Am on phone at work, so can't elaborate much, but no, I was talking about helpful or harmful to others.

No problem, Fall. We can chat later. I would like to discuss what constitutes harmful to others and how ones own internal guidance system, whether guilt or reason, might be able to determine that. It seems we internally assume what is helpful to others, through projection, without knowing what is truly helpful (to the 'other'). Other social animals have evolved just fine, presumably without the requirement for something as complex as an emotion, namely guilt. Feel free to respond when you have time. Have a good day at work.

Fallible wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:My choices are all dependent on factors beyond my control. You seem incapable of grasping that simple truth. This thread isn't for you IMO.

If this is the case, why are you even bothering to try to change? It's beyond your control, you're just a feather tossed hither and yon by the fickle winds of fate. Might as well give up.

I have a sense of desirable/undesirable. I hope to learn a way to improve my behavior. Do you only act to achieve good and avoid bad in order to take credit and boost your ego? I certainly hope not and I doubt it, but that's the view that comes across from what you wrote.

Just quickly, I don't know whether other animals feel guilt or not. Either way, that one social species may have evolved without the need for guilt doesn't necessarily say anything about the need in a separate species. However, we would appear to be one of the most successful species on the planet, and the most successful social species. I have something which does not qualify as anything other than an idle conjecture that perhaps guilt could have played a small part in that.

I would term the projection you refer to as 'empathy'. So I would say that we know what is harmful to someone else because we know what is harmful to ourselves. We experience physical pain when we are punched in the face, which we don't like; it also causes us physical harm. We can safely assume that for most other people, the experience will be the same. We experience feelings of loss, anger, sadness, etc. when someone steals from us, which we generally don't enjoy. It harms us emotionally. Again, we can safely assume it's the same for other people. Your example of extra marital sex wouldn't fit, because it is not harmful. The guilt around that would fall into the inappropriate category which I briefly mentioned in my first post. That's shaming someone in order to control them.

Keep It Real wrote:

Fallible wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:My choices are all dependent on factors beyond my control. You seem incapable of grasping that simple truth. This thread isn't for you IMO.

If this is the case, why are you even bothering to try to change? It's beyond your control, you're just a feather tossed hither and yon by the fickle winds of fate. Might as well give up.

I have a sense of desirable/undesirable. I hope to learn a way to improve my behavior. Do you only act to achieve good and avoid bad in order to take credit and boost your ego? I certainly hope not and I doubt it, but that's the view that comes across from what you wrote.

Aside from the fact that I don't at all see how that view comes across in my post, why do you hope not and doubt it? Everything we do is ultimately for ourselves.

Keep It Real wrote: Do you only act to achieve good and avoid bad in order to take credit and boost your ego? I certainly hope not and I doubt it, but that's the view that comes across from what you wrote.

How are you reaching that "view" as to how Fallible comes across? I can only surmise that you are managing this in one of two ways.

1) Imaging completely different words to whatever Fallible wrote and reaching erroneous views accordingly.
2) That words mean something completely different to you than to the rest of us.

Fallible wrote:Your example of extra marital sex wouldn't fit, because it is not harmful.

Keep It Real wrote:

Fallible wrote:Your example of extra marital sex wouldn't fit, because it is not harmful.

Why is this funny?

Sendraks wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:

Fallible wrote:Your example of extra marital sex wouldn't fit, because it is not harmful.

Why is this funny?

Because it's completely preposterous. Never heard of a family home ruined because of extra-marital sex?

Keep It Real wrote:Because it's completely preposterous.

Why?

Keep It Real wrote:Never heard of a family home ruined because of extra-marital sex?

Never heard of a family home that was perfectly happy and where people were having extra-marital sex?

Extra-marital sex is, as Fallible correctly stated, perfectly healthy and not at all harmful.
I suggest you do some thinking about what the harmful behaviours sometimes associated with extra-martial sex are, before you spout off any more nonsense. Take off your religious blinkers and think again.

Keep It Real wrote:

Sendraks wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:

Fallible wrote:Your example of extra marital sex wouldn't fit, because it is not harmful.

Why is this funny?

Because it's completely preposterous. Never heard of a family home ruined because of extra-marital sex?

Apart from what Sendraks has already said, I was using the trem to refer to sex outside of marriage, whether there is a marriage or not. For example, sex before marriage. But as Sendraks alluded to, it's not the sex that's harmful in sex with someone other than the spouse. I know I'm not going to get anywhere with you on this, given what I already know if your views around it, especially concerning women, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't talk about it.

Fair enough, I thought you meant cheating on a spouse.


@ Sendraks - religious blinkers?! I'm an atheist.

Sendrak, I can accept the words 'harmful' and 'helpful' as valid from a personal perspective. But I strongly disagree EQUALLY with the statements that, "premarital sex is harmful," and that, "premarital sex is not harmful," in the way Fall used it. It is her opinion that it isn't harmful, which is fine. But there is no basis of fact that can state such thing unequivocally. I personally don't think it is harmful. But I recognize that there is and can be no objective way to determine what is and is not harmful.

In terms of the OP, 'guilt' is a personal emotion felt when a personally accepted notion of some ethic is violated. That ethic is internal and subject only to the individual's opinion.

Fall, I read your previous post, so I trust you'll not take the above text with more than a grain of salt. It is representative of my position, however, I do not mean it to imply your position does or does not share elements of it.

Keep It Real wrote:Fair enough, I thought you meant cheating on a spouse.

That's fair enough. I agree that the act of cheating is the problematic thing here, that causes the hurt and for a relationship to break down. If the partners in a relationship are fully consenting in respect of extra-marital sex, then its not a problem.

Keep It Real wrote:@ Sendraks - religious blinkers?! I'm an atheist.

I'm aware that you are an atheist but, that doesn't preclude you from entertaining moral concepts held by religious people. It simply only means that you don't believe in deities.

Sendraks wrote:Extra-marital sex is, as Fallible correctly stated, perfectly healthy and not at all harmful.

If only I'd known sooner.

Actually, on second thoughts, that can't be true, what you said.

ETA: ok, saw your last post. Gotcha. You weren't referring to cheating.

PensivePenny wrote:Sendrak, I can accept the words 'harmful' and 'helpful' as valid from a personal perspective. But I strongly disagree EQUALLY with the statements that, "premarital sex is harmful," and that, "premarital sex is not harmful," in the way Fall used it. It is her opinion that it isn't harmful, which is fine. But there is no basis of fact that can state such thing unequivocally. I personally don't think it is harmful. But I recognize that there is and can be no objective way to determine what is and is not harmful.

There is no basis in fact for stating that pre-marital or extra marital sex is harmful.
There is plenty of basis in fact for stating that sex is healthy and good for people.

The context in which sex is considered harmful is when it is conflated with harmful acts that surround it.

archibald wrote:Actually, on second thoughts, that can't be true, what you said.

Because?

PensivePenny wrote:………….. What I'm doubting is that guilt has any evolutionary basis. It seems to me superfluous to require an emotion for determining harmful or helpful. If one knows something to be harmful or helpful, especially a wild one (early days of our species predecessors), like any animal, they simply act accordingly, without the necessity for "guilt."

For many years, I've come to see guilt as primarily a construct that rose out of man's sense of morality. I don't deny the existence of the feeling. I have experienced it. But that feeling also goes away when one is able to dismiss some behavior as "wrong." For example, I was taught sex outside of marriage was a sin. Guilt was a controlling influence when I was a teen. But as I began to question the existence of god and all the things I had been taught, I realized that premarital sex as a sin was utter bullshit and no longer had that feeling.

I certainly agree with you that humans are evolved animals, but every species is unique, and the human species does appear to be an outlier in matters such as language, morality, close cooperation to the point of eusociality, and the outsize brain which makes these possible. As you say, morality is often viewed by social scientists as a social construct, but I think the idea of morality as an aspect of evolved human behaviour is gaining ground (Wikipedia has an article on the evolution of morality here). I’m not sure the two are altogether incompatible; if morality is evolved like language, then it’s clear that, like language, it takes different forms in different societies, and those different forms are presumably constructed rather than wired in. For example, for most of human history, in most human societies, sex outside marriage was in fact dangerous in many ways, especially for women, and the morality of those societies reflected this. In the 1960s and 1970s medical advances in controlling both disease and pregnancy meant that sex outside marriage had lost much of its danger, so that, as you say, the traditional religious teaching had become bullshit at least for unmarried people. Your experience of changing values was an example of morality being reconstructed in the light of changing technology. The existence of strongly held moral views did not change, that’s wired in, but the views themselves changed.

A 2014 article by a philosopher about the evolution of guilt is here, it draws on research by scientists on evolution and on animal as well as human behaviour. The abstract and introduction are below:

Cailin O’Connor wrote:Abstract
Using evolutionary game theory, I consider how guilt can provide individual fitness benefits to actors both before and after bad behavior. This supplements recent work by philosophers on the evolution of guilt with a more complete picture of the relevant selection pressures.
Introduction
Moral emotions, such as shame and guilt, are deeply important to human moral behavior. Although few ethicists think the ‘is’ of evolved moral emotions should be directly translated to an ‘ought’ of ethical imperative, evidence from psychology and biology has increasingly made clear that at very least a full picture of human ethics must take these emotions into account. This paper will focus on the evolution of guilt specifically. The goal is to provide an analysis of how guilt can be individually beneficial to actors, drawing on extensive literature from evolutionary game theory regarding the evolution of prosocial behavior. In this way, work by philosophers on the evolution of guilt (like that of Joyce (2007), Deem and Ramsey (2015), and Ramsey and Deem (2015)) can be supplemented by a more detailed picture of the relevant evolutionary pressures. As I will show, this literature suggests a number of ways that guilt can provide individual fitness benefits, both by preventing transgression in the first place, and by leading to reparative behaviors after transgression. In an attempt to better understand this latter role of guilt, I present novel modeling work on the evolution of apology.
In section 2, I discuss guilt in humans focusing on how it influences behavior. In section 3, I describe how evolutionary game theory can be used to inform the evolution of emotion. In section 4, I use evolutionary game theoretic models to shed light on the evolution of guilt.

As you say, guilt is an emotion rather than a behaviour, so it’s not directly selected for. The author does address that point in the paper:

Cailin O’Connor wrote:Evolutionary game theory deals with the evolution of behavioral traits in a social context, and has previously focused on prosociality, making this methodology an appropriate one to study the evolution of guilt (which, as mentioned, is often associated with prosocial behavior). This said, emotions simpliciter are not behaviors, and evolutionary game theoretic models represent actors through behaviors. What one can do is to model the evolution of a behavior associated with a particular emotion, show that this behaviour is a successful one, and then argue that this may explain the evolution of said emotion. A tendency towards certain emotional states, then, is selected for by dint of causing certain types of behaviors.

Sendraks wrote:

archibald wrote:Actually, on second thoughts, that can't be true, what you said.

Because?

Well, if it's open and consented to, then the risk of harm is probably minimal. But if it's cheating, then.......I don't think you can separate out the sex and say that it isn't harmful.

Possibly...I'm not sure...you might say it's not harmful if it's not found out. Dunno. Controversial.

The problem with "harmful," is what qualifies? Strictly monogamous sex would make venereal disease non-existent... at least inconsequential. So, it might easily be argued that sex with multiple partners is 'harmful.' Yet, one could also argue that in evolutionary terms, the species is strengthened with the more diverse gene pool afforded by multiple partners, in which case multiple partners is 'helpful.'

I would argue that neither is harmful or helpful. Why should humans be seen as an exception in evolutionary terms? Our species sexual proclivities are natural, whether monogamous or manigomous (?) or perhaps a diverse scattering of both could all have contributed to evolutionary development. It is a characteristic of our species, whatever those proclivities are, and understandably a contributor to our extant status today. It works completely well as exhibited by every other species on the planet, absent 'guilt.' I don't buy that guilt is an evolutionary necessity. We have it sure, but there is no reason I'm aware of to assume 'guilt' existed even 10,000 years ago, whereas every species certainly had their own unique sexual proclivities. I think we give 'guilt' and morals way too much credit in evolutionary terms. Emotions don't leave fossil evidence.