/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2223677]

whats the nature of men? are they born evil? what do u think?

[Anonymous No.2223680]

bet there some cool books about it...

[Anonymous No.2223682]

>>2223677
Intelligent animals.
I think people can alway aspire and try to be better, though.

[Anonymous No.2223683]

Some people have traits that may turn them into a serial killer but that doesn't mean they're evil.

[Truman Capote !!cO9KVBDtkqQ No.2223681]

[Anonymous No.2223685]

"Evil doesn't survive to be judged."

and wow that's funny one of the words in the captcha is tha name of the author the person is from

[Anonymous No.2223696]

There is no good or evil, it's a man-made construct.

And men are not "born" as anything, through life we form opinions and character which then makes us appear "good", "evil", etc.

[Anonymous No.2223699]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

Reed on, OP.

For a textbook, i recomend David. M. Buss - Evolutionary Psychology: the new science of the mind. U can get it off my site here: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=2450

[Anonymous No.2223706]

What is the nature of squids?

[Anonymous No.2223927]

any other opinions i need seriously some opinions GUYS!!!

[Anonymous No.2223930]

Humans are neither good nor evil by nature. They are capable of choice. Being flawed, they sometimes choose evil, and more frequently choose petty, banal, tired stupidity and callousness and insensitivity. But they can do good as well.

[Anonymous No.2223942]

*cough* "Geneaology of Morals" *cough*

[Anonymous No.2223945]

>>2223942
You rang?

[Anonymous No.2223946]

Homework thread? Homework thread.

[Anonymous No.2223952]

>>2223946
wrong..thats topic for papers tomorrow i just need some advice..fag

[Anonymous No.2223953]

Good and Evil don't exist. Good and Evil are societal values attached to social consequences.

These consequences are view differently by other values.

[Anonymous No.2223958]

Men are what they make themselves

[Anonymous No.2223959]

To say people aren't born with predispositions to certain traits and characteristics is foolish, genetic influence is an empirical fact. However, going to the other extreme of the spectrum and saying we are entirely genetically predetermined is also foolish. Hitler wouldn't have risen to power like he did if he'd lived an easy and ideal life in the countryside, for example. It's a little bit of both; some of us are born sociopaths, but live lives that never require us to raise so much as a finger to harm someone else whilst others who are altruisitc and loving are forced to fight, murder and steal just to stay alive.

To attribute good or evil to these people is insulting, patronising; they simply acted as almost anyone would in their situation. Their perspectives, upbringing and life experiences made them what they are and to force them into the boxes of 'good' or 'evil' just because of the life they've lived is, to my mind, ignorant. They have simply responded and adapted to their environment like anyone would.

And the nature of people is partially determined by genes (survive, thrive and fuck someone) and partially their lives (live in a shit area and you'll have to toughen up, not open up and grow 'thick skin'), and partially by their own will (some people will refuse to back down from a fight, or to let a disease claim them quickly, for example).

[Anonymous No.2223970]

btw. did someone read macbeth?

>>2223959
nice one!

[Anonymous No.2223986]

The problem is that we attach man made titles for man made emotions. If were to ever realize our own self importance is literally nothing, we would understand that we are physical animals, and in the animal world there is no good or evil. This idea of morality is a completely fabricated institution, its made by us to control us, just like everything else in this world. "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains"

[Anonymous No.2224001]

>>2223986
This.

I think OP should have said something like:

"Is it possible that some people are born genetically predisposed to indifference regarding certain ethical concepts fabricated by our society?"

[Anonymous No.2224017]

>>2224001
thanks...yah i think i gotta write an essay about "nature of men"

[Anonymous No.2224034]

>>2224017
Nature of man? Hmm... nature... You mean like this?

[Anonymous No.2224041]

>>2223986
Yep.
The truth is, we have evolved the illusion of free will. At some point, there was a prime mover that set off some other in such away to affect another's, who affected another, so on and so forth until you have millions of variables affecting every animal, including humans. there are so many variables of what affect an individual that it is highly implausible to chart, making us feel like we are actually thinking. The famous mathematician John Nash once created an algorithm that predicted the flight patterns of pigeons, so accurate that bird watchers use it today for all types of birds. To suggest that such an algorithm cannot be made for the human race is laughable. we are nothing.

[Anonymous No.2224053]

What can change the nature of man?

[Anonymous No.2224058]

You could argue that the concepts Aristotle, Socrates, Plato and scholastic philosophers came up with regarding human nature are completely redundant when you take into account the fact that free will is an illusion.

Note the commendable theories put forward, but be sure to conclude that the choices any individual 'chooses to make' are all pre-determined.

Memories, behavioural traits and every other aspect of the human character are subject to the predictable actions of neurons, and the molecules and atoms that that make up said neurons.

Man is nothing more that an incredibly complex computer who is programmed by the interaction of external stimuli with a brain of hereditary structure, plus a few mutations.

[Anonymous No.2224063]

>>2223986
>>2224041
>>2224058
wisdom

[Anonymous No.2224061]

Lol. I wrote that >>2224058
then read that >>2224041

[Anonymous No.2224066]

>>2224053
>What can change the nature of man?
Genetic mutations, environmental factors, and the collective social repercussions of both.

[Anonymous No.2224069]

>>2224063
We are all sitting cross-legged, eagerly awaiting your contribution.

[Anonymous No.2224074]

>>2224041
If something has 'self-triggered' once, it means it can be done again, though highly improbable. Thus, we can't be sure if this theory of the 'perpetuating initial movement' doesn't conflict with another phenomena like this.

[Anonymous No.2224078]

>>2224063
come on, newfag ! post some

[Anonymous No.2224101]

>>2224069
>>2224078
fine
Sinfield is a cultural materialist who said that any kind of change to state and ideological apparatuses is inherently going to fail because they try to change these apparatuses by using things which the apparatuses already dominate (language specifically in his essay). Its that same kind of round about argument when you talk about morality in humanity, its a state sponsored activity in reality. These systems of control are put in place as "law", when really the only law of actual substance is that of natures law. I imagine one can see the genesis of morality come out of the need for safe, human community. You need to set an ARTIFICIAL code of behavior to make sure shit doesnt get crazy, but in the end it is most definitely artificial, man made.

[Anonymous No.2224263]

is there anyone who can tell me something about "why does the human live?whats his aim?!

[Anonymous No.2224265]

>>2224263
to survive & continue.

[Anonymous No.2224281]

>>2224265
but what was the aim of "god" who created us..? why do we have to live?

[Anonymous No.2224284]

>>2224281
0/10

[Anonymous No.2224313]

>>2224284
stfu

[Anonymous No.2224318]

>>2224313
-4/10

[Anonymous No.2224323]

>>2224318

?

[Anonymous No.2224334]

>>2224323
?!

[Anonymous No.2224655]

>>2224074
The prime mover doesn't have to be conscious. Why can't the "self-trigger" be the big bang?

[Anonymous No.2224730]

that question is wrong. Man is not 'good' or 'evil'

Man is determined by his enviroment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

[Anonymous No.2224734]

>>2224730
No, I'm pretty sure the Stanford Prison Experiment proves that people, at their cores, are evil.

[Anonymous No.2224743]

>>2224734
No. Read interviews with Zimbardo. He clearly states that 'good' and 'evil' are consequences of the enviroment. I have a VERY good one in english, but with the audio in spanish:

http://www.redesparalaciencia.com/2559/redes/2010/redes-54-la-pendiente-resbaladiza-de-la-maldad

i understand it can be a bit annoying, but i really recommend it

[Anonymous No.2224741]

>>2224730
>>2224734
Right. So, what was the "control" in this experiment?

[Anonymous No.2224748]

>>2223681
1. the iliad is certainly an epic; in fact, it is the standard by which epics are defined. to determine whether another work is an epic, its elements are evaluated in comparison to the iliad: are there gods steering the actions of humans? is there an 'epic' description of the armies? is there a long description of armor and a shield?
2. the odyssey is an epic poem about a quarter shorter in length than the iliad, composed by homer's daughter. it is the quintessential adventure story. i'm not saying no author to have lived in the past two millennia doesn't got shit on homer's daughter, but no author to have lived in the past two millennia has shit on homer's daughter.

inb4 wtf is this daughter shit, the clues are all there. how many housekeepers & servants are mentioned in the iliad? how many are mentioned in the odyssey? how many scenes of the iliad take place in a fucking dining room? and how about the odyssey?

[Anonymous No.2224759]

>>2224734

The results of the experiment are said[by whom?] to support situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be agonizing and dangerous electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.

[Anonymous No.2224767]

>>2223699
>Evolutionary Psychology
Please don't read this utter trash, nobody with any merit takes it seriously.

[Anonymous No.2224796]

>>2224748

>implying that you know Homer to have been a real person
>implying you know Homer to have had a daughter
>implying that both the Iliad and the Odyssey as they survive today aren't the result of the oral tradition of a long line of rhapsodes, all of the male

Are you serious with this post, nigga?

[Anonymous No.2224820]

>>2224796
the history is a bit sketchy, but the iliad was certainly written (i hope we can agree on this), ad it's thought to have been written at the end of the greek dark ages, when the greeks rediscovered writing. there are many formulaic structures within the text, which indicates that it was composed during a transitional period between oral texts and written, hence the end of the dark ages.

there are both sriking similarities and differences between the odyssey and the iliad, which lead people to think that odyssey was written by someone close to homer, but not homer himself

[Anonymous No.2224896]

True evil does not exist. People who do evil things are either mentally imbalanced/corrupted, corrupted, somehow misguided or all. No one does evil shit for the sake of it being bad/evil. To make this more lit oriented, it always irked me how all the Death Eaters called Voldemort the "Dark Lord", as if they were affirming that they were the dark/evil ones and being okay with it. Voldemort and his posse were essentially the Nazis, with their racial purity thing. Ostensibly, they, like the Nazis, thought they were doing the right thing.

[Anonymous No.2224897]

>>2224896
>>2224896
imbalanced/corrupted, **coerced**, somehow misguided or all

[Anonymous No.2224910]

>>2224743
And I disagree with Zimbardo's conclusions.

[Anonymous No.2224929]

>>2224910

proceed

[Anonymous No.2224939]

>>2224281
>>2224748
>>2224929
>>2224897
Am I being trolled?

[Anonymous No.2224992]

>>2224939
dunno. Proceed to explain why you disagree with Zimbardo's conclusions

[Anonymous No.2225016]

Holy fuck, stop answering this guy's homework, faggots.

Saged, reported, called the cops.

[Anonymous No.2225030]

>>2224896

I hope you didn't actually read Harry Potter in the hopes of finding more subtle and deeper distinctions between good and evil.

Sage for OT

[Anonymous No.2225280]

>born evil
>evil
>implying evil exists
The nature of man is as is all creatures, to exist.
Beyond that, nothing.
We just happen to be peculiar in our existence that we manage to supersede our fellow sentient species as the dominant sentience.

[Anonymous No.2225292]

>>2224896
>True evil does not exist. People who do evil things are either mentally imbalanced/corrupted, corrupted, somehow misguided or all. No one does evil shit for the sake of it being bad/evil.

For people to do evil things, true evil must exist.
You contradicted yourself in two sentences.
You said it doesn't exist, then you said it people do it. How they get there is irrelevant to the fact that you defined it as evil.
You can't have no evil and commit evil acts, lest evil exists.

>No one does evil shit for the sake of it being bad/evil.
Depends on the context and in both contexts, yes they do.
People do shit that's bad or as some people consider "subjectively morally wrong/evil" simply to do those things because they're thought of as bad.
Then there are people who do those things but not because they're thought of as bad, but because they fucking like it. Some people enjoy torturing/hurting others etc... Some like the side effects of hurting others, power/control.

>mentally imbalanced/corrupted, corrupted, somehow misguided or all.
As for these, they all assume a standard of ill-defined goodness as the basis of balance/uncorrupted/guided.

[Anonymous No.2225304]

>>2225280
is it just me or is this kind of "good/evil/moral ideas are constructs of the human species with no validity except that which an individual happens to grant to them" existential argument basically /lit/'s consensus?
it certainly seems to be the most frequent answer (almost ad nauseam)
>>2225292
in a lot of the history of the concept of evil in christian context, there are two basic concepts of what evil is: the first views evil as basically demonic, the second as basically banal. the first argues that there is such a thing as true evil, which seems to be your position. the second argues that evil is the privation of the good, that evil is a falling away from a good course of behavior, and that all acts are judged as "good" or "evil" based on how close they are to the ideal of the good. this second view is the view of eg augustine. so by this concept, all those evil actions are characterized more by failing to be good than by being actively bad.

[Anonymous No.2225311]

>>2225304
yeah it's pretty much our entire consensus.

[Anonymous No.2225315]

so then by that argument if someone decides that it is morally right for him to be a mass murderer, or a child molester, or an agent of a totalitarian regime, we have nothing to say to him.

i mean, right? that's an extension of the argument, right, that as long as she's legitimately chosen that moral code for herself it's equally valid to any moral code we assert?

[Anonymous No.2225320]

Moral "evil" is a social construct. Or a personal judgment. It requires an act or set of circumstances, and an observer to judge it; to call something "evil" says as much about the observer (and his/her values) as it does the target of the accusation.

[Anonymous No.2225325]

>>2225320
but are there any principles that determine whether that judgment/accusation is more or less correct? or is it basically arbitrary? if the latter is the case, is it not the case that something like the holocaust would be equally as moral as any other act? and isn't that prima facie absurd?

[Anonymous No.2225327]

As applied to my own values, "evil" is anything that causes harm or pain to another, or anything that opposes life or the quality of life. "Necessary" or pragmatic/expedient evil is allowed for - particularly when it contributes to the greater good - but should be kept to a minimum.

[Anonymous No.2225334]

>>2225325

I guess there could be some objective standard (e.g. God), although from my perspective His judgment would also be arbitrary. But I think life (as we are capable of perceiving it) is essentially absurd.

[Anonymous No.2225343]

>>2225334
but just to be clear here, there's no way we can judge someone's moral beliefs as being more or less correct than our own? so, again, if someone's moral code involves being a mass murderer, that choice is equally as correct as our own, and not morally wrong?

[Anonymous No.2225347]

>>2225343

Okay, for the sake of the argument, it's morally wrong. Why? I mean, objectively, why, because it seems like you have to use your own value system to judge the serial killer (although in this case most other people will conveniently agree with you. Shared culture, philosophy, biology, etc).

[Anonymous No.2225351]

>>2225325
>is it not the case that something like the holocaust would be equally as moral as any other act?

The holocaust is the same as any other action, using the word moral already subjects it to some implied moral system. The point isn't whether it's moral or not, it's that any moral system is arbitrary. If that seems distasteful to you, then you find reality distasteful. Which explains why such moral systems and grand delusions are created in the first place.

[Anonymous No.2225355]

>>2225347
the idea is that there is some value system which, in theory, is the correct one by which to judge the killer (allowing for human imperfection and the possibility that we would never have perfect knowledge of the system). i think getting into the debate of the content of moral principles is too large a question to get into here.

the thing that i don't understand about existentialists is that they reject the very possibility in theory of such principles or ideas, and then somehow don't descend into gibbering mindless terror at the thought

[Anonymous No.2225365]

>>2225355

I think the idea is that everything is relative. Nothing is absurd or meaningless; everything has value - but only relative to everything it's associated with. So while there might not be a single objective "right/wrong" argument, moral judgments can still be made - with validity - for one set of circumstances relative to another.

[Anonymous No.2225373]

>>2225365
so then is it not theoretically possible to make arguments that are valid for all humans? i mean, it doesn't have to be objective, but valid for all human beings. consider human civilization as a specific circumstance.

[Anonymous No.2225384]

>>2225373

There are as many views of human civilization as there are people. But given our shared biology, I guess there are things that most if not all people would agree with, like "that which causes pain is wrong."

[Anonymous No.2225395]

What is the nature of a man?

[Anonymous No.2225401]

I personally do not believe that man is born either good or evil. In addition, I don't feel that good and evil are objective values, although at present it may seem like they are.

[Anonymous No.2225407]

>>2225401
at present that's the opposite of what it seems like, i think we can reasonably say

[Anonymous No.2225416]

There are no isolated events, processes, or objects. At the subatomic level, at least, the lines start to blur. There are no ends or beginnings; everything is part of everything else. All living things are made of nonliving materials. Time is a function of relative change.

There is no physical birth or death. People don’t seem to think about this one much, but it’s generally accepted that life “begins” with a single cell (whether or not the person is “officially” alive until they emerge from the womb is a matter of debate, because that goes a long way toward determining where the “acceptable murder” window falls in the person’s life).

We arbitrarily define birth and death as emerging from the womb and the heart stopping, but that makes birth and death arbitrary terms. It’s unreasonable to say a person isn’t alive just before leaving the womb; likewise, “death” is just a muscle – varying portions of it still living – that has stopped contracting. Calling that death is especially absurd when the heart can be started again, or replaced with an equivalent vessel (artificial or “organic”).

[Anonymous No.2225419]

Take that to its logical conclusion. Birth is not a sperm and egg cell fusing in an instant to make “life.” It takes a complicated process and about a day to combine materials from the mother and father before the two cells become one cell – with some bits discarded at intervals – and sort the genetic material out. A lot of people say that’s the start of biological life, but there’s really not an instant you can point to where parts of the mother and father become a third individual.

Death is also a process: the failure of one part of the body or another stops delivery of nutrients to organs, which require them in order to maintain cohesion; the organs stop functioning as such and gradually become groups of similar cells that no longer serve a collective purpose. One by one, those cells –lacking molecules to move in their inner structures in such a way that they all maintain their shape and function, which is to support further structure – decohere. You could say the cell has stopped “living,” but that isn’t true.

Even if a properly functioning cell is “alive,” it doesn’t just disintegrate; it undergoes its own remarkably intricate – and predictable – process by way of disintegration. There’s not an instant where you could say the cell stopped being. Rather, it eventually breaks into several “apoptotic bodies” which are digested by nearby macrophages (white blood cells): the cell is structured in such a way that when its own mechanisms or neighboring cells signal dysfunction (via more intricate processes, which could probably be broken into infinite details given the tools), it ceases to take in resources and disintegrates. No part of it ever stops being. It is consumed by other cells as resources that go toward maintaining their own structure and function.

[Anonymous No.2225427]

The body is just a giant cell (several steps removed, but the cell is the body in microcosm, at least enough for the purposes of analogy). Other bodies – from mammals to bacteria – are just other cells, like the macrophages; when parts of the body lose their cohesion, they don’t stop existing but become nutrients for those other cells (organisms). A cell is a group of molecules arranged in such a way as to maintain dynamic equilibrium. Similarly, a body is a group of cells so arranged. I’m not going to tackle consciousness here, but biologically speaking, it’s all basic, inanimate atoms (the components of which break down further, possibly ad infinitum), arranged in seeming hierarchy so that nutrients enter and exit in such a way that forms as complex as the human body are maintained. There is no point in the process or hierarchy you can point to and say “that, and only that, is life.”

All of it is alive (or none of it is; the distinction has little value at this point). Physically and biologically, nothing was ever born, and nothing dies.