Oh hey, I got two people to debate with now :O
@Meridis I think you're misunderstanding fitness. Monkeys have a high fitness in the forest but put them in a dessert and their fitness falls down into a chasm. If a "strong" group is placed next to an erupting volcano, their fitness goes down. Fitness is a value that depends on more than a species' attributes: their habitat, as an example.
Okay. The first one was vaguely formulated. I just wanted to get my point across. Let me restate that. "Kindness in fact keeps us from mass and serial murdering each other in most cases." There! Better. Well. You don't have to be kind to not murder people,
Welp, alright then... guess I can't refuse on- wait a minute...
but truly kind people seldom do that.
Gotcha.
Define "truly kind". What do you mean by that phrase? Complete altruism? Perfect ambivalence? Such a case is impossible because greed is hard-coded into human nature. Why did you think we manage to get to the moon? Cause the Americans and Soviets wanna get to the moon first. There are more factors behind the scene contributing to this but the correlation is undeniable -
greed almost always lead to progress in mankind. Sure, not all progress is caused by greed but the fact that some of them are is concrete evidence of my statement.
And as you know,
kindness cannot coexist with greed. And because "truly kind" cannot exist, your point now holds no weight to your argument.
Nature doesn't use arguments. It does its thing.
You mean
natural selection? About killing the weak so that the strong progresses?
Only people are just too complicated and weak and therefore need "arguments", a stuff they made up.
Your argument can be interpreted in many ways but let's look at it as evolution.
You (Mr. Evolution) see two people (two species) in an internet forum (habitat) arguing about kindness (survival of the fittest). One person made a good point (beneficial mutation) while the other misstates their facts and shot themself in their foot (harmful mutation). They kept on arguing (generations of mutation) until the entire forum backs up one guy (habitat change) which causes the other to lose their footing and lose the argument (decrease in fitness). However, that guy made one very good point (adaptation) which caused him to turn the tables on the debate (increase in fitness). Eventually, the other guy failed to counter the debate (fail to adapt quickly enough) and admits defeat (extinction).
You see, natural selection can be taken into anything if you really think about it.
Oh, Alfred Noble and dynamite. A really great guy! And that dynamite thing still helps today to feed millions of people. And helps to gives them electricity. And metals. And railways. Etc. You know, who should be sued? That guy that invented the hammer! That vicious thing killed soooo many people. Wait....If hammers kill people, do keyboards make typos?
Ah, the old "it's the fault of the user and not the tool" argument.
Regardless of the fault of the user or the tool, it proves that kindness is not absolute. It is an attribute that can be described as the absence of "evil" (emphasis on the quotation marks). And as you know, "evil" exists and thus kindness is not absolute.
Oh, fuck no. I'm not doing this. Please read the fine print. Disclaimer: "That said, I really don't want to discuss, if altruistic kindness really exists (We could as well discuss the existence of God. Nobody will be happy afterwards.)" ?
Well, I'd describe God as ambivalent rather than altruistic so there'd be no point to talking about this since we are talking about human-level kindness.
Your turn next