Philosophy Now Forum

We are social animals.
Our mothers don't scrape a hole in the sand, deposit a thousand eggs and then lumber off back into the sea leaving us to take our individual chances. We hang around in troupes. We learn from each other. We have even, across millions of generations, developed the ability to communicate very abstract ideas. Solitary animals could never have developed in such a direction.
Religious or mystical thinkers may (and often do) claim that our moral laws and behavioural codes come from some sort of supernatural source. But those of us who do not accept the existence of such a source have to account otherwise for the fact that we do have some concepts that we call ethics, or morals, or just 'social values'.
I believe that our capacity to think about these things, in fact our capacity to think at all, is a quintessentially social phenomenon.
Now, I admit I'm not formally educated, and have only in the last couple of years begun to look seriously at 'philosophy' as such, but the impression I get so far is that philosophers rarely take our fundamentally social nature into account.
Rather, ISTM that philosophy is all about the individual, isolated mind.
Our tendency to think of ourselves as a social group is often written off as 'herd instinct' as though there is something especially noble about the solitary ponderer, and something contrastingly ignoble about the capacity for consensus.
Concepts like 'free will' are argued back and forth endlessly, to no effect, with hardly a mention of the essential fact that what 'you' are likely to value, or what 'you' want to do, is massively influenced, perhaps almost entirely determined, by people other than 'yourself'.
Is it possible for the individual to have ideas that don't arise out of the group conversation, zeitgeist, or similar social processes? Where would such ideas come from? God again?

Thundril wrote:We are social animals.
Our mothers don't scrape a hole in the sand, deposit a thousand eggs and then lumber off back into the sea leaving us to take our individual chances. We hang around in troupes. We learn from each other. We have even, across millions of generations, developed the ability to communicate very abstract ideas. Solitary animals could never have developed in such a direction.
Religious or mystical thinkers may (and often do) claim that our moral laws and behavioural codes come from some sort of supernatural source. But those of us who do not accept the existence of such a source have to account otherwise for the fact that we do have some concepts that we call ethics, or morals, or just 'social values'.
I believe that our capacity to think about these things, in fact our capacity to think at all, is a quintessentially social phenomenon.
Now, I admit I'm not formally educated, and have only in the last couple of years begun to look seriously at 'philosophy' as such, but the impression I get so far is that philosophers rarely take our fundamentally social nature into account.
Rather, ISTM that philosophy is all about the individual, isolated mind.
Our tendency to think of ourselves as a social group is often written off as 'herd instinct' as though there is something especially noble about the solitary ponderer, and something contrastingly ignoble about the capacity for consensus.
Concepts like 'free will' are argued back and forth endlessly, to no effect, with hardly a mention of the essential fact that what 'you' are likely to value, or what 'you' want to do, is massively influenced, perhaps almost entirely determined, by people other than 'yourself'.
Is it possible for the individual to have ideas that don't arise out of the group conversation, zeitgeist, or similar social processes? Where would such ideas come from? God again?

There has been a lot of interesting work on this subject. Darwin puzzled for a long time over why certain ants had the function they did within an ant colony, because they would not be able to successfully pass on their genes. He got rather depressed about it, because it was a big concern to his theory of evolution.
If we are selected to pass on our genes, then why do some ants sacrifice themselves for the group and do not pass on their genes? Then, it dawned on him that individual ants compete with one another within a colony, but, different ant colonies compete with each other. This is true for different human groups as well. We are what is termed, I think, eusocial, meaning we have multiple generations living together and we engage in altruistic behavior. The bottom line is that in the competition between groups, those groups with the highest percentage of altruistic individuals, have a better chance of survival. However, within any group, the more selfish any specific individual is, the more likely his genes are to be successfully passed on. So, we have a lot of altruism, but it is based on support of the group. Most Americans, for example, wouldn't celebrate someone drowning to save the life of a Taliban member. This also explains our hypocrisy, and why all moral systems are incomplete. Human nature itself tugs at us in two different ways.

As far as how we developed caring, we probably first became concerned about ourselves, then we became concerned about our helpless offspring, and from there, we probably developed some caring for more distant people. We do have mirror neurons, which allows us to understand what others are feeling. Also, when a person is about to be tossed from a group, the same part of the brain lights up as it does in response to a physical attack. If you think about it, our ancestors could not survive outside a group. Who would watch your back? Feed you when you were sick?

It is likely, also, that in looking at the way our closest relatives hunt, in which they form very complex social arrangements, that it was our ancestors hunting, among a group, that helped to lead to our larger brains. So, there is every reason to believe we are socially wired beings, with selfishness and altruism, tugging at us from different directions. Any philosophy that does not take into account modern biology is going to be a wasteful enterprise when it comes to ethics, politics, etc.