Mr. Locke, Do You Have the Key?

My family was over today for dinner, it was great. It really was, we all caught up a bit, talked about everything under the sun (or around it) and generally just enjoyed each others company. One topic in particular we talked about has been resonating with me for a bit now. The topic of morality, it started off by discussing if humans are innately good. My view on this is pretty firm, I side with John Locke in his regard of the newly born human brain as "tabula rasa"... a blank slate. I can look at this from many angles, if you look at language development in infants, they literally have the capacity to adhere to any language. It is the language that is present around them that they end up acquiring, through a pruning process the brain is generally narrowed down to the vital neurons. Babies are extremely passive, they spend an enormous, if not all their time, observing. Through observation they start to develop a sense of things. It isn't even until later in life (2, maybe --- 5 years old) that they develop a sense of self. One experiment in particular that comes to mind regarding this says it isn't until we have a sense of self that we can form episodic (things that happen to you) memories (as oppose to semantic, factual memories). This experiment was carried out by having numerous children go through the process of looking in a mirror, then having the mothers place a red patch on the forehead without them noticing. The children now looked into the mirror again, if they have a sense of self they would reach to their own head to remove the patch, if not, they reached or pointed toward the mirror image. Now, the children were taken to a foreign room and given a lion stuffed animal, this lion was placed in the bottom drawer of a cabinet, the same for every subject. Two weeks later the children were brought back into that foreign room and asked where the lion was, it was only the children who had passed the red patch task, who had a sense of self (if you will) that remembered where the lion was! So, now that I finished that little tangent, I don't know if I agree with Locke's view completely, which is that the world will describe information through experience of the five senses. This knowledge is then reflected upon and perfected, arriving at the abstract concepts such as space, time, etc... He was an empiricist. Don't get me wrong here, I do believe much experience comes from the five senses, and it is perfected through reflection - but I am not so sure that this is the only way we can acquire knowledge. Another view point I like is Rationalism, headed by Mr. Rene Descartes, it is to believe we can acquire knowledge from thought alone, without influence from the external world. I think this is what gives us the ability to think about the abstract concepts such as space, time etc, not the senses, what sense makes us think about a god? The super string theory? Now a man named Immanuel Kant tried to combine these two views, and I like that. So running with him, he poses an argument on morality, to tie everything back to the beginning ;). I'm not saying this is my view, but he liked something that he termed "universalizability" (well, he probably didn't, he was German) this basically said that a right action is something that can be applied across all people at all times. In his echoing translated words, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." That gives a pretty good structure for what is moral. For example... someone sent you a video link of their new movie, they ask hey did you watch the link? You didn't, but maybe in consideration of their feelings you want to say a white lie and say yes. Using Kant's morality view, in this situation, telling a white lie, if applied universally, would probably be a very bad thing. Therefore Kant would conclude that telling the white lie would be immoral. Wam-bam-thankyoumaam. Well, there is one philosophers view on one topic. I don't know if I agree with that, if morality is something to be applied universally in the first place, or is it something that each person should find for themselves. Actually, I am leaning more towards the latter at the moment. Nietzsche looks at this through "master" and "slave" morality, the former consisting of the individuals break through from the societal norm and constructing their own moral truths, the latter consisting of a herd morality in favor of the weak and powerless - he views many religions as having slave morality. I think morality is certainly a matter for discovery through self, however, I do think many people need the stability of moral rules. So here lies another situation where I will not give in to either absolute side, and I feel most things don't settle on an absolute side. Empiricism or Rationalism? Universal or Independent Morality? I don't think these are black and white questions, there are arguments and evidence for both working - and in that - one cannot be an absolute...

Welp, I'm not even going to bother re-reading this one, bed time! ;)