Is evolution adequate for explaining ethics

[o_mlly]

There are all sorts of justified murders. The Mosaic Law gave permission to the state to kill murderers. As well, when you kill an enemy combatant, providing it isn’t some egregious violation of the rules of war (like killing an unarmed prisoner), it’s not viewed as murder. We make all sorts of dispensation that amount to a limited right to kill people.

Let me define my terms. Murder is the unjust taking of innocent human life. The Jews were innocent and their killing was unjust.

“Justified killing” has moral status but there are not all sorts of dispensations only one: self defense. The use of force, even lethal force, is justified to save the lives of innocent human beings from an unjust aggressor. The Jews were hardly the unjust aggressors.

Let’s be blunt here. The Nazis essentially believed that anything that furthered their cause (and by extension the cause of Germany) overrode any particular moral precept.

That was not their defense. But let’s examine your claim which seems to be: The Nazis believed that
killing the innocent Jews was justified because a greater good would result, i.e., the Thousand-Year Reich for millions of Aryan Germans. The Thousand-Year Reich as a good was greater than the evil caused in killing the Jewish population. I don’t think so.

The Treaty of Westphalia gave Germany absolute sovereignty. There is no question about the legality of the Holocaust. Jackson, the lead prosecutor at Nuremberg, had to depart from the philosophy of legal positivism and proceed to a higher authority, a new and higher vantage point to prosecute the legal system of another country. He appealed to the basic principles of civilization in order to prosecute the jurisprudence of the Nazi legal system. To transcend human law had to take recourse natural law – the Creator’s law.

By the beginning of the war, Germany, by and large didn’t operate under any kind of normative legal process. The Enabling Act pretty much made Hitler an absolute dictator, and it was a power that he happily extended to his more enthusiastic lieutenants.

What is a “normative” legal process? The term suggests a higher power sets the standard which becomes normative. In the 1930’s who was that authority and how did they claim a superior moral system than the Germans?

My reading indicates acceptance of the treatment of the Jewish populations in Germany and elsewhere went well beyond Hitler’s “enthusiastic lieutenants”.

Oh my, look at all those posts. I’ve got to master my fingering for that darn F-chord and work on drawing that 5-iron so I’ll check into this thread again tomorrow.

 

[Bradskii]

 

[o_mlly]

Thanks for the link to Sandercoe’s lessons. For those who have not evolved long skinny fingers, your best friend is the capo. Is using the capo ethical? I hope so.

 

[o_mlly]

Thank you for this exchange. I’ve extracted the following snippets to focus on resolving the truth of the proposition: Legitimate acts are moral acts. Laws and morality evolve in society.

Was legitimate rape before the rules of war evolved not an evil act?

From my perspective no.

Would murder become non-murder using the same argument? That was exactly the Nazi defense strategy at Nuremberg.

The Nazis essentially believed that anything that furthered their cause (and by extension the cause of Germany) overrode any particular moral precept.

That was not their defense. But let’s examine your claim which seems to be: The Nazis believed that
killing the innocent Jews was justified because a greater good would result, i.e., the Thousand-Year Reich for millions of Aryan Germans. The Thousand-Year Reich as a good was greater than the evil caused in killing the Jewish population.

By the beginning of the war, Germany, by and large didn’t operate under any kind of normative legal process.

What is a “normative” legal process? The term suggests a higher power sets the standard which becomes normative. In the 1930’s who was that authority and how did they claim a superior moral system than the Germans?

So yes, the Allied Powers imposed their own morality upon the Nazis …

Which brings us to this question: By what moral right did the Allies impose their moral conscience as binding on another sovereign state?

 

[niceatheist]

Which brings us to this question: By what moral right did the Allies impose their moral conscience as binding on another sovereign state?

By the standards of the time, and whether we like it or not, because they were victors. This is the nature of such wars. But to my mind, the Allied Powers, by and large defending themselves and their allies (yes, the Soviet Union is tricky, because it did cut a deal with Germany that allowed the partition of Poland), were in the right.

 

[Pattylt]

Only if the whole song needs to be raised. My problem is that I learned F with the first 3 fingers and it was almost impossible to do it like the video. But his point about thumb muscle development was spot on. Worse cramp ever when learning!

 

[edwest211]

They had won the war. They dictated the terms. Like any negotiation, the Allies wanted as much control as they could get. However, practical problems arose that prevented certain things from happening. One goal was to remove former members of the Nazi Party from positions of control. It didn’t work out. Americans who attempted to fill their shoes soon found that getting things done took a lot longer than was required. So, those same former Nazis were quietly put back to work. Ethics and morality were flexible concepts in some cases.

 

[o_mlly]

By the standards of the time, and whether we like it or not, because they were victors. This is the nature of such wars. But to my mind, the Allied Powers, by and large defending themselves and their allies (yes, the Soviet Union is tricky, because it did cut a deal with Germany that allowed the partition of Poland), were in the right.

Pressing the point to remove a possible “might makes right” interpretation:

• If there was no war then would it follow that the sovereign German government’s treatment of their Jewish population up to and including killing them were moral acts?
• If the Allies lost the war then would it follow that the sovereign German government’s treatment of their Jewish population up to and including killing them were moral acts?

 

[PetraG]

Sorry–I’m not sure how this got to be a reply to you personally, but I can’t figure out how to undo that.

I would say generally that human morality came out of our capacity for empathy: that is, we have the mental capacity to imagine the feelings behind another person’s actions or experience when those are not the feelings we feel ourselves. Many mammals learn to avoid negative consequences imposed by the group, as the introductory question implied, and not just the great apes. Could any other animal have a world of drama or myth? I don’t think so. No, only humans can learn to understand emotions they haven’t felt in their own personal experience.

This capacity for empathy made the city-state possible. We humans have the capacity to see total strangers as members of our own group. We can lead our domesticated animals to do the same, but they follow our cues. Go through an airport or go to Mass at a cathedral, and you’re seeing something no other animal can do. We have the mental capacity to embrace the stranger and even to love our enemies. None of the other animals have that.

That does not mean that we always follow our highest moral capabilities. It means that we have the highest moral capability of any of the animals. We are still totally capable of reacting out of pain or fear as any other animal does. Some of us are even born without the capacity for emotional empathy (that is, we are emotionally prone to become sociopaths or psychopaths) and have to marshal that capacity to understand and relate to others from intellect alone, which is a difficult thing to do without any supporting emotions–without being able to feel “how would that feel if someone did that to you?”

 

[niceatheist]

No, it would not make the mass murder of Jews moral. But let’s be honest, the Allies didn’t wage war on the Nazis because of the persecution and ultimate murder of millions of Jews, they made war on Nazi Germany because it was an expansionist power bent upon domination of Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. It’s a question we will never be able to answer as to whether the Allies would have just sat on their butts if Germany had stayed within its borders and then murdered millions of Jews. I’d like to think we would still have made war on Germany, but the more realistic side of me suggests we would have sat on our butts.

• If the Allies lost the war then would it follow that the sovereign German government’s treatment of their Jewish population up to and including killing them were moral acts?

No, it wouldn’t have been. But there would have been precious little anyone could have done about it. And in the continuum of persecution of Jews, the Holocaust may have been the extreme end of the seemingly endless of pogroms since the First Century. Maybe earlier eras would have still found mass murder of Jews to be a wicked act, but when one considers the treatment of groups like the Cathars, perhaps they wouldn’t have.

Even among the Allies, both the Soviets and Western Allies, there was a level of anti-Semitism. Certainly no one advocated for the general murder of millions of Jews, but they were viewed as outsiders. But by the mid-20th century, at least among Western nations, the idea of murdering millions of people based upon their religion or ethnicity was viewed as immoral. By the end of the 19th century, the term “crimes against humanity” had entered the lexicon of international law, by and large due to the treatment of certain groups by Belgium in its colonies in Africa. This was further entrenched as the Allies learned the extent of the genocide of ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, and the idea of an international court to deal with such crimes was floated (shot down by the Americans at the time).

So considering that the concept of crimes against humanity and genocide being among those crimes, had been around for about 40 years prior to the Nazis undertaking the Holocaust, the Nazis surely knew that the international community viewed mass murder to be immoral and egregious violation of generally agreed upon standards of conduct. But as I said, the Nazis assumed they would win, and I suppose insofar as we can invoke morals on the Nazi side, they assumed they’d simply be able to rewrite the morals. Actually, I wouldn’t even assume that. I think their assumption was that they simply wouldn’t be caught, that their crimes would go without investigation because there would be no one in a position to either investigate or impose any kind of legal sanction.

But ethnic cleansing was hardly a new thing in the 1930s, and various forms of ethnic cleansing had gone on for a very long time. One can only imagine the fate of Jews and Moors in Reconquista Spain if Ferdinand and Isabella had had access to Zyklon B.

 

[Richca]

If evolution is understood as it generally is, i.e., a physical science theory, than evolution is not adequate in explaining ethics or morality whatever. Human morality is derived from their spiritual soul and spiritual powers of intellect and will which soul and powers are not a product of evolution but of creation for every human soul is immediately created by God. The human spiritual soul and spiritual powers of intellect and will are not something that fall under the competence of the natural or physical sciences that can be empirically verified or observed. Human morality and the study of human ethics as well as the spiritual human soul is a question and study for philosophy and theology.

 

[PetraG]

If evolution is understood as it generally is, i.e., a physical science theory, than evolution is not adequate in explaining ethics or morality whatever. Human morality is derived from their spiritual soul and spiritual powers of intellect and will which soul and powers are not a product of evolution but of creation for every human soul is immediately created by God. The human spiritual soul and spiritual powers of intellect and will are not something that fall under the competence of the natural or physical sciences that can be empirically verified or observed. Human morality and the study of human ethics is a question and study for philosophy and theology.

Exactly. I think we could say that humans were created with emotional and mental capacities necessary for morality. When those capacities are missing (and any capacity can be missing in a human), that is a serious defect and a serious impediment to acting according to a moral code.

I think we have a sense of “right” and “wrong” based on these capacities–that is, based on the capacity to understand either emotionally or intellectually or both how someone else is feeling and therefore what kind of behavior one person or group ought to be able to expect out of another person or group. That emotional capacity to form a sense of right and wrong isn’t a moral code in and of itself, though. It is merely the physical capacity for a moral code. I guess I would say it is the physical basis for an animal to have a spiritual life, because we are beings with integrity, made in a seamless way, not spirits and bodies that merely co-exist in time for a time.

In terms of evolution (or, taxonomy, if one wants to quibble about how different living things came to have the physical capacities they have), I think the biological capacities of humans do explain why theology and morality are not applicable to other species–that is, why we would be wrong to expect moral behavior out of the animals, who are incapable and therefore innocent of the world of morality. That appreciation is necessary in forming our moral code toward the environment and toward the animal world.

 

[o_mlly]

No, it would not make the mass murder of Jews moral.

Was legitimate rape before the rules of war evolved not an evil act?

From my perspective no.

What is the critical difference allowing one to:

• disagree and judge that genocide is immoral in a sovereign country that does not believe genocide to be immoral?
• agree and judge rape is moral in a sovereign country that believes rape to be moral?

 

[niceatheist]

niceatheist:

No, it would not make the mass murder of Jews moral.

Was legitimate rape before the rules of war evolved not an evil act?

From my perspective no.

What is the critical difference allowing one to:

• disagree and judge that genocide is immoral in a sovereign country that does not believe genocide to be immoral?
• agree and judge rape is moral in a sovereign country that believes rape to be moral?

Well, to a large extent since the creation of Admiralty (Marine) Law there has been a notion of international law. Historically that was only applied to the conduct of nations towards each other, but with the notion of crimes against humanity, internal actions of a state against its citizens has also been deemed to come under the purview of international law. Since Nuremberg, states cannot rely upon sovereignty as a defense where crimes against humanity are concerned.

Of course, all of this is predicated on the ability of the international community to actually prosecute regimes or internal entities (like rebel groups in a civil war). We’ve had some success with the Balkan War and with some countries in the developing world at prosecuting individuals involved in crimes against humanity, but where we can’t meaningfully investigate (like, say, North Korea), or even if we can, cannot actually arrest offenders, we reach the limits of international law.

So again, morality, even in the actions of sovereign states, is a moving target. 150 years ago, the attempts at Ethnic Cleansing in North America against indigenous tribes was largely viewed as normal conduct. Within 50 years, the moral compass had swung towards such actions being indefensible, and a half century after that we were hanging German and Japanese war criminals.

 

[o_mlly]

Well, to a large extent since the creation of Admiralty (Marine) Law there has been a notion of international law. Historically that was only applied to the conduct of nations towards each other, but with the notion of crimes against humanity, internal actions of a state against its citizens has also been deemed to come under the purview of international law. Since Nuremberg, states cannot rely upon sovereignty as a defense where crimes against humanity are concerned.

I believe that the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for crimes against humanity is more recent. The International Court of Justice ( ICJ) formed after WWII had jurisdiction only over member states and for only disputes between member states. The International Criminal Court (ICC) formed in 2002 claimed jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for crimes against the international community regardless of membership. So, in the 20th century, Germany could not be prosecuted for genocide. I mention this because I believe your argument for the evolution of morality is dependent on the accidents of time and place.

So, at the time of the German genocide there was no international law against genocide just as there was no international law against rape in antiquity or the Middle Ages when Viking and Mongols are reported to have raped conquered peoples.

What principle argues that the Germans acted immorally but the rapists of antiquity and the Middle Ages did not?

 

[edwest211]

Please don’t degrade human beings to the level of animals.

 

[edwest211]

Does anyone here actually know what Zyklon B is?

 

[edwest211]

And some Japanese war criminals who experimented on live human beings were let go. The US did so in exchange for valuable intelligence.

 

[PetraG]

Please don’t degrade human beings to the level of animals.

OK, well, don’t talk about evolution and ethics in the same sentence if humans don’t in any way count as part of the rest of the biological world.

 

[edwest211]

You should understand that humans are unique. Animals do not do what some humans will do. They don’t build cities, for example.