[MD] The End of Faith - Spirituality

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu>:

> [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.

So what is immoral at the biological level?



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