Friday, November 25, 2011

The Moral Individual - iii

I have discussed innate morality of human beings in this series of blog posts. I had come to a conclusion that there is no innate morality and it's just a result of feedback loop in humans based on experience of pain. Let us examine the steps involved in this.

- Feeling of pain - a trait
- Keeping memory of pain - a trait
- Observation (of another suffering) - a trait      
- feedback - a faculty
      - perception of another suffering - a basic trait
      - matching perception with memory - maybe a basic trait
- Resultant empathy - a character

I would define,
a character is a combination of traits and faculties resulting in a meaningful behaviour where,
a trait is determined by genes,
a faculty is a latent phenomenon determined by traits

So, basically babies are field programmable trait arrays (FPTA) for a character. I suppose, even 'speech' is a character because it also requires some of the basic traits and feedback faculties.

2 comments:

anilkurup59 said...

Then what about conditioning? The way the former communist regime in the former USSR ran systematically.

Manju Edangam said...

Conditioning is manipulation of observation,perception and matching. But not all people get conditioned. The reason could be malfunctioning of one or more traits. On the other hand, if rationalism is a character I'm not sure how different traits combine to form it.