VERY long term thinking!I look at morality as placing the individual's long-term interests over the individual's short-term interests.
9/11 Firemen?
I must say I was rather disturbed by the FDNY saga. Didn't they realize they would never be able to do any real good in time before the building they were in collapsed, killing them and their intended rescuees? They MUST have assumed the building would hold for an hour or two. I cannot believe their commanders would have sent them up there if they knew they only had 1/2 hour to climb up 60 floors, douse a fire enough to open up a passageway past the wreckage, and climb back down 60 floors.
Anyway, regarding the general case of people putting their lives on the line as part of their standard job description: First, these people train constantly to try to minimize their risks. Would you sign up for a job where you knew that suicide was inevitable? Probably not, unless times were desperate indeed.
Secondly, these people do know that there is that risk, and they accept that they will cause themselves to die if the situation calls for it. Even here they are trying to maximize their values and those of the people they love. Even if that includes society in general.
Myself, a complete nontheist, would happily (hah) do my part to defeat the terrorists if I was on Flight 93. 'Course, there they knew they were about to die no matter what they did. But the thought of letting myself be a passive passenger on a kamikaze flight, participating in the murder of thousands, would be unthinkable - even though I'd understand that my own death was imminent.
I love our society, and I love our species. I want humanity to thrive even after my death, just like I want my husband & future children to thrive long after my death.
I believe that virtue consists of having a commitment to the consistent application of one's values, and internalizing that commitment. Applying selfish principles consistently and farsightedly sometimes results in actions & attitudes that can seem rather altruistic on the surface. Or put another way: An act of self-sacrifice can be quite moral to an Objectivist if they see it as an investment in the future, or a "moral cost of living", as it were.
As I have stated before, everyone who believes in a religion, evolution, or both; believes in a 'form' of Intelligent Design with the exception of the atheist.
So that means the atheist, by default, believes in the Stupid Designer Theory. Stupidity is lack of intelligence.
The atheist must now use stupidity (lack of intelligence) to explain everything:
Morality, intelligence, the universe, the beginning of life, plant and animal relationship/balance, ect…
The atheist laughs and ridicules the Christian for their beliefs and calls them ignorant. The stupid designer theory is their doorway to enlightenment. It is incumbent upon the atheist and their stupid design theory to explain life:
"For two millennia, the design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought. From classical antiquity through the rise of modern science, leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. From Plato to Aquinas to Newton, maintained that nature manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence. Moreover, for many Western thinkers, the idea that the physical universe reflected the purpose or design of a preexistent mind, a Creator, served to guarantee humanity's own sense of purpose and meaning. Yet today in nearly every academic discipline from law to literary theory, from behavioral science to biology, a thoroughly materialistic understanding of humanity and its place in the universe has come to dominate. Free will, meaning, purpose, and God have become pejorative terms in the academy. Matter has subsumed mind; cosmos replaced Creator."
And Gould’s expanation: "…a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality" is "nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming... and doesn't give a ______ about us (speaking metaphorically)." He says he finds such a view "liberating...because we then become free to conduct moral discourse...in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality." It is indeed hard not to draw the conclusion that Gould has read his view about the process of evolution into his own moral position. How does he know that nature was not constructed for us if not from his studies of the natural world? How would he know it doesn't care about us unless somehow he saw this in his studies? Where else might he get such ideas?
”Stephen Gould has a materialist philosophy behind his theory of evolution. He believes that the material universe is all that exists, and that our own consciousness is a chance phenomena and does not come from a Creator. So, for Gould, where else can he draw his views about the meaning of life and what might be moral? His very thinking is a chance product of evolutionary processes that had no design, either to produce man or to give him a mind. Nonetheless, Gould trusts his mind not only to be able to distinguish between science and religion, he is sure that they should not influence one another.”
The stupid designer theory… Sure they might replace the word stupidity with natural selection and random variation, and also include other mechanisms (symbiosis, gene transfer, genetic drift, the action of regulatory genes in development, self-organizational processes, etc.). These mechanisms are just that: mindless material mechanisms that do what they do irrespective of intelligence. To be sure, mechanisms can be programmed by an intelligence. But any such intelligent programming of evolutionary mechanisms is not properly part of evolutionary biology.
No matter what word they choose at the time to describe their stupidity, it must come from a lack of intelligence.
stu·pid·i·ty [stoo pídd tee ] (plural stu·pid·i·ties) noun
1. lack of intelligence: lack of intelligence, perception, or common sense
VERY long term thinking!