Morality depends a lot upon how much you trust and need to trust each other. Ironically those in rural areas may need to trust each other more than those who live in a crowded high rise. On the other hand, if nature floods the high rise area, the need for mutual trust will tend to make all neighbors a bit more "moral." This seems to have happened in New York, but then again, I wasn't there and don't trust the newspapers all that much.

(PS: I know it's a dodgy reference but you get my drift)

I agree entirely. Self assessment of one's own 'kindness' is just utterly implausible, so unlikely to produce any legitimate estimation – leaving aside the difficulties that may arise from different understandings of kindness. Indeed, I believe that there is a good deal of empirical research that shows people are very poor estimators of their own likely behaviour. (Darley & Batson, 1973) The author also makes the very strange claim that Hamilton and Mackay have a common understanding “that morality has little hope in a culture where strict moral rules are no longer enforced by religion and community.” This is just plain odd. I don't see how Mr Hookway can defend such an inference. I'm not actually a fan of either Hamilton or Mackay., but in fairness, there is nothing about their work which requires strict rule or tradition following. (Much less enforcement by community or religion) I think this is a bit of a straw man argument. Are we actually less moral... huge and complex question unlikely to answered in any straightforward way. Are we less kind? Probably not but again that will depend upon what you mean by kind – does it include animals for instance? A more interesting question might be, have the moral standards of public actors (i.e., persons holding public positions) declined? I don't have an answer to that but I can say the lot we have now are pretty pathetic.

Perhaps people regard other animals as lesser beings than themselves. That would explain why people are happy to subject animals to servitude and misery in order to maximise their own happiness.

Yes, this awful business:

"...as i get older and have more life experience i tend to understand [?] and appreciate most of my elders more..."

Well don't.

Most of our elders - all of them actually - were dills just like us who muddled through. Who would have been good "except for those circumstances".... resisting everything but temptation, jumping to judgement based on what knowledge or understanding they could muster.

Now I reckon that the current crop of kiddies are just tops by and large when it comes to jumping to judgement based on what knowledge or understanding they can muster. They have so much more of it. And it's of different stuff to what I had.

Woolibuddha shuts at 12.00 noon - midday sharp... on the dot. Monday 8.00 am sharp, it re-opens. It is the re-assuring suckle of my childhood years here. Good things - like an immense annual show that runs entirely on volunteer labor, donated cattle, participation from all over the country and involves pretty much everyone.

Now if we were smart we'd have a Country & Western Music Festival and a Competition for Australian Films bumping up either weekend of that. If we wanted street lights. And a MacDonalds. And a motel that was not perpetually for sale.

Bad people tend to think they would be good if they weren't forced by circumstances to be bad.

@ Gill Ainsworth

Been getting into the Ayn Rand have you?

I'm with Cat Mack, Leo Kerr and Peter Ormonde, mutually speaking...

@ainsworth.

"There is no such thing as altruism. Studies in evolutionary psychology demonstrate that every action is a selfish act of self-gain deep down (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, etc)."

You're confusing the individual with the group... an altruistic act of (say) self sacrifice does not benefit the individual as we recognize individuals... that my genes cousins may prosper makes not the slightest bit of difference to my decision.

"While you are staggering under the load of a PhD - I'd like to add another straw.... have a read of Pyotr Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid" ... a delightful old book from a polymath prince/anarchist/zoologist and a dozen other things. 1905 from memory. An attempt to demonstrate the development of social organisation - co-operation - mutualism - perhaps altruism - examining animal behaviour and biology. A rather different slant on "social Darwinism". A truly excellent and under-rated book."

I was just thinking the same thing. Market reductionists of all shades and other assorted apologists for laissez faire ideology have been flogging the idea that the economic privileges of the opulent few are the result of natural processes for the best part of 150 years.

According to this thinking, if you're economically and socially marginalised by dint of being born at the wrong end of a very uneven playing field then it actual fact the injustice and oppression you experience is your own fault. Also the fact that the poorest 50% of the world's population lives on less than 1% of its total wealth is simply a reflection of the fact that they're a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, or something.

Mutual Aid was written specifically in response to a very obvious attempt to establish a pseudo-scientific foundation for economic and social injustice and exhaustively demonstrates that at least within each species altruism is very much necessary to survival. Human beings are I believe the only species on the planet that preys on its own, and to that extent we are not even the moral equivalent of animals.

If you can't tell the difference between doing something out of pure self-interest and doing something because of the intrinsic reward you get from performing selfless acts for others then you're only to be pitied I think. If you can can but choose not to then I'd argue that you're a pretty good example of everything that's wrong with the world.

You've been criticised, Gill Ainsworth, with your youth and your certainty being held against you, but you were responding directly to the heading, after all, and if I had to come down on one side or the other, I'd put myself in your camp.

What is the reckoning, we're seven meals away from anarchy?

I tend to hold a cynical view of mankind, and I do not need to look any further than the market place and politics to justify it, not in my view.

Socrates' comment is all very well but I go to Blake's phenomenal poem 'The Tyger' for my analysis of man.

We are, after all, talking about a being here that destroys its own species like no other on the planet, and it does so with full knowledge of what it is doing.

I think it would also be easy to argue there is no such thing as the opposite to altruism - "total selfishness" because of the interdependency of all things especially for creatures dependent on a localised biological environment.

I suggest that neither position of extremes is thus valid it must be a mix of the two.

Cris ... where'd you put your aitch then?

Not sure the definition of altruism is sufficient. More for what it implies I think. That is, that altruism requires self-sacrifice - a "loss making" extension of compassion or kindness.

I don't think that is the case at all. Firstly I think that givers also benefit. Secondly I don't believe that altruism requires the suppression or avoidance of self interest, broadly defined.

Not a small question in practice. There are obviously long term economic benefits to Australia for example in having a dynamic, prosperous, honest and egalitarian culture in India for example. Or anywhere else. They are customers. Our aid program helps do that.

Is our donation to Sophia's tap any the less altruistic because - long term - we also will stand to benefit, when her grandchildren children are engineers or farmers. Is our day a week for Meals on Wheels any the less generous and kind, just because we don't want our leafy streets littered with starving old people?

Now there are certain religions - not mentioning names but let's say they have more consonants than you - where suffering and personal sacrifice are considered de rigeur. It's not really working unless it hurts. It's a martyr thing.

There are others where giving something away gets you frequent flyer points with karma airways. No pain necessary. Still others where generosity - altruism - is doled out according to a lordly list and set of rules ... but give they do if you are well up the list. It is through their community "altruism" that Hamas holds sway.

That's not to say altruism is any the less important or significant or desirable. But I think mutualism is a far more constructive notion. Altruism is far far too complex to be wholly trusted.

Altruism is a function of reciprocity, which in turn involves the function of trust. Reciprocity depends on each party’s trust that agreements to reciprocate will stand.
And agreements to reciprocate are what altruism (also functional) is all about.
One definition of trust for example is: “the state of being responsible for someone or something.”
One definition of altruism: “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.”
One definition of reciprocate: “respond to (a gesture or action) by making a corresponding one.”

Three sides of the same strategic coin, perhaps. There’s a fourth side to that coin, however, and that’s distrust. All strategies of living beings have evolved to serve a strategic purpose. And the strategy of reciprocation is a bonding strategy that holds all social groups together. There are no cultures that are without their rules for reciprocation. All members of these cultural groups will trust each other to heed those rules. And all members will recognize in one way or another that what we call “altruism” is the trust that all will carry out their respective duties to protect each other from whatever distrustful forces of our natures attempt to sever their strategic bonds and divert their purposes.

These are not concepts that the earlier evolving groups and their members have had to consciously think about at all. The rules have been taught by intelligent examples of what to trust, and enforced by intelligent examples of what happens to distrusters (better known as those cheaters and defectors that evolutionists like to throw here and there into the mix).

Unless of course there's no such thing as a trust/distrust function in biological systems and we all invented such otherwise intelligent responses by happy accident.

Anthony, doesn't a 'moral decline' rest on or assume a pre-existing morality? If I think man doesn't really have an ethical bone in his body, so that allusions to civilised society are little more than a veneer, a sort of window dressing to persuade the buyer we're an intelligent being, we can't decline because we've never risen above bottom, amyway.

I believe that our strongest motivating force is high-wired to survival, and that fear runs through our veins like blood to fuel it.

I know, of course, that we rush to care for people injured in accidents and so on, but just today, I think on one of these threads, I read how the pharmaceutical companies are keeping life-saving H.I.V treatments deliberately high, and only just now, I was talking to someone who mentioned some apparently very promising yet quite cheap cancer-fighting drugs that are not being made available.

Clifford I agree a decline would depend on a position from which to decline. But I think talking about a decline in morality is a category error like saying "there is a decline in the mooniness of the moon".

I do not think it possible to separate a person from their environment, as it is not possible to separate genes from its phenotype. Our genes code for all that is necessary to live in this environment and not much more, our Genes only function because the environment is consistent in some way. A major component of our environment is other humans, so we have adapted to reach a selfless/selfish balance with humans.

In the same way, it is not possible to separate ones self interest from ones communal interests. Therefore we can not separate altruism from selfishness except as relative measures.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
and Expect from others as you would have them expect from you would support the fact we can not state that humans are only selfish, nor can they be only altruistic.

The big pharma are not people (they are organisations of people) and despite financial recognition as "persons" they are not in fact bearers of consciousness, ethics and empathy.

Cases of selfishness do not preclude selflessness as cases of selflessness do not preclude selfishness.

Well in effect, I simply agree with you.

But you seem to be a Glass half Empty person. I also see not change in out ability to care and be compassionate and act in communal interest as well.

I would prefer to be considered "a Glass at 50% Capacity" Person.

Well thanks for making your view clear. Now I understand your position, what value is there in discussing how to improve the Human Condition with you, what opinions could you furnish that would add value ?

Such a pessimistic view point, with no real indicator that you may revise your viewpoint given evidence, suggests to me you you have little to add.

Why not consider that there is margin for error in your views and that it may not be so dire as you say. You may then surprise me and yourself at how much better we can be.

Gary Hudson, I do agree with what you've said here and it's not being cynical, so that dialogue such as occurs on this site, does suggest, I think, that we can develop morally and ethically.

But your qualification regarding survival, is spot on the money, it really is, and that is the key, in my opinion, to our daily behaviour and actions, speaking generally. We might not show tooth and claw 24/7 but scratch the surface and you'll soon see the intellectual jungle we inhabit.

I think if we could embrace even unpalatable 'truths' about ourselves and our nature, your last interesting sentence could see the light of day, sometime.

I am a little more of a humanist than Gary and Clifford, but perhaps also a little different.

To me one of the greatest lessons brought to me from Evolutionary theory is life is not good or evil, it just is. I would add we are neither selfish or unselfish - it is just part of our evolution as social creatures that we have an instinctual need to categorize actions. It is part of trying to manage the intent of others and our relationships to them. Evolutionary theory guides us to recognise there are evolutionary stable strategies that organisms adopt. The interplay between Hawks and Doves and game theory exposes a lot of these.

All of these competing, coordinating and countervailing strategies exist at once and across many domains so there is no hope of making a consolidated ruling or identify trends.

Within this there are the unpalatable and beautiful 'truths' in a magical interplay overtime, with nothing more certain than "no extreme will be maintained for long".

Very interesting, Thanks. Nice to understand you better and I do support much of what you have said.