[MD] The End of Faith - Spirituality

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
No. Lying, cheating, stealing and killing are biological patterns.

[Arlo]
No.

Let's take a closer look, first "stealing". On the biological level, 
there is no such thing as stealing. Pirisg refers to a "might makes 
right" orientation, but the thing to remember is that when a wolf 
takes a leg of lamb from another wolf it is not "stealing" it. 
"Property" is a social level pattern. What the wolf does is purely 
moral on the biological level.

"Stealing" occurs only when the social pattern of "property" meets 
the biological moralness of self-preservation. "Stealing" is not a 
biological pattern, it is a moral pronouncement of the superiority of 
social codes of property over the biological organism's right to 
self-preservation. It is the social level that says the butcher's 
"property" is more moral than the man's need to satiate his 
hunger."Stealing" is a social level statement of value, not a 
biological pattern.

"Lying" is much the same, abeit it far more nuanced that I can get 
into here. Simply, it is a moral statement of intellect asserting its 
dominance over social patterns. It says that manipulation of facts 
(intellectual patterns) to serve social ends (social patterns) is 
immoral. But it is NOT a "biological pattern".

"Killing", I might agree with some qualifications, is the result of 
intra-level biological conflict, but when we use it here we are 
expressing an intellectual level value that the word does not have on 
the biological level. Thus, while a wolf may kill another wolf, this 
act is not immoral within the biological level. We also (most) do not 
see the "killing" of a wolf by a man to be "immoral". And, we also do 
not see the "killing" of a man by a wolf to be indicative of "immoral 
behavior" on the part of the wolf. As such I think "killing" (in the 
sense of man killing another man) is a value expression of the 
conflict between intellectual level values and biological and social 
level values.