Objective Morality (Once More Into The Breach)

[seer]

Sounds like you are describing human behavior more than Chimps. Your describing the similarities which remain regardless of your view. It is also observed that Chimps show empathy, social rules, reciprocity, and peace making, and like humans bad behavior. Also primative tool making and the teaching of those skills to others.

Chimps are not moral, they act on instinct. They do not conceptualize or understand moral principles. As your religion teaches it is the rational soul that separates us from the animals, and it is through the rational soul that we come to these understandings and ideals. "All sciences, knowledge, arts, wonders, institutions, discoveries and enterprises come from the exercised intelligence of the rational soul.”

[Tassman]

Chimps are not moral, they act on instinct. They do not conceptualize or understand moral principles.

This instinctive behaviour is a precursor of human morality; only humans have the intelligence to conceptualise it into a moral system. But, since altruism, empathy, and gratitude underpin all moral behaviour, finding these qualities in our fellow primates suggests that they run deep in our brain biology and did not come about because of moral reasoning or religion

[Tassman]

Well, let's take one example, "do not steal". I could see how fitness (reproductive success) would be improved by stealing, and this happens a lot in the animal kingdom, but this is a moral principle. And it doesn't seem like one that would easily evolve.

The other primate’s exhibit the precursors of morality, not a systematised moral code such as the more intelligent humans have developed. All social animals (including humans) have hierarchical societies wherein each member knows its own place. Social order is maintained by certain rules of expected behaviour. Dominant group members enforce order through punishment. But the higher primates also have a sense of reciprocity, e.g. chimpanzees remember who did them favours and who did them wrong and reward or punish them accordingly.

[lee_merrill]

So God did not create these morals, they are eternal like God?

Yes, as are mathematical truths.

Again, how do morals exist, where do they exist?

And I repeat that they are self-existent. They also do not have a location somewhere.

That doesn't mean that all our dreams influence behavior.

Well, that was a "for-instance". But given that some dreams influence behavior, then at least some forgotten dreams would still exist.

But you are suggesting something different - that they are self-existent, how is that possible, where do they exist apart from a mind?

No, I'm not saying dreams are self-existent.

Blessings,
Lee

[lee_merrill]

The evidence concerning primates does not support your assertion.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20moral.html?mcubz=1

These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.

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But I still do not see chimps acting against their impulses. "Do not steal" is not in effect.

Source: NY Times

They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

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So it is now required of you to show how judgment and reason could have evolved.

Blessings,
Lee

[lee_merrill]

But the higher primates also have a sense of reciprocity, e.g. chimpanzees remember who did them favours and who did them wrong and reward or punish them accordingly.

But I still hold that such higher primates only act according to their impulses, "do not steal" is not one of their principles.

Best wishes,
Lee

[seer]

And I repeat that they are self-existent. They also do not have a location somewhere.

Since you can not show how they exist (apart form minds), and that they have no spacial location, how is this any more than an assertion?

[Tassman]

But I still hold that such higher primates only act according to their impulses, "do not steal" is not one of their principles.

So does the human primate act according to its impulses but their higher intelligence enables their “impulses” to be conceptualised into a formal system of morality. As for “stealing”, those higher up the hierarchical scale would thump those lower down the scale if they stole from them...a more primitive means of maintaining communal Law and Order, where everybody knows their place.

[shunyadragon]

But I still hold that such higher primates only act according to their impulses, "do not steal" is not one of their principles.

Best wishes,
Lee

In fact do not steal is a principle among Chimps only when comes to stealing from the offended chimp. Also cooperation is rewarded and freeloaders are punished.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/like-humans-chimps-reward-cooperation-and-punish-freeloaders/

Working with 11 chimps housed in a large outdoor enclosure at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, researchers devised an experiment to assess cooperation, defined as two or more chimps working together to access a food reward. Initially two chimps had to team up, with one lifting a barrier and the other pulling in a tray baited with small pieces of fruit. Once cooperation between two subjects was established, another barrier was added, requiring a third chimp to pitch in if all three were to obtain the spoils.

Given that the apes had nearly 100 hours to obtain their reward in the presence of bystander chimps, there were plenty of chances for competition to arise. The authors defined “competition” as episodes of physical aggression, bullying a fellow chimp to leave the scene of the reward or freeloading—stealing the prizes of others without putting in the work of retrieving them.

Although the study only looked at a small number of individuals, the results were telling. In 94 hour-long test sessions, the chimps cooperated with one another 3,565 times—five times more often than they were in competition. In addition, the animals used a variety of strategies to punish competitive behaviors, such as preferentially working with their more communal and tolerant fellow animals.
When aggression did occur, it was often used to subdue the overly competitive or prevent freeloading, perhaps an even greater affront to the chimpanzee honor code. Attempted thefts by those who did not put in the work were not well received. In fact, the researchers even observed 14 instances in which a third-party chimp—typically one of the more dominant of the bunch— intervened to punish freeloaders. “It has become a popular claim in the [scientific] literature that human cooperation is unique,” study co-author Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Yerkes, said in a statement. “Our study is the first to show that our closest relatives know very well how to discourage competition and freeloading.”

Plenty of other species exhibit cooperative behaviors—take for example the enviable coordination of ants building a subterranean metropolis. But as lead author and Canisius College psychologist Malini Suchak explains, what her team observed in chimps is even more impressive. “Although cooperation is widespread across species, cooperation in ants, for example, as well as in many other species is directed toward kin and is basically preprogrammed,” she says. “Our study shows that chimpanzees are really thinking about cooperation and actively making decisions that maximize cooperation and minimize competition.” She adds: “Cognitively, what they did in our experiment is much closer to what humans do when we cooperate than it is to what ants do when they cooperate.”

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[seer]

In fact do not steal is a principle among Chimps only when comes to stealing from the offended chimp. Also cooperation is rewarded and freeloaders are punished.

We are speaking of chimps in the wild, not controlled situation:

Bands of chimpanzees violently kill individuals from neighboring groups in order to expand their own territory, according to a 10-year study of a chimp community in Uganda that provides the first definitive evidence for this long-suspected function of this behavior.

University of Michigan primate behavioral ecologist John Mitani's findings are published in the June 22 issue of Current Biology.

During a decade of study, the researchers witnessed 18 fatal attacks and found signs of three others perpetrated by members of a large community of about 150 chimps at Ngogo, Kibale National Park.

Then in the summer of 2009, the Ngogo chimpanzees began to use the area where two-thirds of these events occurred, expanding their territory by 22 percent. They traveled, socialized and fed on their favorite fruits in the new region.

"When they started to move into this area, it didn't take much time to realize that they had killed a lot of other chimpanzees there," Mitani said. "Our observations help to resolve long-standing questions about the function of lethal intergroup aggression in chimpanzees."

Mitani is the James N. Spuhler Collegiate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. His co-authors are David Watts, an anthropology professor at Yale University, and Sylvia Amsler, a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Amsler worked on this project as a graduate student at U-M.

Chimpanzees (along with bonobos) are humans' closest living relatives. Anthropologists have long known that they kill their neighbors, and they suspected that they did so to seize their land.


https://phys.org/news/2010-06-chimpanzees.html#jCp

Animal coercive sex

It has been noted that behavior resembling rape in humans is observed in the animal kingdom, including ducks and geese, bottlenose dolphins, and chimpanzees. Indeed, in orangutans, close human relatives, copulations of this nature may account for up to half of all observed matings. Such behaviors, referred to as 'forced copulations', involve an animal being approached and sexually penetrated as it struggles or attempts to escape.

Sexual Coercion

Male chimpanzees, like other male mammals, exhibit patterns of behavior toward females that disarm females' resistance to mating. These behaviors may include physical force and qualify in human terms as rape or sexual assault, or they may be more subtle or indirect, as when males engage in activities that partition females from other males. Direct sexual coercion includes a male keeping an ovulating female to himself, which limits sperm competition. An indirect form of sexual coercion is males killing infant babies that he is fairly sure aren't his own. This may be an effort to spur the mother into becoming fertile again so that he can mate with her. Female chimpanzees also kill the babies of other chimp mothers.

http://sciencing.com/chimpanzee-mati...s-6703991.html

So chimpanzees regularly kill each other, steal each others territory and practice rape.

[shunyadragon]

We are speaking of chimps in the wild, not controlled situation:



So chimpanzees regularly kill each other, steal each others territory and practice rape.

This is also true of humans in wild situations like our contemporary civilizations, which is the part of the point that primate behavior has many similarities with human behavior, but in a more primitive form. This same punishment for theft, and cooperation has been observed in the wild. The research is valid, and done in controlled conditions.

The controlled conditions do not detract from the conclusions of two independent research projects. More details here: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/32/13046.full

Again . . .

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/like-humans-chimps-reward-cooperation-and-punish-freeloaders/

Plenty of other species exhibit cooperative behaviors—take for example the enviable coordination of ants building a subterranean metropolis. But as lead author and Canisius College psychologist Malini Suchak explains, what her team observed in chimps is even more impressive. “Although cooperation is widespread across species, cooperation in ants, for example, as well as in many other species is directed toward kin and is basically preprogrammed,” she says. “Our study shows that chimpanzees are really thinking about cooperation and actively making decisions that maximize cooperation and minimize competition.” She adds: “Cognitively, what they did in our experiment is much closer to what humans do when we cooperate than it is to what ants do when they cooperate.”

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[shunyadragon]

Primates in the wild commonly demonstrate cooperative behavior, and more specifically cooperative learned behavior shared within the primate community, and associated primitive tool making, which varies from primate communities. This behavior cannot be remotely described as 'impulse' instinctive behavior.

Source: http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/212/chimpculture/chimpculture.html

Multicultural chimps

Some of the best evidence for primate culture has come from field studies comparing the repertoire of chimpanzee skills and behaviors in groups around Africa. For example, in 1974 William McGrew of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, detailed how chimps at Jane Goodall's Gombe site in Tanzania used sticks to fish driver ants out of their nests. A decade later at Taď, Boesch and his colleagues noticed a slightly different technique. At Gombe, chimps use 60-centimeter-long sticks to probe an ant nest. They wait for the insects to swarm halfway up the stick, then withdraw the tool and sweep ants off with their free hand, gathering a crunchy mouthful of hundreds of ants. At Taď, chimps use sticks about half as long, wait only a few seconds, then use their lips to sweep about a dozen ants directly into their mouth. The Taď method, analogous to eating soup with a tiny sugar spoon, collects only one-fourth as many ants per minute, but in 2 decades of observation, no animals at Taď have ever eaten ants Gombe-style, presumably because no chimp there ever discovered it. "A Gombe chimp would laugh at [the Taď chimps]" for their "primitive" method of ant fishing, says McGrew.

Social interactions vary among groups, too. For example, McGrew, primatologist Linda Marchant, and their colleagues have recently documented a new behavior they call "social scratch," in which one chimp rakes its hand up and down another's back after grooming. The behavior is common at Mahale in Tanzania but never seen elsewhere. Like some human fads and fashions, the behavior isn't utilitarian, but a part of social etiquette that apparently caught on simply because it feels good. "It's unlikely to be related to functional significance of grooming," McGrew says, but rather helps to reinforce the social hierarchy. In preliminary studies, higher ranking chimpanzees received more social scratches per grooming session.

Such examples add up to an impressive list. In last week's issue of Nature, researchers from the seven longest established chimpanzee field studies combined observations and listed 39 behaviors, from tool design to grooming to mating displays, that are distinct to particular groups and not readily explained by ecological differences. "We now have, in a sense, an ethnographic record" of chimp populations, McGrew says. "We have enough data in enough populations that we can start doing the sorts of comparisons that cultural anthropologists do across human populations."

Such geographical differences suggest that a chimpanzee's specific behavior and skills are shaped by where it is raised. That idea "is the most exciting finding" in chimpanzee field research this decade, says primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan. Yet simply noting these geographical differences begs the question of how they develop and how they are maintained.

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[seer]

This is also true of humans in wild situations like our contemporary civilizations, which is the part of the point that primate behavior has many similarities with human behavior, but in a more primitive form. This same punishment for theft, and cooperation has been observed in the wild. The research is valid, and done in controlled conditions.

Shuny, no one is arguing that certain species don't cooperate, but that is mere instinct, and it does not tell us what is right or wrong. They are not acting, as human morality and law suggest, on ethical abstracts. Yes chimpanzees share, but they also rape, they also kill that take each others territory. A monkey will never attain the moral abstract thinking of humans, because as your own religion teaches it is the rational soul that separates us from the animals:http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/c/BW...=highlight#gr4

[shunyadragon]

Shuny, no one is arguing that certain species don't cooperate, but that is mere instinct, and it does not tell us what is right or wrong. They are not acting, as human morality and law suggest, on ethical abstracts. Yes chimpanzees share, but they also rape, they also kill that take each others territory. A monkey will never attain the moral abstract thinking of humans, because as your own religion teaches it is the rational soul that separates us from the animals:http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/c/BW...=highlight#gr4

I cited specific scientific research that demonstrates cooperative social behavior in primates in the wild and controlled conditions that cannot be only attributed to instinct nor simply 'impulsive' behavior as the same behavior in humans cannot be attributed to instinct.

Your abusive unethical selective citation of Baha'i scripture to justify your agenda continues unabated as you do with all others who disagree with your agenda. Yes, we both believe that humans have a rational soul, but that is not the issue of this thread.

[seer]

I cited specific scientific research that demonstrates cooperative social behavior in primates in the wild and controlled conditions that cannot be only attributed to instinct nor simply 'impulsive' behavior as the same behavior in humans cannot be attributed to instinct.

Nonsense, there is no evidence that apes can or do think in abstract moral principles.

Your abusive unethical selective citation of Baha'i scripture to justify your agenda continues unabated as you do with all others who disagree with your agenda. Yes, we both believe that humans have a rational soul, but that is not the issue of this thread.

No, the issue of this thread is objective ethical principles (do they exist and where). And how is it unethical to quote your own religion - that teaches that the rational soul is necessary for ALL knowledge.