luvluv

What I was saying was that "feelings of guilt" surrounding selfish behaviors will emerge once the child becomes involved in a community. I was saying that children are essentially without guilt feelings, and that adults have guilt feelings. How they actually end up behaving is irrelavent to the claim. Kids generally don't feel guilty no matter what they do. Adults do feel guilty, though they quite often behave in ways that produce guilt anyway.

I don't believe someone can be "trained" to have these physiological responses. What does happen, it seems to me, is that the mind somehow "attaches" these innate responses to what the child is told by his or her society is wrong. But what I am referring to is the innate response, the physiological ability to "feel" guilt as a hormonal or chemical response to certain types of behavior. I am not referring to their ability to behave.

I fail to see how anyone can be "taught" a chemical, physiological, hormonal response. If the body was not hardwired to have somekind of punishment/reward system attending moral decisions, then all the "learning" in the world wouldn't do a bit of good. If morality was solely learned, and not innate, then we could only use moral instruction as information for choosing the path most useful for us. We wouldn't "feel" that something was wrong, we would "remember" that it was wrong, like we remember the multiplication table.

The entire point behind the evolution of the moral system, from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, is to provide an "intellectual short cut" to decision making. Instead of having to process out all the moral commands as pure information, we have evolved moral responses to allow us to quickly make decisions from deep, innate "feelings". Again, no amount of instructions can produce feelings unless I was hardwired to have those feelings.

Tell your child from age 2 to age 25 that he should produce endorphins everytime he sees shag red carpet, and he won't be able to do it. Why? Because a child can't "learn" to produce hormones on command in response to just any old stimulus. But tell the kid he should feel bad about peeing on the shag red carpet, and eventually he probably will. Because the structure and capacity to feel guilt is innate.

Now, it is certainly the case that children must be taught what to properly attach these feelings of guilt to. But it is evident that certain broad categories occur to him without much need of instruction. I think the general capacity for empathy does not have to be taught, an old enough child who has experienced hurt will probably feel guilt about inflicting hurt on other people. Of course there are exceptions. I have defended the moral system as a sensory system, and some individuals have faulty input systems (they are blind, deaf, etc). So some children may not develop proper feelings of guilt no matter what happens to them. I think, dangin, that we would both concede that some people who are taught to feel guilty about certain things still do not feel guilty about them. And people who are taught not to feel guilty about certain things, still do feel guilty. (As an example many white Southerners grew up with the strong conviction that slavery and racism were wrong even though they were taught that they were right).


Well, for the record, I don't particularly care what other primates do, the argument is about whether fidelity is selected for in human nature. Even if we evolved from ape-like ancestors, that does not mean we should act like them. We evolved for a reason: our ways are more succesful than theirs. So if anything you should devote your time to helping the apes imitate us, so far as they are able.

We do tend to have less guilt feelings surrounding sexual activities which are likely to lead to healthy, protected, provided for off-spring, and to have more guilt feelings surrounding activities which are not likely to lead to offspring. I would think that this response, like simple empathy, would be likely to emerge in a person regardless of their environment because of the universality of it's function. In any society, it is clearly advantageous to have sex with reproductive intent rather than not. THEREFORE, there is NO REASON to assume the feelings have any other origin unless you can provide a reason with more explanatory power than the purely naturalistic one. Your appeal to social explanations is problematic on many accounts. Why do most social constraints around sexuality tend to center around the same activities, and why do all of these prohibited activities seem to be non-procreative? The convergence of opinion on these matters from all over the globe would seem to suggest that there is some innate natural source for these emotions which are not entirely socially determined.

I certainly can't change your mind for you, but there seem to be demonstrably obvious holes in your assumption that all sex feelings are learned. It being that there is a clear reason why nature would select for procreative activities, it being that the sexual feelings of guilt tend to surround non-procreative activites, and it being that nearly all cultures tend to put more sanctions around non-procreative sexual activites than procreative ones, your explanation would fail. Your account is less parsimonious than the simple assumption that these feelings have their roots in nature.

Are you serious? You know that stuff that comes out when males masturbate? Can you guess what it's for? You telling me that nature doesn't have a reason for preffering that this stuff goes into a fertile female instead of into a tissue?

Philosoft

This doesn't appear to address what Jamie wrote. He didn't say anything about gauging behavior. The point was, there are adult behaviors that are sometimes accompanied by feelings of guilt that don't engender guilt in children. Whether the feelings of guilt are internally developed or socialized remains a point of contention.
Maybe, but not for the reasons you give. You seem to be intent on having it both ways. The idea that a behavior that was selected against by some evolutionary pressure will still manifest in children is rather odd, and not at all supported by your explanation. I don't really know what all is encompassed by the term "social being," but I assume it includes cooperative strategies that have survival benefits. What's not clear is why behaviors like oral sex would be selected against.

luvluv

Philosoft:

Oral sex don't make babies.

beastmaster

I have never once in my life felt the slightest pang of guilt related to sex in any way, shape, or form. In fact, before today, I never seriously contemplated the notion that there could be any instinctual guilt associated with sex.

Guilt over masturbation?! The notion seems ludicrous to me. I've been masturbating for as long as I can remember. I've never had a second thought that it was something I shouldn't be doing.

Casual sex? Well, I want to make other people happy. The only guilt I can conceive of related to casual sex would be if I were to hurt other people's feelings. Not a drop of guilt related to the sex act itself, however.

Dunno, maybe I am a freak of nature.

But the more likely explanation is that I did not grow up in a religious household.

luvluv, if sexual guilt conferred a significant evolutionary advantage, one would expect to see examples of it in other species. For example, powered flight is advantageous, and evolution has selected for it time and again in many different unrelated species.

I cannot think of any animal or plant that shows a drop of guilt related to sex. To the contrary, the animals I have observed seem quite shameless about all kinds of sexual expression. There are a tribe of monkeys at the San Diego Zoo that spend all day in their cages finger-fucking their assholes. Quite a shock for the tourists! My dog never stops wagging her tail when she dry humps my leg.

These "shocking" behaviors don't seem to impede their ability to have babies.

Evolution gave us an overwhelming desire to have sex. The sexual desire is greater than our ability to fulfill. Thus, the desire to masturbate is inevitable. You could say evolution causes us to masturbate!

luvluv

beastmaster:

And on that note, intelligence is also apparently not a selective advantage....

You know, it's times like these I regret my decision to refrain from the eye-rolling icon.

eldar1011

I think this response says it best.

Procreation is an outcome from this strong sexual desire, but I don't think this strong sexual desire is an outcome from a need
to procreate.

The two are obviously related, but I'm not sure of the "chicken/egg" relationship here.

I'm gonna make a fool of myself, but I'll try using a different example.

Giraffes. These animals didn't evolve a longer neck to survive. Instead, those with longer necks were able to reach more food. More food meant greater chances of survival. Therefore, this trait was passed down to subsequent generations.

I see human sexual desire in the same fashion. We didn't develop sexual desire in order to procreate. However, our strong sexual desires did enable us to successfully reproduce.

As far as desire is concerned, I don't think it involves anything other than deriving sexual pleasure. I don't think sex (in general) feels any different depending on whether or not you've successfully reproduced. So, then how could an aversion to non-procreational sex develop?

That's all I got. Don't know if made sense to any of you, but it's real clear to me.

philechat

Most cultures (even now) are polygynous, i.e. a harem with one male and more than one females. Evolution will explain that polygyny results in the greatest number of offsprings, given that men need not waste much time bearing their children as women do.

There are also cultures which do not expect fidelity at all. Extra-marital sex is condoned in many Native American and Polynesian cultures, at least before Christianity was introduced to them.

One possibility of the demands of fidelity (especially on women) is that a man wants HIS offspring to be passed down the generations, and not some other men's offsprings. Thus the social tendency toward a stricter demands on female fidelity than male fidelity.

The so-called "guilt-feeling" probably develops initially from a fear of collective punishment. The community uses punishment to reinforce community standards and identity, and those who commited actions against social expectations might encounter (often brutal) retaliation from the community. The fear of discovery (by the community or by, alas, the dieties) might be expressed in a way that we commonly refer as "guilt".

christ-on-a-stick

luvluv - that's pretty rich coming from you directed to beastmaster. Hehehehehe.... oh the irony!!!

Sorry, carry on.

luvluv

philechat:

This explanation has less explanatory power than the notion that the feelings are innate. Why does the community establish that extra-marital or non-procreative sex be restricted in the first place? Ockham's razor and all that...

Lauri:

I only meant that rationality, like guilt feelings, has only evolved once. That something has only evolved once is not evidence that it is not a selective advantage.

The question is whether or not the strategy which selects for fidelity and monogamy are rooted in HUMAN nature. I would imagine that the fact that our young are so defenseless and that we operate by learned behavior rather than instinct would be good reasons why nature selects more aggressively for monogamy in us than it does in some other animals. We are the only species where the young are so dependant for so long on their parents. We not only have to be given resources, we have to be TAUGHT how to use them. As such, it requires an extraordinary amount of resources to be invested to ensure the growth of a human baby. The offspring of other animals can be ready to exist independantly with much less of an investment from their parents, so such nature has not produced as many restrictions on their procreation as it has on ours. For them it would be a waste of time.

We ain't them.

Philosoft

Oh dear. I had hoped you'd learned a fair bit about evolution in your time here, but alas.

A behavior is commonly selected against when it reduces a thing's survivablility. That is, a living thing that behaves in a way that is more likely to get it killed will be less likely to pass that behavior on via offspring. If you can think of a way that oral sex reduces the thing's reproductive fitness, in the sense that it is more likely to die when performing this behavior, I'd like to hear it.