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ABC's avatar

Thank you for your insightful essay. I would like to share a few thoughts in response.

As you mentioned, Hugo Mercier argued that Voltaire was mistaken when he said, "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Instead, Mercier proposes that it is "the desire to commit atrocities that makes you believe absurdities." However, I believe Mercier himself is incorrect. In my view, "it is the unconscious drive to succeed in evolution that makes you believe absurdities AND commit atrocities," a concept inspired by Steve Stewart-Williams's gene-machine from "The Ape That Understood the Universe."

Here’s how I think it works: Environmental cues indicating threats or crises trigger adaptive behaviors. Firstly, these cues prompt individuals to create largely false causalities to address the perceived threats. These constructed explanations often rely on existing myths or conspiracies to identify a cause that can be either combated (the out-group) or appeased (the gods), thus motivating belief in absurdities.

Secondly, these environmental cues provoke the formation of alliances and typical group dynamics, including both intra-group and inter-group competition, with significant social signaling involved. Within intra-group competition, humans often resort to spreading rumors, character assassination, and excommunication. For inter-group competition, strategies include demonization and dehumanization, often focusing on ethnic or religious features. Rather than risking the integrity of one’s own group by investigating the underlying causes of a problem, it is easier to blame someone else (scapegoat model). These are also strong motivators for believing absurdities.

If the threat increases and other less costly options fail (as discussed in Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature"), actors might resort to physical violence, leading to the "desire to commit atrocities."

All of this unfolds largely unconsciously, driven by intense emotions such as fear, disgust, and anger, pointing towards our motivational system and back to evolutionary psychology. Even when deliberate actions are involved, the underlying motives are likely unconscious.

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JustAnOgre's avatar

Disagreement. I would say moral, ethical behaviour is most often not the result of goodness of character or philosophy, but conforming to social norms. In other words, if someone has weird hair, there is a higher chance they will rob you than if they do not.

Even when weird hair is not unethical and robbing people is, they correlate because both fashionable hair and not robbing people is just conformance to social norms, usually. People most often don’t make truly ethical choices but more like “what would people say?”

There is also "I won't rob you because you are of my tribe, not because you are human" and tribal membership is signalled by e.g. hair.

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