Posted: Aug 03, 2018 4:59 am
zoon wrote:
Why do you expect anyone to take your inexpert opinions seriously, when you have produced no citation indicating anyone more competent than yourself criticises Professor Bloom’s work? Read the article if you want to know more about interviewing infants.
If you're a student or researcher or practitioner in this field, you should know much better than I do that the nature-nurture debate rages on, and we all are forced to admit that our responses as adults develop from a combination of influences. The moral judgements of infants have relatively little weight in the political arena; perhaps we can agree that life might be just ducky if the world were run by infants, who make inarticulate and non-negotiable demands (also a function of inherited characteristics) much more often than they make ethical judgements. Oh, wait. We already have a political example of an oversized, orange infant pretending to run things in the government of a major world power. Perhaps I should reconsider the moral capacities of not-fully-developed individuals to see what infantile responses look like when played in the large.
What you're describing (or rather, emphasizing) is what might only be a current fashion in one subfield of behavioral studies. In another generation, the fashion might be to emphasize something else. The human capacity that far outstrips in effectiveness any other capacities inherited at birth is the capacity to learn, to imitate, and eventually (with high enough functioning) to innovate. You should try out your capacity for innovation sometime instead of touting your favorite authority to somebody who doesn't really give a shit, because your judgement skills have not really been demonstrated in anything you've written lately beyond recognizing my contempt for your rhetorical ploys.
zoon wrote:Sapolsky seems to think we should go on using punishment much as before, as a deterrent, to shape behaviour, but he seriously, very seriously, objects to our enjoying the doling out of punishment.
If you know anything about these sorts of responses ("enjoyment"), you'll understand that it's too much work not to enjoy something that we enjoy, even if it's killing us. What to do? What to do? Maybe we can just enjoy disagreeing with Sapolsky, who wags his finger and tells us we shouldn't enjoy something that we enjoy. It's not just Calvinistic, zoon. Everybody (except maybe romansh, sometimes) enjoys wagging the finger. There are pecking orders to be maintained, a feature of the lives of social animals I'm sure you find utterly essential. We can't have an overabundance of chiefs and a deficit of Indians, which is what happens when infants run things.
What you see is that social innovation is prevented from taking flight by most people's resistance to change, which is basically just laziness. Any social innovation is subject to revocation by the inborn laziness of relying on tradition. The only innovation you're offering is that moral or ethical thinking is a result of inborn capacities and our social history instead of divine forces. To which (of genetics or history) do you really want to give more weight? Judgements determined by interviews of infants?