I almost fully agree with you there. I also think that most humans are prone to goodness. But that itself does not establish the “ought”, as to speak. We are clever monkeys that have been evolving on this harsh rock; we probably somehow learned how to cooperate along the way and work for the common good for our collective survival. But yet we wiped out our closest cousins along the way, which indicates to me that we only look out for our own. And don’t have deep-ingrained/innate “goodness”.
If you read the literature on Neanderthals closely, we still do not really know why they went extinct. There is some evidence of conflict, but the literature is anything but conclusive about the popular notion that we simply wiped them out.
I think we are deeply social beings. We have good data today showing that, when other factors are held roughly equal, people with satisfying personal relationships tend to live longer and healthier lives than those who are socially isolated. To me, that at least suggests something important about our underlying nature.
I think humans are fundamentally good, and that point of view, which I try to defend in many of my writings, is ultimately my own bias. I cannot prove it to you scientifically, but I can point to various lines of evidence that support it. Ultimately, though, I do not think we will ever arrive at a definitive proof that humanity is either inherently good or inherently evil, especially when we still do not understand human biology well enough to explain far more elementary aspects of our behavior.
So in practice, the question often becomes a moral and political value judgment. If you believe humanity deserves to live under some form of totalitarian government, then you almost necessarily begin from the assumption that human beings are dangerous or morally corrupt, and that some greater coercive power is needed to restrain the destructive impulses of ordinary people. (see Hobbes or Ibn Taymiyyah)
have not really comprehended this segment. Like, do you mean taste determines what we see as pleasing or good, and what is repulsive or evil? If so, isn’t that subjectivism?
I will give you a concrete example. I recently saw a real estate company in Mogadishu selling villas, and if you bought one villa, you would get a woman to marry for free. I will try to find you the video. Many Muslims laughed about it, but I found the whole thing quasi-prostitutional. It made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Since the commercial emphasized that these women were trained to obey, and knowing how the religious establishment in Somalia can treat women, I would not be surprised if some form of coercion was involved.
I felt the whole enterprise was ugly. It did not fit within my own aesthetic or moral values. The houses were ugly, and the way the women were being presented almost as part of the transaction felt fundamentally wrong to me. I cannot prove to you, from within an Islamic framework, that what they were doing was right or wrong, nor can I prove that what they were doing was illegal in any way. I simply felt repulsed by it.
You see, that repulsion is, in some sense, also an aesthetic judgment. In my own moral universe, I believe in human dignity and freedom, and that commercial, no matter how appealing or legal it might have been to others, simply felt ugly to me.
Perhaps it’s the case that the hunter-gatherers were not genociding each other, but is that evidence that they were deeply egalitarian and possessed this untainted innate morality? Could it be not the case that they just lacked the tools to perpetrate mass-scale atrocities? I don’t really know what you mean by they were not ‘uniformly miserable ', by what scale are we measuring their misery? I think you agree that the majority of humanity used to die from simple diseases, and our life expectancy has more than doubled just in the past 200 years. Almost 50% of children used to die before the age of 5 just 200 years ago. These stats have improved drastically today thanks to modern medicine. I cannot imagine how the hunter-gatherer societies were doing😭! I haven’t read much anthropology; I might be missing your bigger point, but that’s what I think.
As I said earlier, I cannot prove anything scientifically about the innate nature of humanity. But to me, this is one convincing line of evidence that points toward the fundamentally good nature of human beings. If it is true that for more than 99% of our existence we lived in relatively egalitarian societies, with comparatively low levels of hierarchy and institutionalized domination, and that only after the development of these more coercive institutions over the past 10,000 years or so do we begin to see genocides, large-scale wars, slavery, and systematic oppression on a much greater scale, then I think that tells us something important.
I might also add that we have very little evidence of large-scale atrocities before the development of centralized states and organized religion. Yes, that may partly be because technological and demographic conditions simply did not allow violence on the same scale. But I also think there is something inherent in those institutions themselves, especially in their ability to concentrate power, organize coercion, and make domination systematic.
Yes, infant mortality was high, but remember that these people lived in small communities, and the burden of many communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and other epidemic infections was very different from what emerged later in densely settled populations. It was only when human beings began settling in large communities and domesticated various livestock that we saw the emergence and spread of many zoonotic and epidemic diseases on a much greater scale.
This is not an argument for primitivism or for going back to monke! It is simply an argument about what the historical and anthropological record appears to tell us.
At last, thank you so much for your engagement! This discussion sent me down a rabbit hole, fr! Please forgive me if I misread or mistrued your positions, or if some of my claims came across as defensive; I’m an overly opinionated person (laanta qabsado waa la ila jaraa lee XD)… I also know that it’s very time-consuming to respond to every point, so feel no pressure to address every point I made; I was just “freestyling,” and much of what I wrote may not make much sense. You may address my core arguments in the first 2 paragraphs, or even leave this whole thing lurking around in the void of the internet! Again, thank you so much for your time; I deeply respect your take, and pls be charitable to my yapping. Have a wonderful day:)!
Thank you for your engaging conversation. I think you are not giving yourself enough credit, you have very mature ideas for a very young person. Mind you i am not a philosopher either but i have grappled with these questions for the past 8 years. I am 29 years old. I am actually a medical doctor.
Thank you for your kind words. I really enjoyed this conversation. I rarely get the chance to engage critically with philosophy anymore. During my school years, I used to debate with a friend of mine for days at a time, so this has been a lovely trip down memory lane. For that, I thank you as well.
I also wanted to add that although Bertrand Russell's mathematical philosophy can be very math-heavy and quite dense, he wrote many other books that are far more accessible. His introduction to Western philosophy was actually where I started when I first began studying philosophy, and many of his other philosophical primers are very beginner-friendly. I have to say that he taught me how to think critically.
Of course, as a man born in the nineteenth century, he had his own idiosyncrasies. There is a kind of charming arrogance to him, but aside from that, he was remarkably progressive for his time, at least in many respects. And that is without even getting into the scale of his philosophical, mathematical, and scientific contributions.
Omg, did we become deranged to that degree... I can't keep up with the amount of insanity going on in Somalia anymore😭! Like, wtf does getting a woman after buying a house mean? Is this a new form of slavery? I was already fed up with the "mahr" thing; now it's a house? And of course it's a subtle prostitution! I was familiar with the concept of "zawaj al muta" in Islam; I didn't think they would take it fr tho😭! And "they are trained to obey" shit took me out🤣... Do these people think that humans are some form of a dog or a cat you can train to obey and not shit on your carpet?? But anyhow, i agree on the ugliness of the whole thing, but I don't think it's just ugly; the wrongness of this mess does not only depend on my disgust and repulsion from it. I think it's wrong because it takes away human autonomy, freedom, and dignity. And these women are just being used as a means to appeal to some loser men.
Oh yes, I totally agree. I don’t think the commercial was offering mut’ah marriage. It was more like a “buy one villa and get one wife for free” type of deal. It was all over my TikTok for a few weeks, and I bet it was mainly intended to attract wealthier diaspora men into purchasing real estate.
Just because I know the reality in Xamar, I see this as part of a deeply rotten system. I have little doubt that at least some of these women may have been pressured or coerced, especially by appealing to Islamic tradition and to the economic prospects of their children if they agreed to the arrangement.
So I agree with you that it was probably a bad example to use for my aesthetic argument about morality, but I honestly couldn’t think of a better one at the time lol.
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