Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-32571505-20180309042305/@comment-29564364-20180409154127

DYBAD wrote: Now, that's some serious attention you've been paying there ^ ^ I'm always paying attention so as to not miss important information, primarily to avoid making false assumptions about the person/people I'm interacting with, but also so that I may use additional information that some could dismiss as unimportant.

I do believe that mankind is inherently amoral, just like any other species. Why ? Because at the end of the day, we are simply mammals with opposable thumbs and higher cognitive functions. They allowed us to achieve a lot of great things, and notably build various cultures aiming at tempering our primitive impulses, but these accomplishments didn't change our brain circuitry, and both our bloody history and modern politico-financial ruthlessness are large-scale testaments to this state of affair. This is a non-sequitur. There is a huge leap of logic between "we are just particularly smart animals who can work together, but also kill each other to attain power" and "therefore we are amoral." You will need to elaborate a lot more if you want to bridge that gap. You first need to define what you mean by "amoral" and then show how human behavior conforms to the definition because up to this point, all I'm seeing is you conflating the definitions of immoral (in violation of one's morals) and amoral (lacking morals).

Feel free to disagree and argue accordingly, it would be interesting to see how well one can defend the opposite stance. Seems a lot more challenging, but maybe it's just me. It doesn't take much to defend a stance opposed to a factual inaccuracy like "human beings have no morals." I tend towards you being unwilling to try on shades of a different color than your favourite pair to understand how other people see the world and/or conflating the definitions of immoral and amoral.

"Is this an ad Nazium I see?"

Among similar ideologies, yes. Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism, etc. are all perfect examples of state-enforced "morality" that were ultimately "a brainwashing tool" that was notably used to "further inhuman agendas" (and maximizing instigators' status and wealth, of course). "ad Nazium" was not linked just to look pretty: "Reductio ad Hitlerum (pseudo-Latin for "reduction to Hitler"; sometimes argumentum ad Hitlerum, "argument to Hitler", ad Nazium, "to Nazism"), or playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi party, [...]"

"Either that, or that their statement was referring to your morality, e.i. one that is based on values of respect, freedom and happiness."

By all means, please do illustrate what "morality" looks like without those. I gave a few examples above myself, maybe you have different ones to propose? Morality does not need quotation marks. Morality remains morality regardless of what standards it is based on, and the possibilities are so diverse that the examples I'd provide could vary greatly, so if you were to provide a hypothetical set of moral standards (excluding respect, freedom and/or happiness) to base an hypothetical individual/society's morality upon, I'll try to describe their/its behavior the best I can.