Is Lying Unethical/Immoral?

[Augustus]

You are either unable or unwilling to seriously debate your own view, so you cherry-pick Hauser's book, focus on the word 'pluralistic' and imply that he favors your position.

Yet another example of the very strange RF tendency among people who can't be bothered to read on a topic they claim to be interested in to attack the very concept of providing evidence in support of your claims.

Do you personally believe it is rational to accept someone's claim that multiple quotes from multiple sources that are in mutual agreement are "cherry picked" if the person making the claim admitted they had never read any of these sources and could offer no evidence in support of the claim?

IMO, we are born with a basic framework that is universal. I stick with the label we humans pinned on that basic framework long ago: 'conscience.'

What do you think this means?

Once we have acquired our culture’s specific moral norms—a process that is more like growing a limb than sitting in Sunday school and learning about vices and virtues—we judge whether actions are permissible, obligatory, or forbidden, without conscious reasoning and without explicit access to the underlying principles.

 

[joe1776]

What do you think this means?

Once we have acquired our culture’s specific moral norms—a process that is more like growing a limb than sitting in Sunday school and learning about vices and virtues—we judge whether actions are permissible, obligatory, or forbidden, without conscious reasoning and without explicit access to the underlying principles.

I've explained this previously in Post120.

Since I can't question him, I'm not sure what Hauser means. He might be referring to such things as the variation in insults or the other misperceptions I noted in my Post 120. He might also be stretching Chomsky's analogy beyond its limits as I mentioned in the same post. But my best guess is that he's making both errors yet still maintaining that the basic structure, which I call Conscience and he calls our moral grammar, is universal.

What I'm certain of is that, with 19 years of data supporting it, it's very unlikely that Hauser and Harvard have backed away from this statement which explains why the Moral Sense Test was put online 19 years ago:

"About the Moral Sense Test: Nothing captures human attention more than a moral dilemma. Whether we are soap opera fanatics or not, we can’t help sticking our noses in other people’s affairs, pronouncing our views on right and wrong, permissible and impermissible, justified or not. For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that our moral judgments arise from rational, conscious, voluntary, reflective deliberations about what ought to be. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is a slowly developing capacity, founded entirely on experience and education, and subject to considerable variation across cultures. With the exception of a few trivial examples, one culture’s right is another’s wrong. We believe this hyper rational, culturally-specific view is no longer tenable. The MST has been designed to show why and offer an alternative. Most of our moral intuitions are unconscious, involuntary, and universal, developing in each child despite formal education. When humans, from the hunter-gathers of the Rift Valley to the billionaire dot-com-ers of the Silicon Valley generate moral intuitions they are like reflexes, something that happens to us without our being aware of how or even why. We call this capacity our moral faculty. Our aim is to use data from the MST, as well as other experiments, to explain what it is, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities and concerns about human welfare. The MST has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word “ought” — about the principles that make one action right and another wrong, and why we feel elated about the former and guilty about the latter.