Do your morals only exist due to fear of the afterlife?

[LuckyR]

We are human animals. Your above statement flies in the face of the facts of animal behaviour and nature. Unfounded presumptive opinion and nothing more than that. Sorry.

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize: "I think the best of humanity is animalistic and childish" was a superior form of factually based discourse that was head and shoulders above "unfounded presumptive opinion".

[Sy Borg]

The worst of humanity is animalistic and childish..I think children have a better than adults at least in the sense that their capacity for self deception is close to zero. Adults come up with many ways to justify their evil.

Try being an autism spectrum child at school. Children are far more cruel than adults as a rule. Ancient cultures were more cruel than modern cultures. There are numerous studies on childrens' undeveloped morality and also about ancient torture methods.

-- Updated 29 Sep 2016, 02:40 to add the following --

The worst of humanity is animalistic and childish..I think children have a better than adults at least in the sense that their capacity for self deception is close to zero. Adults come up with many ways to justify their evil.

I think the best of humanity is animalistic and childish. The worst is the pretense of not being like animals and behaving like we're better than children.

Sounds like advocacy of the noble savage ideal. We were pure in In the Garden of Eden but now we are defiled!

I am surprised you are so metaphysical. Evil doesn't exist - entropy does. When entropy happens close to you and yours, you call it "evil". When a person is inclined towards behaviour that increases the entropy for others we call them "evil" (or "Rupert Murdoch" :). Those who promote the growth of order or reduce entropic effects are labelled "good".

Children at school are innocent, but more cruel and atavistic than adults. I couldn't wait to leave school and spend time with relatively civilised adults.

Humans have more choice about inflicting entropy on others than other species. More control, thus greater empowerment. Greater empowerment leads to greater damage being done by the worst of us - because they can. Some of them may be empowered, but they are not representative of humanity. Leadership is brutal in all social species, so it usually takes a brute to be able to achieve leadership roles.

Yet, when you look past the historical cruelties, the wars, physical and economic terrorists, Machiavellian manipulations and so on, most adult humans I've met and worked with have struck me as usually well-meaning and just hoping for a nice life. I don't tend to meet these terrible creatures who are so decried on philosophy forums, just average schmucks and schmuckettes quietly going about their business and happy to help others if the costs to them are not too great.

[Burning ghost]

Prespeech children have a natural inclination to share. Is far more likely that children mimic adult behaviours.

In a psychological test two toddlers were fed marbles through tubes and both received an equal number of marbles that they could then place in a device that made flashing lights and such (if I remember correctly. They both enjoyed this.

Then one of toddlers was fed more than the other. Without any prompt whatsoever, other than previous equal distribution, they shared the marbles out equally. And we are talkign about pre-speech children here not teenagers already deeply steeped in cultural traditions.

Children are not cruel at all. Adults are just plain stupid. Children don't judge people on appearances, are inclined towards sharing and equality, and in our stupidity of seeing them mimic our own blind intolerance and prejudices we call them "cruel"? Sorry, I cannot even begin to agree with such a statement. Do some children struggle to adapt? Yes. Are children inherantly "cruel"? Certainly not.

I am not saying structure doesn't help children and that left to their own devices they'd do better than us ... after all what we are is precisely due to what we were. That is unburdened by social prejudices and cultural indoctrination. In general kids are happy and loving not cruel.and malicious.

Do they lack soem quality of empathy in early years? I can say it appears so. I can also say that as adults we may have lost a lot of empathy too though that we once embraced in our early years.

[Sy Borg]

BG, I think there's enough literature on the development of morality with age for me not to argue this point on face value.

Your post is full of anger and disappointment with humanity. You have considered humanity's potentials and today wonder how we could have blundered so badly on so many levels. You wonder how our current unfairness could stem from growing morality. My answer is that we are not in control and we have never been in control. We instinctively herd together into groups and compete. Like so many other species. Herding together keeps us alive but that's when the trouble starts.

Humans are not in control of their destiny due to the tragedy of the commons. Any ethical decision made will eventually be superceded by competition between various militaries, companies, nations and subcultures. If all nations signed treaties against certain weapons or unethical practices you can be sure that some company or rogue government would push forward. As moral development and understanding grow and refine in some circles, there are always those to take advantage of it, just as happens in a game of Prisoners' Dilemma. As I say, no control. Well, not much.

Many worry about the afterlife. We learn about causality, that "we reap what we sow". So people are leery at the idea that everyone gets off scot-free once they die. In their experience it's never been that easy - the slate is never fully wiped clean. Old stuffups so often come back to haunt us. For some reason we don't tend to think so much of the flow on effects of our good deeds (probably negativity bias). A "clean slate" after death seems too good to be true for some, but others dread obliteration.

[TSBU]

We have different ethics (I think moral is used sometimes qith the same meaning) and we have them formany reasons. I have my ethic and I'm an atheist, I never think in the afterlife.

[Burning ghost]

Go ahead and argue you the point for children being inherantly cruel then.

Up to now you've expressed an opinion nothing more.

When children go through the "terrible two's" they are often regarded as mischieous and outright destructive. What is actually going on is they are learning about empathy and otherminds, they learn how other people have different wants and needs and this stage of development is extremely important for them.

If you are referring to children you are verbally interacting with their environment (other people), they pick up habits of those around them. Memeory also functions differently. For example if you ask a child what is in a candy box they will say candy. If they open the box and find pencils then you ask them what they thought was in the box before opening it they say pencils and believe it completely.

As mentioned in previous post they are also considered to naturally share although in some situations they may simply lack the cognitive capacity to devise a way to share or see sharing as a problem (changes with empathic develpment and undertsanding of othrr minds).

Why are children more cruel than adults amd what does cruel mean?

My post was full of shock at such a statement, not anger. When I say adults are stupid I am simply saying they are so far removed from childhood they are stupified (stupid). Stupified by social convention that is irrational. For example if I rolled around on the floor laughing and flailing my arms and legs you're first thought would not be "that looks like fun, maybe I shoudl try it!".

The major difference being adults are cognitively more capable of dealing with emotional experiences and have a greater ability of control and reasoning to look for alternative courses of action. A child frustrated by its inability to express itself will often inflict harm on others and if social prompts are not put in place to help this child cope they will grow up to possible be complete bastards in adult life too.

I have seen children kick and fight and punch each other in play. Very, very often harm caused is not realised or meant. Also if, for example I hit someone and they hit me back with what they felt was the same appropriate force and this back and forth continued we'd both increase the forces of the blows thinking that it was the other person doing so because that is our physiological makeup.

I am interested to hear what you have to say because I found what you said very shocking. I get that children are quite volitile in nature and alien from our perspective. I can see how people refer to children, especially teens, as exhibiting cruel behaviour. I don't understand how we can say children are more cruel than aldults as a blanket statement.

[LuckyR]

Children are not inherently cruel (much as animals are not inherently "cruel" (in the context of this discussion). Children, though are less inhibited than adults, though and this leads to a wider variation in behavior than adults. Thus children can be more cooperative and can also be more selfish (and thus "cruel" appearing to others) compared to adults. So if you observe all of the behavior but only report on the negative behavior, children will behave more negatively than adults do in public.

[Sy Borg]

BG, do you know of the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan regarding the development of human morality?

Do you believe that morality comes pure within children and then is degraded? That makes no sense to me. While we start with some moral impulses, evidenced in the kinds of early childhood studies you mentioned, moral development takes time. That's why, for instance, the SS employed so many young boys - turning them into "magnificent beasts of prey". The boys were insufficiently morally developed to comprehend the damage they were causing. Ditto many suicide bombers today, no doubt.

I admit a personal bias, as I am still suffering from an over-zealous amygdala after five years of daily bullying at high school, forty years on. At the time not much was known about subtle autism traits; you were just considered weird - or "eccentric" in adult circles. I was desperate to leave school and escape to the civilised world of adults where pointed exclusion, insults, assaults, destruction of property and so on were far less likely. I left school a complete failure, without qualifications, and a mind largely focused on the possibility of suicide. However, at work the brutality stopped, replaced by the pragmatic indifference of workmates. Being largely ignored felt like heaven to me after the focused cruelty of teenagers at school.

With age, I myself have become far less cruel, much kinder and more empathetic to all. I now understand more of the ramifications of my actions, understand more of others and how they feel and think, including other species. Anecdotally and observationally, others seem to go through similar developments. Yes, major events can lead adult to fearfulness and thus to great cruelty. However, barring exceptional circumstances, I think we mammals otherwise tend to refine and expand out morality with age. We become more mellow, leading a more examined life. That's the process of maturing; which tends to happen in all areas - physically, emotionally, intellectually and morally.

[Burning ghost]

I agree that when we are young we are open to suggestion and influence. We absorb our surroundings. A child brought up among wolves will act like a wolf. Children brought into the SS is a silly argument for labelling children as "cruel", the cruelty was the adults manipulation of molding of an innocent mind to actively do evil deeds.

Any study about teenager is a different story. It has been suggested that teenagers are like sociopaths in some respects. Most evidence I have read about and seen in daily life is that children are general much more accepting about differences in people. Once they hit about 9-10 things change and social experimentation happens more often, limits are tested and put in place.

My argument is that we have empathy and develop this capacity as a natural case of being among people and seeing them as like ourselves. The whole idea of other minds is a huge step.