I’m talking in the context of the “capitalist rules”. If you say the aforementioned sentence, you remove the responsibility of the player by dismissing the fact that the winner makes the rules.

PS: Doesn’t work for every context: if the player aims to change the rules because he doesn’t like them, he might see winning as a way to change them. “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” I guess…

  • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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    11 months ago

    Morality is the basis for social cohesion, which is necessary for the survival of the individual. Try to survive without the help of any other person, including parents, teachers, employees, …

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      That has nothing to do with morality. You don’t help people because it’s right. We help each other because we literally evolved to be social animals. Our biology in many ways depends on others. We feel individually sad and bad if we are isolated. And we feel good when we help others and see that people around us are doing well.

      Morality has not been present throughout our evolutionary or even social history. Moralism only became an essential part of society after Christianity and other religions like it took over.

      Things being “wrong” or “right” don’t help us really, materially. In fact, it’s mostly been used to control people and keep them in-line. After all, who decides what’s “moral”?

      • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        I consider morality to be a societal representation of our social nature.

        Imposition of “right” and “wrong” guidelines from outside are called “ethics”.

        • novibe@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          morality noun principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. “the matter boiled down to simple morality: innocent prisoners ought to be freed”

          There isn’t much of a distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics is mostly spoken of as a philosophical question, and morality as an ideological one. Ethics is usually associated with the ancient Greeks, and morality to Christianity.

          What I mean is that if we allow external entities and “authorities” to dictate to us what is right or wrong (an ideology, the Pope, a philosopher we like etc.), we aren’t living materially and objectively, but ideologically. We are being controlled by externalities.

          • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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            11 months ago

            You should also look up the definition of ethics, if you do so for morality:

            ethics noun(used with a singular or plural verb): a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.

              • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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                11 months ago

                The difference between morality and ethics is commonly used as such:

                • morality: Distinction between right and wrong on a specific, or individual level
                • ethics: a system of moral principles. Usually invoked/developed by systems.

                When you claim that

                “We are being controlled by externalities”

                then that is due to the ethics invoked by these externalities which try to impact your individual moral compass.

                The christian church usually claims that morality is absolute, since it comes from god. If this was true and you consider that “there’s no salvation outside the church”, this makes the church the arbiter of ethics and by extension: morality. At least in their logical framework. Therefore, it is only natural for the church to talk about morality, when it actually is talking about their ethics.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think the point is that Morality can very simply be an evolved human trait due to the massive second and third order effects that derive from it or the lack of it.

        Let me put things this way: psychopathy is a condition people are born with, were they are unable to empathise with others so amongst other things they don’t feel the hurt of others and are thus capable of inflicting great hurt to others, lie and do all sorts of socially-reprehensible things without feeling a shred of guilt. In practice they will do what’s best for themselves with no consideration for others except for the purelly rational “can they punish me if I do this” (in simplifying all this a bit since psychopathy is actually a range rather than simply an Yes/No thing).

        Anyways, around 3% of people are born high in the psychopathy spectrum. Now, if psychopathy is “doing what’s best for yourself with no consideration for others, no guilt, no conscience to be weighted on” - on other words, no moral, just limitless personal upside maximization - which one would expect is the best possible survival and reproductive strategy there is, why doesn’t human evolution lead to 100% of people being born psychopaths?

        My theory is that societies with too many psychopaths collapse, removing the psychopaths from the genetic pool, plus psychopaths have trouble cooperating (for the obvious reason they only care for themselves) and thus can’t survive the kind of danger that can only be defeated by a group of people.

        How would that be. Well, they’re pure takers - why tire oneself by making if you can get away more easilly with taking - and they’re not good at cooperation (both because they only care about themselves and because when other people spot their character, they don’t trust them and don’t want to cooperate with them), so any society with too many psychopaths is less productive, has less resources available (too many takers too few makers), it stops evolving, can’t properly organise a collective defense system and eventually gets overwhelmed by some other society without such problems.

        In other words, even whilst the 1st order effects of being entirelly amoral and purelly out for yourself are pretty positive for that individual, the 2nd order effects (such as others tending to shun that individual) and 3rd order (societies with too many such people end up collapsing or conquered) make being amoral a non viable strategy, except if they’re a small fraction and most people around are moral.

        This last part is just my theory for why, but certainly the part that only 3% of people are born like that is a pretty good indication that for whatever reasons an amoral behaviour in humans is not a winning evolutionary strategy even though some might think at first sight that it would be.

        • novibe@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          Psychopaths can just as well have morality systems… they will just look very different from yours.

          Morality is ideological definition of right or wrong. To you, scamming someone might be wrong. To a psychopath, getting money from a sucker who’s less smart/strong/awesome than you is right.

          Might makes right is a moral system… it might be “imoral” to you, but it’s a moral system nonetheless.