[ExI] Religions and violence.

[Jebadiah Moore]

2010/8/18 Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it>
>
> Feel and religion are not the source of Natural Law.
>

If you believe in natural law, you believe that natural law comes from
nature (and thus if you're religious probably from God).  But if you don't
believe in natural law, which I don't, you can still try to figure out where
the belief in natural law comes from.  I think that the belief in natural
law is sourced primarily in the belief in religions.

>> People will tend to favor moral systems which benefit the
> >> majority
>
> Nope.
> People tend to favor moral systems that favor them.
> They prefer moral systems that favor the individuals when they recognize
> the possibility to be at the receiving end of someone else moral system.


I didn't say it was the primary drive.  Obviously if a moral system favors
an individual, that individual will tend to favor the moral system.  But
this won't hold true if favoring that moral system is practically dangerous
(i.e., people believe you're evil because of it). So on average, people will
favor systems that don't cause them to be scorned.  Based on the principle
that people go for moral systems that favor themselves, finding a system
that doesn't get you scorned will tend to look like finding a system that
favors others.  Because you want the majority not to scorn you (or at least
a majority of the power, which might be held by a minority), you'll find a
moral system that favors the majority of the others, and therefore the
majority.

It's not the only factor, though.  If you can get away with a moral system
which favors yourself, you probably will (this is called "corruption").  If
for whatever reason you believe very strongly in some particular moral
system, you'll probably favor it even if it works against you, at least up
to a point (people turning themselves in, submitting to systems in which
they are subservient, etc.).  And I'm sure there are many more factors at
play.

-- 
Jebadiah Moore
http://blog.jebdm.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100818/8cc0780a/attachment.html>