I did not have relations with that amendment. I just want the American people to know that.
Nevermind whether I feel pain or not, or whether anyone else does - let's just put it in terms of the single case of you. Is it wrong for me to inflict pain on you? If so, why?
Because it sucks. But really, I'm not sure if there's any way I can convincingly answer that unless you know what it is. Otherwise, if you can take my word that I feel it, I guess you can also take my word that it's wrong.
There's a potential answer for that in evolution as well, it turns out - Dawkins devotes much time to that very question of "why self-sacrifice?" in The Selfish Gene. Whether his answer is compelling or not, I leave up to you ;)
BWWAHH HA HA HA HAAA! [<-- evil, maniacal laughter] And I cleverly anticipated a response to that! The issue isn't what impels us to self-sacrifice, it's whether or not we should. Yeah, I'm sure Dawkins or Gould or any one of them could come up with some evolutionary, survival-of-the-species explanation for the instinct. But as intelligent beings, we have the ability to discard most of our instincts if it's our desire. Your point to me was that we have morals against inflicting pain and death so that we ourselves can be spared it. But the fact that people bring pain and death upon themselves, and will invariably explain that they do so simply because it's the right thing to do, pulls the rug out from under your assumption that their conception of morality is guided by their desire to avoid unpleasant consequences.
Is it my turn to look for a lifeline ;)
Does this mean I have to put it in a multiple-choice format?
You're still thinking of how to express it in terms of your relationship to someone else. You say "you know that feeling when you hit your hand with a hammer?" and they say "yeah" and you say "THAT'S what I'm talking about." The problem is that you can only express it in terms of some relationship with someone who has some experience of the thing you're trying to describe.
And I could chase you around some more, but the point is that it's completely subjective. It's not that you can't convincingly answer if I don't know what pain is - that's true, but it's not the real problem. The problem is that there's no convincing answer at all.
Ultimately, if I chase you around long enough to pin you down, we'll discover one of two things. Either it's wrong for me to hurt you just because you don't like being hurt, and therefore it's basically a personal preference of yours about pain. Or, it's wrong for me to hurt you because someone else told you that it was wrong for me to hurt you. These are the only two possibilities - you may not think so, but you'd be forced into one of them sooner or later.
So, the problem you have is that, given the first choice, it ain't a universal moral imperative any more - it's just one of many preferences you have, for which you can articulate some sort of reason with varying degrees of success. I prefer chocolate, you prefer strawberry. I like wine, you prefer beer. I like painlessness, you like pain. And we don't call the first two sets of choices "moral imperatives", but we want to pretend that the last preference is.
And you can repeat that for any other thing you want to call a moral imperative. Ultimately, every single one of them is going to boil down to being wrong just because you don't like whatever it is, or because someone told you it was wrong.
So if it's just a personal, arbitrary preference, then we can write off any claims to the universal truth of the thing, whatever the issue at hand is. So let's look at the other option.
Now, if someone just tells you a thing is a universal moral imperative, you can believe them or not, of course. If I tell you a thing is a universal moral imperative, I might be right, or I might be wrong. But the question is, what makes me special about seeing universal moral imperatives? If I can see them, you should see them too, right? But we presume that there's nothing special about me, and I can't see things you can see. So it must be just my own personal preference that I'm trying to claim is a universal truth. But we've already noticed that there's no reason at all to think that. "Butter pecan is the best ice cream there is, as a matter of universal truth. We must have butter pecan, but not other flavors of ice cream," I tell you. But you, clever person that you are, see that this is not a universal truth at all - it's just my opinion.
But maybe I'm telling you what someone else has told me - someone told me that thus-and-such is a moral imperative, and now I'm telling you. After all, those are our only two options about moral imperatives - it's just a preference, or I heard it from somewhere else. I'm not special, so to claim universal truth about what I say, it has to be a bit more than just my preference, so I must have heard it from someone else. But if it's true, and whatever it is actually is a universal truth, then it must have come from someone a good deal more authoritative than you or I, someone for whom it's not a personal preference, and someone who didn't just hear it from someone else. It must have come from someone not like us, who can see and know universal truth in a way that we cannot.
And I'll give you about twenty seconds to think of who all that person is usually thought to be :^)
The issue isn't what impels us to self-sacrifice, it's whether or not we should. Yeah, I'm sure Dawkins or Gould or any one of them could come up with some evolutionary, survival-of-the-species explanation for the instinct. But as intelligent beings, we have the ability to discard most of our instincts if it's our desire. Your point to me was that we have morals against inflicting pain and death so that we ourselves can be spared it. But the fact that people bring pain and death upon themselves, and will invariably explain that they do so simply because it's the right thing to do, pulls the rug out from under your assumption that their conception of morality is guided by their desire to avoid unpleasant consequences.
Not at all. It's a false dichotomy - either they're guided by a desire to avoid unpleasant consequences, or they're guided by a desire to propagate the species. But of course, the true answer is that both drives are operating at any given moment. And mostly, they don't conflict with one another - I can usually assure the long-term survival of the species by assuring my own short-term survival, and thus preserving my ability to reproduce. But sometimes those drives do conflict with one another, and there's a mental calculus that comes into play, a rather (to our minds) cold and rational cost-benefit calculation that people make.
And if we were to set up an experiment to put those two desires into conflict with one another, I think we'd be surprised by how uneven and unpredictable people's responses were. I dangle you and your child over an abyss, and explain that I'll drop one and only one of you, and it's your choice who gets it - you, or the kid. But no matter what you choose, there's a rational basis for that choice. Some people will choose the "noble" self-sacrifice of dying so that their children will live. And some will choose the "base" option of their own personal survival, partly so that they might produce more offspring later on. And I think you'd be surprised at how many people would choose the second option, instead of the first.
And maybe that's why we cast self-sacrifice as "noble" and "good" and "worthy" and sing its praises and tout its virtues - because, in our heart of hearts, we know just how rare it really is, and that maybe it's not really the norm after all. After all, why cast it as noble and good if that's how everyone does it anyway? It's just the normal state of affairs.
What people "should" do in such a case begs the question - that there is a "right" answer to begin with. But people ignore ideas of what "should" be done in such situations all the time - look at how many people neglect or abuse their children because those children interfere with some other desire of theirs. "Should" just isn't a part of that calculation, unless, that is, we decide from the get-go to define a right answer for those situations. Or, if we think that someone else has told us what that right answer is, someone authoritative about such things.
And both choices allow you to start talking about what people "should" do, equally well. Either way, we have some basis for something to call "morality", whether it came from someone authoritative, or we bootstrapped it ourselves. Both options fill the need equally well......