsweek's online site, but it is there. So, for your consideration: Adventures in Good and Evil by Sharon Begley It isn't surprising that the best-known experiments in psychology (apart from Pavlov's salivating dogs) are those Stanley Milgram ran beginning in the 1960s. Over and over, with men and women, with the old and the young, he found that when ordinary people are told to administer increasingly stronger electric shocks to an unseen person as part of a "learning experiment," the vast majority—sometimes 93 percent—complied, even when the learner (actually one of the scientists) screamed in anguish and pleaded, "Get me out of here!" Nor is it surprising that Milgram's results have been invoked to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib and others in which ordinary people followed orders to commit heinous acts. What is surprising is how little attention science has paid to the dissenters in Milgram's experiments. Some participants did balk at following the command to torture their partner. As one of them, World War II veteran Joseph Dimow, recalled decades later, "I refused to go any further." On second thought, ignoring the few people who did not fit the pattern—in this case, of throwing morality to the wind in order to obey authority—is not that surprising: in probing the neurological basis and the evolutionary roots of good and evil, scientists have mostly focused on the majority and made sweeping generalizations. In general, most people's moral sense capitulates in the face of authority, as Milgram showed. In general, the roots of our moral sense—of honesty, altruism, compassion, generosity and sense of justice and fairness—are sunk deep in evolutionary history, as can be seen in our primate cousins, who are capable of remarkable acts of altruism. In one classic experiment, a chain in the cage of a rhesus monkey did double duty: it brought food to the monkey who pulled it, but delivered an electric shock to a second monkey. After observing the effect of pulling the chain on their companions, one monkey stopped pulling the chain for five days and one stopped for 12 days, primatologist Frans de Waal recounts in his 2006 book, "Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved." The monkeys "were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain on another," he writes. The closer a monkey was related to the victim, the longer it would go hungry, which supports the idea that morality evolved because it aided the survival of those with whom we share the most genes. Darwin himself viewed morality as the product of evolution. But monkeys and apes, like people, have taken a trait that evolved to help kin and extended it to completely unrelated creatures. De Waal once saw a chimpanzee pick up an injured starling, climb the highest tree in her enclosure, carefully unfold the bird's wings and loft it toward the fence to get it airborne. And the final "in general" is that people's ethical decision making is strongly driven by gut emotions rather than by rational, analytic thought. If people are asked whether they would be willing to throw a switch to redirect deadly fumes from a room with five children to a room with one, most say yes, and neuroimaging shows that their brain's rational, analytical regions had swung into action to make the requisite calculation. But few people say they would kill a healthy man in order to distribute his organs to five patients who will otherwise die, even though the logic—kill one, save five—is identical: a region in our emotional brain rebels at the act of directly and actively taking a man's life, something that feels immeasurably worse than the impersonal act of throwing a switch in an air duct. We have gut feelings of what is right and what is wrong. These generalizations are all well and good, but they get you only so far. They do not explain, for instance, why Joseph Dimow balked at Milgram's experiments. They do not explain why a Tibetan monk who had been incarcerated for years by the Chinese said (in a story the Dalai Lama is fond of telling) that his greatest fear during captivity was that he would lose his compassion for the prison guards who tortured him. They do not explain why—given the human capacity for forgiveness and revenge, for compassion as well as cruelty, for both altruism and selfishness—some people fall at one end of the moral spectrum and some at the other. Nor do they explain a related mystery—namely, whether it is possible to cultivate virtue through the way we construct a society, raise children or even train our own brains. Saying that the brain is wired for both virtues and vices "tells us nothing more than what everyone already knew," says Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. "The important questions are what accounts for human variation in moral behavior? And are there ways to cultivate virtues?" Unfortunately, says Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, who has done pioneering work on the evolution of altruism and cooperation, there is precious little research on individual differences. "We know that women tend to be more altruistic than men on average, older people tend to be more altruistic than younger ones, students are less altruistic than nonstudents," he says. "People with higher IQs tend to be more altruistic/cooperative." However, there is little or no correlation between altruism and standard personality traits such as shyness, agreeableness and openness to new experiences. That may be because altruism and its cousin, generosity, seem to reflect less who you are than what you see. The greatest barrier to greater generosity, at least in the wealthy West, is that "people think they're in a world of scarcity and living on the edge," says Christian Smith of Notre Dame University, who has studied what motivates people to give. "Consumer capitalism makes people feel they don't have enough, so they feel they don't have enough to give away." But obviously some people do give very generously. That may reflect something very basic. "Being taught that it's important to give and, even more, having that behavior modeled for you makes a big difference," says Smith. So does empathy, which may explain why panhandlers on my subway so often seem to do better with people who are scruffily dressed and struggling than with the pearls-and-pumps set. Observing compassion and forgiveness can spur those virtues, too. But in these cases, whether you are likely to be forgiving or vengeful, compassionate or cold, may depend less on having a role model and more on emotion. A specific cluster of emotional traits seem to go along with compassion. People who are emotionally secure, who view life's problems as manageable and who feel safe and protected tend to show the greatest empathy for strangers and to act altruistically and compassionately. In contrast, people who are anxious about their own worth and competence, who avoid close relationships or are clingy in those they have tend to be less altruistic and less generous, psychologists Philip Shaver of the University of California, Davis, and Mario Mikulincer of Bar-Ilan University in Israel have found in a series of experiments. Such people are less likely to care for the elderly, for instance, or to donate blood. /snip the rest of the article is here: www.newsweek.com/id/195117/page/2
|
|
|
Post by Liberator on May 10, 2009 18:06:57 GMT
Rather a long article but I was fascinated by the difference in attitude to beggars when I came here. My own is tht I don't like them but see nothing immoral about it. If that's their deal, it's probably more honest than playing silly buggers with other peoples' money who may not all themselves be silly buggers. The attitude I was more used to though was usually the get of your arse ad do some work kind regardless that most of them would incapable of hammering a nail. Here there were defintely two attitudes: one is There but for the grace of God go I and the other, it may look better than working but I wouldn't do it
|
|
|
Post by Alpha Hooligan on May 10, 2009 20:18:30 GMT
Irony here...this guy probably did take human lives, posssibly bayonetted people to death....yet, some of those who were happy to zap/torture the victims in the experiment would probably regard him as a "killer" if you asked them.
The line between good and evil is a blury one sometimes, I'd torture a child abductor if I thought he would reveal the location of that child...some would call it evil/barbaric...I would call it an act of good and consider it my responsibility to an innocent child.
AH
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 11, 2009 2:29:53 GMT
In regard to "beggars", we have them here, too. People are usually tolerant. One man set up shop on the side of a lead in road to a bridge every day before rush hour. Traffic would back up and people usually tossed a dollar or so into his box on their way home. We sometimes supposed he made a good living that way - and with no taxes. I think people are less tolerant of street people who often appear to have mental problems - not completely unsympathetic, but wary . . . maybe a bit afraid. and, yes, it does seem to be a very long article, though with my paper copy of Newsweek, I just sat down and read it right through. I wonder why it seems longer as a message board post.
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 11, 2009 2:46:01 GMT
Irony here...this guy probably did take human lives, posssibly bayonetted people to death....yet, some of those who were happy to zap/torture the victims in the experiment would probably regard him as a "killer" if you asked them. The line between good and evil is a blury one sometimes, I'd torture a child abductor if I thought he would reveal the location of that child...some would call it evil/barbaric...I would call it an act of good and consider it my responsibility to an innocent child. AH I suppose it is blurry in a way. But, we easily accept the fact that some people are more empathetic than others. If, via empathy, we are able to feel some connection to another's pain, then that might explain those who would not participate beyond a certain point. Do we all start out with the same amount of empathy, with some losing that quality over time? Do we become immune to others' pain and shun altruism by degrees, so that some are overly sympathetic, with sociopathy being the other end of the bar? I agree with you about the child abductor. That's similar to the ticking time bomb example.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 11, 2009 13:01:33 GMT
In regard to "beggars", we have them here, too. People are usually tolerant. One man set up shop on the side of a lead in road to a bridge every day before rush hour. Traffic would back up and people usually tossed a dollar or so into his box on their way home. We sometimes supposed he made a good living that way - and with no taxes. I think people are less tolerant of street people who often appear to have mental problems - not completely unsympathetic, but wary . . . maybe a bit afraid. and, yes, it does seem to be a very long article, though with my paper copy of Newsweek, I just sat down and read it right through. I wonder why it seems longer as a message board post. A lot of people (and I'm one of them) refuse to give to beggars because the chances are that they will spend it on drugs. As for the mentally disordered: well it is sometimes hard to tell if the behaviour is due to substance abuse. This bit from the article made me think. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich is reported as saying: "We know that women tend to be more altruistic than men on average, older people tend to be more altruistic than younger ones, students are less altruistic than nonstudents," he says. Now, I always thought that students were the people setting the world to rights and condemning we polluting wage earners for our irresponsibe behaviour. Have times changed or are they all a bunch of selfish hypocrites after all?
|
|
|
Post by Big Lin on May 11, 2009 16:28:24 GMT
I don't suppose students have changed that much over the years.
A lot of student 'politics' is just bravado anyway.
At the end of the day we all know pretty much that being kind is good and being cruel is bad.
I reckon that's about as much of a basis as us humans need for a decent morality.
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 12, 2009 16:57:57 GMT
In regard to this subject, it usually comes down to opinions about whether people are born inherently good or inherently evil. My general thought is that we are born innocent and acquire traits via life experiences.
The exception would be those who have mental problems with physical causes.
Of course, that's just my optimistic view. The flip side would be that humankind is born with no concern for anyone else and has to learn how to empathize.
|
|
|
Post by Alpha Hooligan on May 12, 2009 19:49:15 GMT
Human beans are generally, mostly decent sorts, until they are angered or threatened, then the thin veneer of civilisation is ripped away and we are revealed for what we are...the animals right at the top of the food chain. You don't reach the top unless you are willing to kick the ass of every other predator/threat that is in competition for your food source and living space. That's us folks. AH
|
|
|
Post by Liberator on May 13, 2009 0:39:11 GMT
I think there must be something very early in childhood to determine whether empathy develops or not. You can see very small children who react immediately to emotions of others and automatically share, and others who behave like threatened animals determined to hang on to anything they have and grab what others have as well. Since that behaviour in a group all of that kind usually means losing everything, they go on doing it because they are too stupid to make the connection that not chasing what others have would protect their own better.
There's said to be a development from unconscious lack of differentiation from others to differentiation and then back again to a more conscious empathy that religions mostly try to inculcate. Differentiation as Self is animal "Nobody knows the difference between mine and thine better than a guard dog" wrote Robert Heinlein (not that I give him the prophetic status that a lot of Americans do).
It is said as well that Neurosis and Psychosis are both a failure of differentiation but in different forms, that the Neurotic incorporates all the world's experience as their own, while the Psychotic experiences all the world as centred on their ego. There's no doubt that this is our natural modus operandi and traditional beliefs in omens, astrology, magic and all their relatives depend on it. Compared to animals, we are mad. We have abstract intelligence that they do not but we are the first and it is not integrated yet with our aeons-old other faculties.
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 13, 2009 1:10:20 GMT
I think there must be something very early in childhood to determine whether empathy develops or not. You can see very small children who react immediately to emotions of others and automatically share, and others who behave like threatened animals determined to hang on to anything they have and grab what others have as well. Since that behaviour in a group all of that kind usually means losing everything, they go on doing it because they are too stupid to make the connection that not chasing what others have would protect their own better. There's said to be a development from unconscious lack of differentiation from others to differentiation and then back again to a more conscious empathy that religions mostly try to inculcate. Differentiation as Self is animal "Nobody knows the difference between mine and thine better than a guard dog" wrote Robert Heinlein (not that I give him the prophetic status that a lot of Americans do). It is said as well that Neurosis and Psychosis are both a failure of differentiation but in different forms, that the Neurotic incorporates all the world's experience as their own, while the Psychotic experiences all the world as centred on their ego. There's no doubt that this is our natural modus operandi and traditional beliefs in omens, astrology, magic and all their relatives depend on it. Compared to animals, we are mad. We have abstract intelligence that they do not but we are the first and it is not integrated yet with our aeons-old other faculties. Yes, with children, one sees that again and again in the bullies and the bullied. Animals have stragglers on the fringe of the pack who are the first picked off by predators. I once had a teacher who said that, if we wanted to succeed in life, it was necessary to conform so as not to be among the stragglers. That's a scary thought, imo - not getting picked off, but conforming out of necessity.
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 13, 2009 1:15:39 GMT
Quote: Human beans are generally, mostly decent sorts, until they are angered or threatened, then the thin veneer of civilisation is ripped away and we are revealed for what we are...the animals right at the top of the food chain. You don't reach the top unless you are willing to kick the ass of every other predator/threat that is in competition for your food source and living space. That's us folks. AH, this goes back to the need to conform, and once a member of the pack in good standing, to achieve alpha, I guess. So, do the alphas have the ability to feel compassion, or are they oblivious to all but their own personal needs (present company excepted, of course).
|
|
|
Post by Liberator on May 13, 2009 2:39:21 GMT
Only a few days ago I remember hearing somebody interviewed saying that we are the survivors of the killers of the past, that is why we enjoy games involving throwing and hitting things that could all be weapons. That is why the better religions have always aimed to get beyond that and made a false division between our feelings and our intellect. We need that distinction at this primitive stage in our development because we still have far too much cultural baggage dragging us back to suit the rules of those who have risen to the top using those rules. We switch from one extreme to the other and the extremes are often given a sex bias because it's harder to dissociate women from children than it is men. Our swing against 1980s conservatism back to 1960s liberalism is overdue, but really, the 1960s was more 1970s and 1930s conservatism lasted well into the 1950s, so the return to liberal values may not be as overdue as it looks. This is an interesting site: dealwiththedevil.yuku.com/directory
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 14, 2009 0:00:46 GMT
Only a few days ago I remember hearing somebody interviewed saying that we are the survivors of the killers of the past, that is why we enjoy games involving throwing and hitting things that could all be weapons. That is why the better religions have always aimed to get beyond that and made a false division between our feelings and our intellect. We need that distinction at this primitive stage in our development because we still have far too much cultural baggage dragging us back to suit the rules of those who have risen to the top using those rules. We switch from one extreme to the other and the extremes are often given a sex bias because it's harder to dissociate women from children than it is men. Our swing against 1980s conservatism back to 1960s liberalism is overdue, but really, the 1960s was more 1970s and 1930s conservatism lasted well into the 1950s, so the return to liberal values may not be as overdue as it looks. This is an interesting site: dealwiththedevil.yuku.com/directory That looks to be a site worth exploring, though I have not gone beyond the front page. Do you post there, ratar? I'm not sure I agree about the gender bias. There's no doubt it would apply to most of the 20th century and earlier, but less so now.
|
|
|
Post by Liberator on May 14, 2009 0:44:00 GMT
I never agree about any gender bias that traditionalists=feminists seek to impose. I do post there. I think any gender bias applies much more since 1980 than before. Then, 'feminism' meant mostly that women's traditional values were of equal or greater value than men's, and for men and society to accept that. After meant accepting 'consumerist' values mostly applied to men as superior and any that women (or men) had otherwise inferior to be discarded in order to become 'equal' from a position of inferiority for those who do oppose consumerism with values depised as traditionally 'female' I also post in freethinkerspub.yuku.com/alicesrestaurant.yuku.com/balicesrestaurantboomerbay.yuku.com/directoryundebunked.yuku.com/directoryin the Yuku group.
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 14, 2009 2:09:02 GMT
Quote: I never agree about any gender bias that traditionalists=feminists seek to impose. I do post there. I think any gender bias applies much more since 1980 than before. Then, 'feminism' meant mostly that women's traditional values were of equal or greater value than men's, and for men and society to accept that
Ah but most men and the lion's share of society did accept that.
Evidence - the total dominance of men in business and industry. Do you realize that in many, many circumstances, the "secretary" or "administrative assistant" did most of the work - including, many times - the actual decision making, while male management drew 3 times the pay (or more)? Not just wild speculation, I saw this happen a number of times. Frankly, I think the entire issue is about control. Maybe some women want to be controllers after having been controlled overmuch throughout history. Personally, I never cared anything about being a controller - just did not want to be controlled. But then, I'm not a rampant feminist. I do, however, value the improvements brought about by those who were/are. I think we are straying from the topic.
When it comes to who is more compassionate, male or female, I'll go back to what I said before. Women were long considered more guided by emotion than men, who were thought to be more cerebral. Now, we know the playing field is far more even. Thanks for the list of boards. I'll look. Though I often do not agree with you, I enjoy reading your posts.
|
|
|
Post by Liberator on May 14, 2009 13:23:12 GMT
You have me a bit lost here. Quoting doesn't help either. I say that pre-1980 there's a strong move to establish traditionally female activities as more central than male. It looks as if you agree that it was effective, but you do so as if contradicting. Then, you cite total dominance of men in business and industry as evidence (your words) of this acceptance of the equal or central value of women's traditional non-business and non-industrial activities and go on to say that where women were in traditionally male occupations they were doing the real work without the real pay. That all looks like an argument that women were accounted at a lesser value than men and you don't mention traditional domestic values at all. I know all about the rule during the 1980s that selling a word processor is done by chatting to the secretary before the official sales pitch to the boss. She uses it, she makes the decision. I think control is a matter, but it is belief in control that is the real issue. Feminists (at least what Wendy McElroy calls victim-feminists and I call feeble-feminists) seem obsessed with power and control and always with trying to show that men have it all and women are bereft and helpless. That really annoys a lot of women and contradicts the self-esteem most feel. The trouble with rampant feminists is that they believed traditional sexist values, so could not accept men as equals with them and would not see that their exclusive communes could suffer worse prima-donna jockeying than men more familiar with accepting leadership in some areas and being followers in others. You can see it in children: boys form structured gangs and the leader in one group may follow in another; girls are for ever switching best friends and cliques ganging up on enemy of the day who may be best friend tomorrow. Not just children either: I had three late teenage friends who were forever switching which two were against the third that went on for years My issue there is that we are still suffering from Reagan-Thatcheritis with all value outside the home and none inside so that everything is about getting women under the same control as men and none about liberating men to have a home life equal to women with both working much shorter hours at something they actually want to do instead of have to do. There is a control matter because if you grow your own food and make your own bread (or even deal a local market) you can tell the supermarket to piss off. These days, it is often not just the supermarket dictating but Mucky Donald and Bugger King. Some women may want to be controllers but that is because women have expected since 1950, more freedom than men. Through most of history, it's only in places (usually islands) too small to develop an aristocracy, that most of the population have not been under the Lord's control and that meant men having to go off and fight while women were free not to. Later, when mass employment came in, women eventually extricated themselves so they could have the freedom to run a home while men provided for them - in other words took the same position relative to men as aristocracy relative to peasantry. What we need is some requirement for women to serve like men and some freedom for men to serve less and all change from emphasis on profit to emphasis on supplying needs to order. That's how it started, you made a profit if you fulfilled an existing need, you did not spend millions advertising to create want for what you had decided to produce. In the case of compassion or any other thing, I take a general rule that society promotes what it wants to believe opposite to the reality. So society wants to justify (and exploit!) men's emotional outbursts and mass hysteria as rational pride and honour and patriotism and loyalty and romance while it likes to contrast that with female offspring nurturing seen as emotional and irrational because that conceals the unpleasant reality that the best practical mother is a calculating gold-digger able to enlist the male best able to provide for her and offspring and if necessary make a cold decision of which must be sacrificed for another. You can make a comparison some Indian did talking about religion: when religion doe not endorse the existing culture, it opposes it, so the ideals of compassion and universal peace come out strongest in India when war was treated as sport and 'Israel' during the period of anti-Roman terrorism.
|
|
|
Post by beth on May 14, 2009 22:04:46 GMT
I'm sorry I was confusing. Guessing that might have come from the direction each of us is trying to go on this. I'm looking at it in connection with the current Topic (good vs evil, weak vs strong, emotional vs cerebral, etc.) as it might pertain to the genders. In that regard, women were stereotyped as weaker, more emotional, and, perhaps, more compassionate, historically. Now, of course, it's generally recognized that is not true. I don't have statistics before me so just at a guess, there are fewer female murderers than male. Is that because of the maternal role? The topic at hand - whether there is a predisposition for caring vs uncaring - is interesting to me. You're thoughts?
|
|
|
Post by Liberator on May 14, 2009 22:54:34 GMT
Ha yes! My first point, that society tries to cure what it perceives as weakness, so there's every likelihood that if there are any natural differences going back to animal, they are the opposite of the socially desired stereotypes. So you train boys to be tough and unfeeling and girls to be soppy. The animal reality is that mothers have to be tough. It's tough enough having the child in the first place. What might be an accurate stereotype is that women are better at constant stamina stuff and men at bursts of activity. Although that should make women better long-distance runners and I don't think that's true. A while ago I saw some links to about 150 years ago showing all the arguments then why pink was the obvious colour for a boy because it reflected strong manly red and blue for a girl because it reflected peaceful sky and water and delicate cornflowers. That is, whatever you believe it can always be rationalised. When it comes to murder, I think it needs to be broken down. First we can consider professional hit men (who after all are no different from mercenary soldiers) and general 'unemotional' murder for criminal reasons. That is nearly all male. If a woman plans a murder for gain or just to get an awkward man out of the way she is more likely to hire a hitman than to do it herself. Then there's the cases that may not have intended to kill but didn't care whether they did or not. Whether that is murder or manslaughter often depends on jurisdiction (and lawyer!). That's another case where men are more likely to feature because of physical strength. Even if a woman flies into a hysterical rage or fear, unless she has a weapon a man can probably control her. The law recognises crimes of passion as provocation but some jurisdictions accept this as explosive in men but cold battered wife syndrome in women, Though that's a typical defence that doesn't prove the woman actually was a victim and there've been many cases where she'd rather murder than face the shame of walking out. Mostly Indo-Pak and it may be that shame there translates to serious revenge against the whole family, so may be a tougher dilemma than for westerners. All told, I think we should expect professional, gang and rage killing to be mostly male, emotional murder to be planned by women but often carried out by men for them. You can add a small number of girls probably more prepared to use a weapon on older people than boys are on men, either because they think of older women as more motherly and what they may think is self-defence against men. It depends on your culture of course but we do surround boys much more with images suggesting that serious violence is not as serious as it really is, while girls know the true state of affairs. I used to be against this, but I wonder now if there wasn't something to be said for the days when it was recognised that boys might fight, so they did it under recognised rules of fairness to win, not to maim each other. Now that there are no rules, they more often fight like girls no holds barred to destroy for just the same reason, that by the time it has got that far, you are talking cornered animal fighting for its life (emotionally). What might also be emotional is that women much more often use a weapon than men and the more distant the better - throw things better than swing a club better than a long knife better than a short one. It could be a kind of distancing, it could be that she just can't bear to touch him, it could be fear of not being strong enough or getting close enough for retaliation. It does look as if when women murder they are much colder about it and much more likely to murder where men might find some other way of getting what they want. There were two notorious ones last year. One hired a hitman to do her husband so she would get his pub and move her lover in; the Scissor Sisters murdered their mother's African boyfriend who they said was defrauding her and cut him up and buried the pieces around a park. All three are guests of the State for a very long time. www.digitaljournal.com/article/267369 I doubt you'd get men adding this kind of viciousness to murder.
|
|