http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/27/opinion/zak-moral-molecule/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9 Interesting testing. According to this, there is a standard of morality embedded in us, and it's chemically mandated. So does this mean that evil people aren't responsible for their actions? The moral implications are staggering...
No. Everything's chemical. That doesn't mean you're 100% predetermined to perform certain actions or behaviours, it just gives you a greater disposition. Everything is on a scale, from your predisposition to a certain colour to your predisposition to commit violence and murder. Whether you act on those predispositions is molded by your environment, as to is your sense of morals. The term 'evil' never sits easy with me, it's a cop out. I've not heard of this guy but if he bases his whole argument on oxytocin then he's arguing that all mammals have morals.
I would agree that we're still all responsible for our actions, but this is a "nudge" in the right direction, so to speak. As to uneasy with the concept of evil, I don't have a better term to define certain people, especially certain historic personages. Hitler, Gaddhafi, Hussein-what would you call them? A person who abuses their family because of unmedicated schizophrenia is one thing-hat's not evil, that's a well-known illness. But to assume control of a country and then systematically eradicate people groups implies planning, forethought and intent-things that mental illnesses are not well known for. I think we throw the term around too much, but then again we now exemplify actions that in earlier generations would have been seen as unmitigated evil-look at the praise for capitalism that's really thinly veiled greed. Many before would have seen it as morally bankrupt to do such as withhold health care for money, but now people think it's OK. What changed in the interposing years that it went from unthinkable to business as usual? That mini-rant was used so I could set up this question-if it's all a chemical thing, and we're such more likely to be altruistic with a high oxytocin level, should we be administering the pills to the populace and watching to see if people act nicer to each other? (Yeah, cue Firefly...) It's food for thought.
I'm really going to throw the cat amongst the pigeons now. Nature does not have any morals, it's some thing we as the human race have created to keep order. Think about this, in nature when an animal is ready to breed it will. We as human beings having moral standards have gone against nature in as much as we say that a 13 or 14 year old boy/girl shouldn't be doing such things. Mother nature says it's fine, hence the amount of teenage pregnancies. Now the complexity of the human mind is what creates all sorts of variables and as such it is going to throw up some serious miss fits this is down to chemical imbalances and we frown upon it. But is it?, I say it's down to social circles as well and comes back to morals that we as humans create. It's what we consider the difference between wrong and right. Nature says that because I am bigger than you it's ok for me to take your meal away. The human race says it's theft and morally wrong, nature says it's the survival of the fittest. It's a natural pecking order and the way that he food chain works. Now look at nature again and a praying mantis. She eats her mate, now if your wife/girl friend tried to do that to you every time you had finished making whoopy, she would be straight off to the nut house, never to be seen again. Use this as another example and 99% of nature is not monogamous,we as humans beings have decided that it is the way we should conduct ourselves. I could also diversify to the extent and say that football hooliganism is down to a primeval pack instinct to protect your own pack against others. Think about nature again and it's all there. How much different is it to invading another country. Some would argue thats it's perfectly ok to do this. (Hitler beings a good example). I could go on all day about nature verses the human race and what is morally right and wrong, but I think this gets the general idea out there.
Nature might be amoral, but then again the very concept of civilization is something that directly defies both that and nature. Morality can be viewed as a construct that makes the continuation of society possible. Considering that if people just do "what they're programmed" to do, society as a whole doesn't work. A certain amount of ordering one's urges must occur to keep things going.
It boils down to what is evolutionary positive, imagine that we were not gregarious in nature and were more solitary (wolf vs tiger) our morals would be different, maybe we would not have the current society we have. Notice that animals that live in groups usually have some rules and hierarchy, they don't kill those that are in the group, they defend each other and their offspring, they take care of the offspring of other members of the group, they gather food for the group and they usually follow one of the group (think matriarch and the alfa males). As for monogamy, humans are not a good example of monogamy... Anyway, i found the next link some days ago, it may contain some relevant information for this debate: The Biochemistry of Love http://www.brookscole.com/chemistry...urces/0030244269_campbell/HotTopics/Love.html
Unless it's a little sociopathy added to a high level of charisma, multiplied by a group of sycophantic yes-men willing to do one's bidding in return for reward, divided by an ignorant populace looking for a strong father figure, minus positive direction, plus a negative outlet for one's actions. It's easy to take someone like Hitler and just label him as evil. Hey, he personally gassed all those people, right? Rather, it's much more interesting - and ultimately much more rewarding - to try to figure out what was going on inside his head, and what life experiences he had that lead him to such infamy. With a more stable upbringing, and a more positive outlet for their personalities, any one of the historical bad guys may have been another Bill Gates. Maybe there are evil people. I'm not really sold on the idea because it implies that there are truly saintly people, and I have too much pessimism for humanity to believe that. In my opinion, evil people and saints are really two side of the same coin - they're metaphorical examples to which we can compare our own actions in an attempt to figure out where on the scale we reside.
This is a loaded statement, but the conclusion doesn't follow - why if some people are evil must there also be some good or "saintly" people? Is it not possible for everybody to be evil (to some degree)? @ KayinBlack, I agree that if this is taken to be true it has staggering moral impications, but I don't think it holds water. All Zak is saying is that a certain chemical promotes particular behaviours which he calls moral, but it's altruism rather than morality. People attribute "morality" to such behaviours but there is no means by which to determine why these behaviours are either good or evil; they are good because Zak says they are, and they are evil because Zak says they are.
Ok dusts off A Level Pyschology and Megalomania 101 for dummies : There is no good, there is no evil, they're simply constucts made up by humans, animals inflict upon each other some of the nastiness we inflict upon each other, yet they are not evil or good, even chimpanzees who are adept at reasoning and exhibit an emotional palette similar to humans. Or more precisely what is good or evil is a standard defined by the society/family/clique you function within. Whereby based upon the social norm your Super Ego governs the argument between your Id and Ego, limiting and inhibiting your chemically stimulated behaviour and drives, based upon the predominant social mores and usually most importantly those who may witness your actions/behaviour. For example if you lived in a situation whereby your actions would not be judged and/or there could be no repercussions in light of your actions, most people would indulge their whims with only whatever remorse/guilt they felt as a consequence. Again remorse/guilt are social constructs, or in most cases the prime tenants of a religion. How many people think to themselves, If I Ruled The World ? Working in a customer facing capacity myself, I sometimes think If I Ruled The World I'd happily shoot 90% of the earth's population on sight for being point blank fecking stupid as a start just to help the gene pool, then 99% of the remaining population would have do a damn good job of justifying their existence, that's the problem with no natural selection affecting the human race Cue maniacal laughter and taking of my med's for this morning
I don't know if I'm helping but I think the reasoning behind SUpermonkey's statement is under the operative of a binary. Yes there would be less evil people, but because there's a specturm of "evil" then there must be saintly. And because there's that binary idea, then there should be some concept that counters the first proposition. (ofc it's the whole binary method of thinking, but I guess that's what it was aimed at). And agreed, morality is subjective, altruism is chemical, morality is not. We are inclined to help those within our "tribe" and very reluctant to assist the "outsiders". It's a natural instinct, chemical if you will. This just got quite a bit more philiosophical. But It's like a person's ability for empathy and love, which is apparently linked to serotonin and oxytocin (Correct me if I'm wrong. ). The more that is released the stronger the feelings are. Still chemical mind you. Altruism should lie in the same area since it's assistance of those within the same group if you will.
I didn't think that the finding of chemistry related to altruism would absolve us of moral culpability-merely that it might be possible to enhance the altruism of the human race-because let's face it, we as a species suck. Like the toddler in China hit twice and no bystanders rendered any assistance. A college football coach who stepped over a seizing player to berate the rest of the team (Alabama's football coach, actually.) Two examples of a more worrying problem. I don't know exactly what has caused us to act that way (I'm sure someone will come up with a justification involving ingroup/outgroup dynamics) but it seems to me we could stand to be nicer. I just posted this because it looked like it would be of interest to you guys. Apparently I was right.
wrong! like if you were swinging upside down on a swingbar and then the guy sneaks up from the side and doesn't kick you but helps you down.. that's the difference getting people addicted to taking chemicals is not the answer.. big pharma would love this- but it solves nothing.. you'll have another group of people addicted to it stepping around the real issues they have
This isn't something synthetic, it's a chemical made by the brain. Kind of like how we found that melatonin works as a no-side-effect sleep aid. Since it's the chemical that makes us sleep.
Oh, how I wish that amateurs (I mean: neuroeconomics. WTF?) would stay away from psychology. First, they confound concepts. Sharing is labeled as "virtue", and not sharing as "vice". Whoa, imposing a subjective framework on objective behavioural observations, perchance? Rosenthal effect right there. Secondly, what does their experiment measure? Er, no. Oxytocin is not associated with morality, but with social bonding behaviour. DM1 basically does the tribal thing: share with another member. DM2 responds in a way that reinforces that sharing behaviour because it benefits both (and by extension the tribe). Oxytocin is a feel-good chemical associated with bonding; it is also released with other bonding behaviours like cuddling, grooming and breast feeding. Adam Smith is on the money: social behaviour is good. It benefits the tribe. Empathy is a necessary ability for good social behaviour and indeed considerable chunks of our frontal lobes are dedicated to empathic reasoning (which is why we, the primates and dolphins have such huge frontal lobes). Where he loses it a bit is to label that behaviour as "Good" in the moral sense. That may certainly be the subjective short-hand label that we, in daily life, give good social behaviour, but it is in the end just a label. "Good" and "Evil" both are labels for actions that are respectively good for the tribe or bad for it. Oxytocin is just a neurotransmitter released as part of the process of such behaviour. 'Cause all our thinking, feeling and behaving is (physically speaking) an electro-chemical process, see? The third problem is that just because a chemical is released during certain cognitive processes, that does not necessarily mean that it is the cause of those processes. It could be a consequence too, or just a by-product. When I bump my toe, I experience pain, swear a lot and my body releases of a jolt of adrenalin and endorphines. That does not mean that adrenalin and endorphines cause me to bump my toe painfully and swear. It does not mean that adrenalin and endorphines are even necessary to make me bump my toe, experience pain and swear. They are associated processes that help the body deal with pain and the possible threat that might be inflicting it. Similarly, oxytocin may facilitate social behaviour, but does not cause it, nor is it necessary for such behaviour to occur. As a species we do suck. But then again, as a species we are designed to live in small social groups (100 people, at most), which exert a powerful social control because everybody knows (and watches) each other. We cannot handle larger communities very well; inevitably they split and coalesce into smaller in-groups which (by nature) compete with each other. The Chinese toddler who got knocked over twice simply had the bad luck that none of the passers-by were from her local community. If they had recognised her as little Wang Yue who lives down my road/goes to the same school as my child/is the niece of my second cousin then they would have jumped to her aid. But she was none of these; just an anonymous child belonging to Some Other People and therefore Some Other People's Problem. And who was watching, anyway? Nobody else of the passers-by's ingroup there to pass judgement on their behaviour. It takes a good bit of abstract conceptual reasoning to be able to think of the whole of humanity as your tribe, and be an unconditional altruist. It is not in our instinct.
A red herring of an article, then! While we're here, I think we should talk about causality, free will and moral responsibility, anyway. It's a quagmire I always enjoy stumbling into.
Whether or not it is oxytocin in particular, how is it news that chemicals cause people to do things? I'm pretty sure that Cartesian dualism as the standard concept of the mind was very much on the way out with modern advances in neurobiology. Most of which is even more intriguing than this oxytocin argument.
Also released with female orgasm, so a women that is breast feeding whom orgasms will also release milk at the same time
